Dennis Prager here details recent vicious attacks upon himself and his wife, and then offers an explanation of liberal-left scumbaggery:
First, truth is a not a left-wing value (though, of course, some individuals on the left have great integrity). If you don't know that, you cannot understand the left. Truth is a conservative value (though, of course, some individuals on the right lie). From the Bolsheviks to today's left-wing, lying is normal. Not one left-wing comment or article (except for the HuffingtonPost reference to the MIT report) even dealt with the issue of the truth of the claim that one out of every five female college students is sexually assaulted/raped, or the truth of the charge that our universities are a "culture of rape."
Second, mockery, indeed cruel mockery, is the norm on the left. I urge readers to visit any of the liberal websites cited and read the comments after the articles. No significant American group hates like the left does. If you differ with them — from global warming, to race relations, to same-sex marriage, to the extent of rape on college campuses — they will humiliate, defame, libel and try to economically crush you.
Addendum: More liberal-left scumbaggery: New York Times publishes Darren Wilson's Address. Liberals see politics as a form of warfare, and they will do anything to win. "All's fair in love and war." When will conservatives wise up to this and learn how to fight back?
The only mystery about the last six years is how much lasting damage has been done to the American experiment, at home and abroad. Our federal agencies are now an alphabet soup of incompetence and corruption. How does the IRS ever quite recover? Will the Secret Service always be seen as veritable Keystone Cops? Is the GSA now a reckless party-time organization? Is the EPA institutionalized as a rogue appendage of the radical green movement with a director who dabbles in online pseudonyms? Do we accept that the Justice Department dispenses injustice or that the VA can be a lethal institution for our patriots? Is NASA now a Muslim outreach megaphone as we hire Russia, the loser of the space race, to rocket us into orbit?
[. . .]
Every statistic that Obama has produced on Obamacare enrollment, deportation, unemployment and GDP growth is in some ways a lie. Almost everything he has said about granting amnesty was untrue, from his own contradictions to the congressionally sanctioned small amnesties of prior presidents. Almost every time Obama steps to the lectern we expect two things: he will lecture us on our moral failings and what he will say will be abjectly untrue.
At this late date it is beyond clear that no more brazen liar has ever occupied the White House. He is not just a liar; he is a consummate master of the manifold modes of mendacity.
This entry is a further installment in a continuing discussion with Tim Pawl, et al., about the Chalcedonian Christological two-natures-one-person doctrine. Professor Pawl put to me the following question:
You ask: “Now if an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed, how is it that an individual substance can be the sort of item that is not its own supposit or support, that is not broadly-logically-possibly independent, but is rather dependent for its existence on another substance?”
You then say: “That is tantamount to saying that here we have a substance that is not a substance.” I don’t see that it is tantamount to . . . . And I don’t see the force of the analogy from accidents to individual substances. Could you spell out the reasoning a bit more, if you are inclined?
With pleasure.
We all agree that the accidentality of the Incarnation cannot be understood as the having by the Logos of an Aristotelian accident. Thus we all agree that
1. The Logos, while existing in every metaphysically possible world, does not have a human nature in every world in which it exists. That is, the Logos is neither essentially nor necessarily human. (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists; x is necessarily F =df x is F in every world in which it exists and x exists in every world. For example, Socrates is essentially human but not necessarily human; the number 7 is both essentially prime and necessarily prime.)
and
2. The Logos' accidentally had humanity (individual human nature) is not an Aristotelian accident of the Logos as Aristotelian substance.
And we all agree why (2) is true. Briefly, an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed.
So if the human nature of the Logos is not an accident of any substance, then it is a substance. We now face an antilogism:
3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance. 4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence. 5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.
The triad is clearly inconsistent: the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.
Limb (4) is a commitment of the Aristotelian framework within which Chalcedonian Christology is articulated, while the other two limbs are commitments of orthodox theology.
So something has to give. One solution is to reject (4) by adding yet another 'epicycle.' One substitutes for (4)
4*. Every self-suppositing substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
Under this substitution the triad is consistent. For what (4*) allows are cases in which there are substances with alien supposits. The individual human nature of Christ, though a substance, is not a self-suppositing substance: it is not its own supposit. Its supposit is the Logos. So its being a substance is consistent with its not being capable of independent existence.
If I say to Tim Pawl, "What you are countenancing is a substance that is not a substance," I expect him to reply, "No, I am not countenancing anything self-contradictory; I am countenancing a substance that is not a self-suppositing substance!"
To which my response will be: "You have made an ad hoc modification to the notion of substance for the sole purpose of avoiding a contradiction; but in doing so you have not extended or enriched the notion of substance but have destroyed it. For a substance by definition is an entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence. A substance whose supposit is a different substance is not an accident but it is not a substance either. For it is not metaphysically capable of independent existence."
Recall what my question has been over this series of posts: Is the one-person-two-natures formulation coherently conceivable within an Aristotelian framework?
My interim answer is in the negative. For within the aforementioned ontological framework, the very concept of a primary substance is the concept of an entity that is broadly-logically capable of independent existence. Any modification of that fundamental concept moves one outside of the Aristotelian framework.
Appendix: The Concept of an Accident
What is an accident and how is it related to a substance of which it is the accident? Let A be an accident of substance S. And let's leave out of consideration what the scholastics call propria, 'accidents' that a substance cannot gain or lose. An example of a proprium would be a cat's being warm in virtue of its internal metabolic processes, as opposed to a cat's being warm because it has been sleeping by a fire.
The following propositions circumscribe the concept of Aristotelian accident.
P1. Necessarily, every accident is the accident of some substance or other. (This assumes that there are no accidents of accidents. If there are, then, necessarily, every accident that is not the accident of an accident is the accident of some substance or other.)
P2. No accident of a substance can exist except by existing in (inhering in) a substance. Substances are broadly-logically capable of independent existence; accidents are not. Substances can exist on their own; accidents cannot.
P3. Accidents are particulars, not universals. They are as particular as the substances of which they are accidents. Thus accidents are not 'repeatable.' If Socrates is seated and Plato is seated, and seatedness is an accident, then there are two seatednesses, not one.
P4. Accidents are non-transferrable. Some particulars are transferrable: I can transfer my pen to you. But accidents are not transferrable. I can give you my coat but not my cold. So not only is every accident the accident of some substance or other; every accident is the accident of the very substance of which it is an accident.
Thoughts don't like to subside. One leads to another, and another. You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, thoughts that you will soon post to your weblog, all the while realizing that mental blogging is not meditation.
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden," said Emerson and you would swim upstream to the Source. So you make an effort, but the effort is too much for you. Perhaps the metaphor is wrong. One from al-Ghazzali might be better.
A cooling evening breeze is more likely to come to the desert dweller if he climb to the top of the minaret than if he stay on the ground. So he makes an effort within his power, the effort of positioning himself to receive, when and if it should come, a gust of the divine favor.
He waits for the grace that may overcome the gravity of the mind and its hebetude.
To meditate is to wait, and therein lies or sits the difficulty.
This morning's session (sitting in plain English) was good and lasted from 3:30 to 4:25. Fueled by chai: coffee is too much the driver of the discursive. But now the coffee is coming in and I'm feeling fabulous and the thoughts are 'percolating' up from who knows where.
Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man. This one goes out to Sally S."Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"
What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee? They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience. Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).
UPDATE (11/24): Up from a nap, I pour me a serious cup of serious java (Kirkland Portland Bold), and log onto to email where I find a note from Patrick Kurp who recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with the nap and the aforesaid java, has this old man banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders' and ready for some more scribbling.
Chicory is a cheat. It cuts it but doesn't cut it.
"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."
I hesitate to call them philosophers. David Gordon serves up for our delectation and instruction the following tidbit of Continental balderdash (I quote the whole of Gordon's entry and then add a comment of my own):
The philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, who died November 19, would ordinarily hold little interest for readers of the Mises Blog. Bhaskar was a Marxist, who in his later years veered off toward a fuzzy spirituality. It is worth taking note of him, though, because he was an extreme example of a besetting sin of the contemporary academic world. His prose style made him unreadable; and one of his sentences was selected by the journal Philosophy and Literature as the winner of its 1996 Bad Writing Contest. This was the winning sentence:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
To call this 'bad writing' and 'unreadable' is unduly charitable. I am currently studying Erich Pryzwara's Analogia Entis, trs. Betz and Hart, Eerdman's, 2014. It is poorly written and deserves to be called 'unreadable.' I plan to post on it later. But if you really know your stuff and are willing to read and read and re-read and work very hard, you can more less follow what Pryzwara is saying. His book embodies real thought. The above passage, however, reads like a parody of Continental bullshitting. Continentals love to name-drop. But the above is name-dropping on stilts.
Did the Jews of Europe keep a sharp eye on the political from, say, 1923 to 1933 when Hitler acceded to power? Not very well, as the sequel showed. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Their space is narrowly hodological: marked by paths along which merely practical needs are met and merely practical tasks discharged. What lies off these beaten paths is as good as nonexistent to them. As their space, so their lives. The pleasures of meandering the byways are foreign to them.
Regular readers of this blog know that I respect and admire Dennis Prager: he is a font of wisdom and a source of insight. But I just heard him say, "Egalitarians by definition lack wisdom." That is another clear example of the illicit use of 'by definition,' a mistake I pointed out in an earlier entry. Here are some examples of correct uses of 'by definition':
Bachelors are by definition male
Triangles are by definition three-sided
In logic, sound arguments are by definition valid. (A sound argument is defined as one whose form is valid and all of whose premises are true.)
In physics, work is defined as the product of force and distance moved: W= Fx.
In set theory, a power set is defined to be the set of all subsets of a given set.
By definition, no rifle is a shotgun.
Semi-automatic firearms are by definition capable of firing exactly one round per trigger pull until the magazine (and the chamber!) is empty.
In metaphysics, an accident by definition is logically incapable of existing without a substance of which it is the accident.
In astrophysics, a light-year is by definition a measure of distance, not of time: it is the distance light travels in one year.
By definition, the luminiferous either is a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic signals.
By definition, what is true by definition is true.
Incorrect uses of 'by definition':
Joe Nocera: "anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill."
Donald Berwick: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."
Illegal aliens are by definition Hispanic.
Bill Maher, et al.: "Taxation is by definition redistributive."
Dennis Prager: "Environmentalists are by definition extremists."
Dennis Prager: "Egalitarians by definition lack wisdom."
Capitalists are by definition greedy.
Socialists are by definition envious.
Alpha Centauri is by definition 4.3 light-years from earth.
The luminiferous ether exists by definition.
By definition, the luminiferous ether cannot exist.
I hope it is clear why the incorrect uses are incorrect. As for the first Prager example, it is certainly true that some environmentalists are extremists. But others are not. So Prager's assertion is not even true. Even if every environmentalist were an extremist, however, it would still not be true by definition that that is so. By definition, what is true by definition is true; but what is true need not be true by definition.
As for the second Prager example, it may or may not be true that egalitarians lack wisdom depending on the definition of 'egalitarian.' But even if true, certainly not by definition.
So what game is Prager playing? Is he using 'by definition' as an intensifier? Is he purporting to make a factual claim to the effect that all environmentalists are extremists and then underlining (as it were) the claim by the use of 'by definition'? Or is he assigning by stipulation his own idiosyncratic meaning to 'environmentalist'? Is he serving notice that 'extremist' is part of the very meaning of 'environmentalist' in his idiolect?
Similar questions ought to be asked of other misusers of the phrase.
It is quite unreasonable to suppose that the appeal to sweet reason is the best way forward in all of life's situations. The reasonable appreciate that the hard fist of unreason applied to the visage of evil intransigence is sometimes the most cogent of 'arguments.'
It is unreasonable to be reasonable in all things.
Soft determinism is still determinism. And it's really not a different type of determinism. It is, rather, drawing different conclusions from determinism, or rather, not drawing the conclusion that we are not free and not morally responsible for our actions.
A track star at the University of Southern California, Louis Zamperini was swept up like so many of his generation into World War II. Story and interview here.
In May 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. For 47 days, he floated on a raft in the ocean. He was then captured by the Japanese, who held him prisoner until August 1945. These experiences tormented Zamperini’s postwar life, but in 1949 things began to turn around for him. Zamperini forgave the men who held him prisoner, including the sadistic Japanese corporal, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who was known as the “Bird.”
Zamperini credits a young Billy Graham for bringing him to Christ and forgiveness.
I, or rather this site, experienced a surge yesterday: 4,207 pageviews. Why? Beats me. My traffic is usually in the 1600-2000 pageviews per day range. This, the TypePad version of MavPhil commenced operations on Halloween 2008. This third incarnation of MavPhil is closing in on the 3 million total pageview mark. That's nothing to crow about, I know, but I thought you might be interested.
I thank you for your 'patronage.' And remember: triple your money back if not completely satisfied.
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UPDATE. The day ended at 5 pm with 2, 298 pageviews.
