Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment

    Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one?  Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar.

    a) To exist is good, but it would be better to exist without a gross material body subject to decay and dissolution. The body is an impediment, a vehicle for sublunary roads that it would be better not to have to travel.  I am neither identical to my body, nor dependent on it for my existence; I am a soul temporarily incarcerated in a body from which I will be released upon death. I have fallen from a topos ouranios into a spatiotemporal matrix and meat grinder extrication from which is both possible and desirable.

    b) To exist is good, but a gross material body is necessary to exist as a conscious and self-conscious being, whence it follows that embodiment is at least instrumentally  good. I am not (identically) a soul; I am a soul-body composite, both components of which are necessary to exist at all.  

    c) To exist is good, but only with a 'resurrected' and perfected body supplied by a divine being that needs no body to exist.

    d) To exist is not good because possible only with a gross body.  (See my Benatar category.)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Imprudent Behavior

    Depicted here.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Moral Progress: Our Tantalusian Predicament

    If I drive to Santa Fe, the town stays put while I get closer and closer. Moral progress is different. A good part of the moral journey involves the recession of the destination. This morning I discovered that C. S. Lewis had had a similar thought. 

    "No man knows how bad he is until he tries very hard to be good." (Mere Christianity, 124)

    Allowance made for  a bit of exaggeration, our moral predicament is describable as Tantalusian.  Remember your Greek mythology?

    Tantalus (Ancient Greek: Τάνταλος Tántalos), also called Atys, was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus: for trying to trick the gods into eating his son, he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. (Wikipedia)

    Something of a stretch, but a tantalizing conceit that I couldn't resist. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?

    This Stack topper proposes a generalization of the age-old principle from Roman law, ultra posse nemo obligatur.

    Excerpt:

    This is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all.  Many think that to be idealistic is good.  But surely it is not good without qualification.  Think of National Socialist ideals, Communist ideals, DEI-driven ‘wokester’ ideals and of their youthful and earnest and sincere proponents.  Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable.  The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state including the states’ agents of equalization.  Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot.  The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet. 

    Their ideals were not realizable because not warranted by the actual facts of human nature. The possibility of their realization was merely imagined, merely ‘cooked up’ or excogitated in the febrile heads of such utopians as the Nowhere Man John Lennon.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Play the Current Position

    In life as in chess. There's no use fretting how you got into it. If not even God can restore a virgin, then surely you cannot undo the mess you are in. You're in it, now play it.  Fretting is of use only if it helps you avoid the pickle next time.

    And that reminds me of an online chess player's moniker: Next Time.  Even better: Weaker than F7.

    After a hard day of tournament play the chess player came home to his wife. The love light shone in her eyes. "Not tonight, honey, I'm weaker that F7."

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Solitary, Alone, Lonely, Lonesome

    Neil Diamond, Solitary Man.  Johnny Cash does it better.  Nothing better than the sound of an acoustic guitar, well-made, well-played, steel-stringed, with fresh strings. This one goes out to Dave Bagwill.

    Calexico, Alone Again Or. 

    Original (1967) by Love, an underrated '60s psychedelic band.

    Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely

    Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo

    Stay free from petty jealousy
    Live by no man's code
    Save your judgment for yourself
    Lest you wind up on this road.

    Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  Whatever happened to William Zantzinger?  Well, he died at 69 in 2009.  NYT obituary here.

    A couple of bonus cuts for a NYC friend:

    Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City. Great song, great video.

    Barrett Strong, Money (1959)

     A curious rendition by The Flying Lizards

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Solitary, Alone, Lonely, Lonesome”

  • World War III

    Will we be able to avoid it? I see little reason to be sanguine, and neither does this guy.

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “World War III”

  • Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable?

    I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No. 

    Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

    This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments.  So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists?  Bahnsen's claim makes no sense.  It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of  God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

    Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative.  This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.  Let me explain.

    I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times.  Here for example. In any case, whatever  presuppositionalists  such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

    Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again.  It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways.  Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

    1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do.  Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field.  So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

    2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H2O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

    3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v1  and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v2, then the velocity of the ball will be v1 + v2. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

    4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members.  Many if not most  people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say.  They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain.  If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

    5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up?  No, use it or lose it!

    Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true. 

    What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute.   Well they are — but only for God, only from God's point of view.  God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true.  But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

    But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do.  But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?  

    Bill Vallicella

  • What Exists Exists

    A miserable tautology?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Jews and Christians Together

    A reader of this blog recently opined, "And there isn't any "Judeo-Christian" anything: there is just Christian and Jew, and ne'er the twain shall meet." This provocative comment ignited some animated push-back from other commenters. And so it was serendipitous that I should stumble this morning upon Jews and Christians Together by Ian Speir. If my reader seeks to decouple the Christian from the Hebraic, Speir and those he quotes aim to bring them together, but in a way that seems to favor the Hebraic over the Christian. Here is a taste (bolding added):

    Those ideas and values—mediated through the Bible, accelerated by the rise of the Christian West, and strained through the filter of the Reformation and the Enlightenment—found good soil in America. They are at the root of some of our country’s most fundamental convictions, like [such as]  human dignity and ordered liberty, the necessity of freedom of conscience, and the insistence that the common good is best secured when men and women are free to pursue lives of virtue. 

    These civilization-shaping ideas do not depend upon the Constitution; they predate it. The Declaration calls them rights—though they are equally responsibilities—that are “endowed by [our] Creator.” They are more than a frame of government or a social contract. They form a civilizational covenant, transcending the ebb and flow of history and the politics of a particular moment. 

    At times these values have been called “Judeo-Christian.” The better descriptor is “Hebraic,” a term that simultaneously captures their worldview significance and their biblical source. 

    In his lecture, Cohen insists that the “Hebraic spirit” of America and of the West is now at stake.

    I will leave it for you to decide whether the thought in the bolded passage goes too far in  the direction opposite to that of my reader. 

    How should we characterize the spirit of America and the West? Off the top of my head, here are four options that may serve as a menu for further rumination:

    a) The spirit of America and the West is not Hebraic but Christian with Christianity decoupled from Judaism. (The extreme  view of my reader which is nonetheless useful as a foil against which to contrast more plausible views.)

    b) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Judaism. (This seems to be the view of Speir and those he cites.)

    c) The spirit of America and the West is Hebraic-Christian with primary emphasis on Christianity which, while in continuity with Judaism,  supersedes and perfects it.

    d) The spirit of America and the West is the spirit expressed in (c), and thus the spirit of Jerusalem but a Jerusalem supplemented and where necessary corrected and held back from fanaticism and 'enthusiasm' (Schwärmerei) by the enlightenment values of Athens (philosophy) both ancient and modern.  (This, I want to suggest, comes fairly close to the classically liberal spirit of the Founders who were men of the 18th century Enlightenment.)

    This schema does not cover all the options, but may be of some use.  Of the four, I prefer (d). 

    Bill Vallicella

    10 responses to “Jews and Christians Together”

  • Will We be Able to Avoid Civil War?

    I am not talking about cold civil war. That is fait accompli.  Read this. 

    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Will We be Able to Avoid Civil War?”

  • How Left-Wing Conspiracies Work

    VDH:

    Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas.

    We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian-collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS.

    The Russian “disinformation” laptop hoax—the notion that the same Russians four years later created a fake Hunter Biden laptop to smear the Biden family on the eve of the first 2020 debate—was jumpstarted by the Biden campaign’s then-chief foreign policy advisor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

    There was never much evidence that a wayward bat or pangolin in a meat market birthed the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the efforts of China, Western and international health officials, and Dr. Fauci’s health bureaucrats to spread that lie.

    The January 6th riot was certainly wrong and buffoonish. But the idea that it was an insurrection aiming to violently overthrow the U.S. government was also a left-wing myth fueled by the Democratic House leadership and the media.

    All these schemes have their commonalities:

    Related:

    Niall Ferguson, We're All Soviets Now

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is There a Right to Health Care?

    Arguments contra.

    Top o' the Stack.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Is There a Right to Health Care?”

  • The Trump Conviction: It Depends How the Question is Framed

    Donald J. Trump is a convicted felon.  Indisputably true. And so the question is asked: "Would you vote for a convicted felon for U. S. president?"

    Time was when almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, would have answered in the negative. For until recently lawfare was rare if not nonexistent in the USA.  When procedural norms were respected, a conviction meant something: to be found guilty in a properly conducted proceeding by a jury of one's peers was taken to be good evidence of actual guilt.

    But no more. We conservatives are unmoved by Trump's being a convicted felon. We return an affirmative answer to a different question: "Would you vote for a victim of lawfare railroaded in a Soviet-style show trial for U. S. president?" Yes. For  to be 'convicted' of a 'felony' in a show trial  in which the procedural rules have been flouted has no tendency to show that the defendant is guilty of any crime.

    A defendant found guilty of a crime in a court of law may or may not be guilty of the crime with which he is charged — even if the  courtroom proceedings were procedurally correct in every respect. And similarly if he were found not guilty. One may be found not guilty and yet be guilty. O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of the double homicide of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.  You will all remember that so-called 'trial of the century.'  But no one believes that Simpson did not do the dastardly deeds. Though found not guilty, his guilt stank and stinks to high heaven.  No one is looking for the 'real killer,' to adapt a verbal riff from the late F. Lee Bailey. So while the courtroom proceedings were procedurally correct,  the objectively wrong verdict was arrived at: found not guilty, Simpson was in fact guilty.

    A fortiori in the case of Trump in which the procedural rules were set aside. Alan Dershowitz:

    The infamous conversation between Stalin and the head of his KGB Lavrenty Beria is often quoted: 'Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.'

    This prosecution was even worse because, though DA Bragg tried desperately to find a crime with which to charge Trump, he failed to find one, as did his predecessor Cyrus Vance.

    So Bragg went a dangerous step further than Stalin ever did: he made up a crime.

    He found a misdemeanor that was past the statute of limitations — making a false bookkeeping entry on a corporate form — and magically converted it to a felony that was within the limitation period by alleging that the false entry was intended to cover up another crime.

    Throughout the trial, many people inferred that crime to be an alleged attempt at election interference. But Bragg never actually explicitly stated that.

    In fact, the prosecution didn't tell the court what Trump's other 'crimes' were until their closing arguments on Wednesday – by which point the defense had no opportunity to respond.

    And even then, the supposed crimes outlined were vague.

    In his closing instructions, Judge Juan Merchan exposed his already apparent bias once more – telling the jurors that they didn't actually have to agree on the specifics of Trump's unlawful behavior.

    How could someone defend themselves against such vague allegations?

    It was at this moment that I became convinced that the jury would find him guilty.

    And that conviction may well mark the beginning of a new era of partisan weaponization of our justice system.

    DA Bragg has demonstrated how easy it now is to get a conviction against a political opponent. Other ambitious DA's are likely to follow suit. And the ultimate losers will be the American public.

    John Yoo is right : this is a direct assault on the rule of law and the separation of powers.  

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “The Trump Conviction: It Depends How the Question is Framed”

  • Plato, Power, and Existence

    The return of the Eleatic Stranger.

    Substack latest.

    Theme music:  Barbara Lewis, Hello Stranger

    EmmyLou Harris, Hello Stranger

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “Plato, Power, and Existence”

Philosophy Weblogs

Other Websites