Maverick Philosopher – Page 488 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Begging the Question Against Meinong

For Meinong, some objects neither exist nor subsist: they have no being at all. See Kripke's Misrepresentation of Meinong.

London Ed finds Meinong's characteristic thesis contradictory. "The claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist is an existential claim, of course, so how can 'they' have no being?"

I say that Ed begs the question against Meinong, but Ed denies that he does. Let us see if we can sort this out.

To simplify the discussion and to avoid being sidetracked by the question about modes of being and whether existence and subsistence are distinct modes of being, let us focus on what is characteristically Meinongian, namely, the claim that some objects have no being at all. Earlier philosophers had held that there are modes of being, but what is characteristically Meinongian is that claim that some objects, or better, items, have no being whatsoever.

We can therefore simplify Ed's rhetorical question as follows, "The claim that some objects have no being is an existential claim, so how can 'they' have no being?" This question suggest the following argument:

1. The claim that some objects have no being is an existential claim.

2. An existential claim is one that affirms the being or existence of one or more items.

Therefore

3. The claim that some objects have no being is self-contradictory since it is equivalent to 'There exist objects that do not exist' or 'There are objects that are not' or 'Some existing objects do not exist.'

It is this argument that I claim begs the question against the Meinongian. It begs the question at premise (1). For (1) is precisely what the Meinongian denies when he affirms that some objects have no being.

There is no need for the phrase 'beg the question' lest that be a further stumbling block for Ed and bone of contention between us. The point is simply that Ed assumes what the Meinongian denies. If you merely oppose me, or contradict me, then you haven't refuted me.

The Meinongian runs the above argument in reverse: he grants (2), but then argues from the negation of (3) to the negation of (1). Or we can put the matter in terms of an antilogism or inconsistent triad:

1. The claim that some objects have no being is an existential claim.

2. An existential claim is one that affirms the being or existence of one or more items.

~3. The claim that some objects have no being is not self-contradictory.

The limbs cannot all be true. (2) cannot be reasonably disputed. The Meinongian solves the problem by rejecting (1), Ed by rejecting (~3).

I say there is a stand-off. I would like Ed to concede this. The concession would be minimal since it does not prevent him from providing independent reasons for rejecting Meinong's Theory of Objects. But I know Ed and I am not sanguine about him conceding anything, even the most self-evident of points.

I fear that he will say that 'some' by its very meaning is ontologically loaded, that 'Some Fs are Gs' MEANS 'There exists an x such that x is F and x is G.'

But I will not respond to this until and unless Ed verifies my fear.

Juan Cole, Terrorism, and Leftist Moral Equivalency

In Terrorism and Other Religions, Cole argues that "Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions." Although we conservatives don't think all that highly of Bill Maher, we cheered when he pointed out the obvious, namely, that Islam, and Islam alone at the present time, is the faith whose doctrines drive most of the world's terrorism, and that the Left's moral equivalency 'argument' is "bullshit" to employ Maher's terminus technicus. Why should pointing out what is plainly true get Maher labeled a bigot by Cole?

So I thought I must be missing something and that I needed to be set straight by Professor Cole. So I read his piece carefully numerous times. Cole's main argument is that, while people of "European Christian heritage" killed over 100 million people in the 20th century, Muslims have killed only about two million during that same period. But what does this show? Does it show that Islamic doctrine does not drive most of the world's terrorism at the present time? Of course not.

That is precisely the issue given that Cole is contesting what "the bigot" Maher claimed. What Cole has given us is a text-book example of ignoratio elenchi. This is an informal fallacy of reasoning committed by a person who launches into the refutation of some thesis that is other than the one being forwarded by the dialectical opponent. If the thesis is that Muslims who take Islam seriously are the cause of most of the world's terrorism at the present time, this thesis cannot be refuted by pointing out that people of "European Christian heritage" have killed more people than Muslims. For this is simply irrelevant to the issue in dispute. (I note en passant that this is why ignoratio elenchi is classifed as a fallacy of relevance.)

Someone born and raised in a Christian land can be called a Christian. But it doesn't follow that such a person is a Christian in anything more than a sociological sense. In this loose and external sense the author of The Anti-Christ was a Christian. Nietzsche was raised in a Christian home in a Christian land by a father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, who was a Lutheran pastor. Similarly, Hitler was a Christian. And Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, was a Muslim. But were Ataturk's actions guided and inspired by Islamic doctrine? As little as Hitler's actions were guided and inspired by the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of some of Ataturk's anti-Islamic actions.

Having exposed the fundamental fallacy in Cole's article, there is no need to go through the rest of his distortions such as the one about the Zionist terrorists during the time of the British Mandate.

Why do leftists deny reality? A good part of the answer is that they deny it because reality does not fit their scheme. Leftists confuse the world with their view of the world. In their view of the world, people are all equal and religions are all equal – equally good or equally bad depending on the stripe of the leftist. They want it to be that way and so they fool themselves into thinking that it is that way. Moral equivalency reigns. If you point out that Muhammad Atta was an Islamic terrorist, they shoot back that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist — willfully ignoring the crucial difference that the murderous actions of the former derive from Islamic/Islamist doctrine whereas the actions of the latter do not derive from Christian doctrine.

And then these leftists like Cole compound their willful ignorance of reality by denouncing those who speak the truth as 'Islamophobes.'

That would have been like hurling the epithet 'Nazi-phobe' at a person who, in 1938, warned of the National Socialist threat to civilized values.

And Why No Mention of Black-on-White Violence?

Why no mention in the MSM of this?

Hanson on Ferguson

Here:

The backstory of Ferguson was that out of the millions of arrests each year only about 100 African-American suspects are shot fatally by white police. And yet we were falsely and ad nauseam told that Michael Brown was proof of an epidemic. There may well be an epidemic of blacks killing blacks, of African-Americans engaging in the knock-out game against non-blacks or flash-mobbing stores. But as far as rare interracial gun violence goes, in 2014 it is more commonly black on white. Ferguson is an anomaly that did not warrant hundreds of reporters who gladly skipped the real dramas of a world on the verge of blowing apart as it had in 1939.

Right. Ferguson is almost entirely a media invention.

[. . .] We are back to an O.J./Duke Lacrosse/Trayvon landscape, in which larger and mostly unsolvable issues loom — and yet cannot be discussed: the one side silently seethes: “Please, do not commit 50% of the violent crime in America at rates four times your demographic, and, please, stop shooting nearly 7,000 fellow African-Americans a year, to ensure that there is less likelihood to encounter the police — in other words, restore the family, cease the violent and misogynist hero worship, and be wary of government dependence.” And the other side simmers: “Create for us the economic and social conditions in which we have equal opportunity without prejudice and stop the police from inordinately harassing us.” Amid that growing divide, which is now some 60 years old, all the trillions of dollars of the Great Society ^[12], Jesse Jackson ^[13], Al Sharpton ^[14], and an array of “activists,” all the latest criminological and sociopolitical theories, and trillions of man-hours of social work have come apparently to naught.

[. . .]

Yet if our power brokers chose to live in the inner city, to enroll their children in public schools, and to visit local neighborhood establishments, perhaps they could marry their often loud abstract anguish with quiet concrete experience. Instead, we get the impressions that the Michael Browns and Trayvon Martins of America are the sort of fodder that the race industry elite and the white liberal grandees devour for their own respective careerist and psychological purposes. Because of inner-city pathologies and disparities, affirmative action is now perpetual and yet largely benefits those elites who have little in common with those who commit 50% of the nation’s homicides, while privileged liberals understand that if they don’t transmogrify Ferguson, Missouri, into Bull Connor ^[15] and Lester Maddox ^[16], then their own apartheid existence and abstract anguish are called into question.

The Strange Saga of the Last True Hermit

Peter Lupu has called me a recluse. I have referred to myself as reposing in Bradleyan reclusivity. But I am a hermit only in an analogous sense. For my hermithood is but partial and participated in comparison to the plenary hermithood of this dude. He approximates unto the Platonic Form thereof. Compared to him, Seldom Seen Slim is a man about town, a veritable social animal. Take a gander at Slim:

Related: The Strange Case of Gene Rossellini and indeed the entire contents of the category Questers and Other Oddballs.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Pattie Boyd as Muse

A musician needs a muse. George Harrison and Eric Clapton found her in Pattie Boyd. Here are five of the best known songs that she is said to have inspired. If you don't love at least four of these five, you need a major soul adjustment.

Something
Isn't it a Pity?
Wonderful Tonight
Layla (The best part starts at 3:13 the poignancy of which still rends my soul the way it did 44 years ago)
Bell Bottom Blues ("If I could choose a place to die, it would be in your arms . . . .")

Theodore Dalrymple: A Man Who Had Never Heard of Robin Williams

Until he hung hanged himself, that is. Williams, that is.

I knew who Williams was, though I have seen only two of his films, The Dead Poets' Society and Mrs. Doubtfire. From what I know of the others I have no desire to see them. The gushing over celebrities at their passing is as tolerable as it is predictable. One only wishes that people had better judgment about who is really worthy of the highest accolades and encomia.

Here is the memorable carpe diem scene from The Dead Poets' Society. I think Dalrymple would appreciate it.

Companion posts: If Obituaries Were Objective . . .

If Obituaries Were Objective II . . .

And oh yes, here is the Dalrymple piece.

Pray to Pray Well

And this in two senses. Pray to become good at praying. And pray for assistance in getting good at it.

Advice from Erasmus

Enchiridion, p. 104:

Transfer your love to something permanent, something celestial, something incorruptible, and you will love more coolly this transitory and fleeting form of the body.

Beingless Objects

For Meinong, some objects neither exist nor subsist: they have no being at all. The stock examples are the golden mountain and the round square.

London Ed finds this contradictory. "The claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist is an existential claim, of course, so how can 'they' have no being?"

But of course it is not an existential claim from a Meinongian point of view. Obviously, if it is true that some objects are beingless, then 'Some objects are beingless' is not an existential claim. On the other hand, if it is true that sentences featuring the particular quantifier 'some' all make existential claims, then 'Some objects are beingless' is self-contradictory.

So the Grazer can say to the Londoner: "You are begging the question against me!" And the Londoner can return the 'compliment.' The Phoenician stands above the fray, merely observing it, as from Mt. Olympus.

So far, then, a stand-off. Ed has not refuted the Meinongian; he has merely opposed him.

Ed needs to admit this and give us a better argument against the thesis of Aussersein.

Beware ‘Illegal Use of Software’ E-Mail Scam

I just deleted a suspicious looking e-mail that claimed that I had to appear in court in Costa Mesa re: illegal use of software. I of course did not open the zip file that would have invited a trojan horse or some other piece of malware into my motherboard. One dead giveaway was that while Mesa is not far from here, Costa Mesa is in California. I am a native Californian. (Which fact implies, by the way, that I am a native American!)

It is hard to fool a philosopher. We are trained skeptics. It is especially hard to fool a philosopher who knows his Schopenhauer. Homo homini lupus, et cetera.

Never click on any link thoughtlessly. To be on the safe side, delete suspicious looking e-mail from the subject line. Don't even open them.

Another rule of mine is: Never allow your body or soul to be polluted. So if I get an e-mail with a nasty subject line, I delete it straightaway. If the subject line is OK but the first line is hostile or nasty, same thing. Go ahead, punk. Make my day.

More info here.

Companion post: Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

Kripke’s Misrepresentation of Meinong

In "Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities" (in Philosophical Troubles, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 52-74) Saul Kripke distances himself from the following view that he ascribes to Alexius Meinong:

Many people have gotten confused about these matters because they have said, 'Surely there are fictional characters who fictionally do such-and-such things; but fictional characters don't exist; therefore some view like Meinong's with a first-class existence and a second-class existence, or a broad existence and a narrow existence, must be the case'.²³ This is not what I am saying here. (p. 64)

Footnote 23 reads as follows:

At any rate, this is how Meinong is characterized by Russell in 'On Denoting'. I confess that I have never read Meinong and I don't know whether the characterization is accurate. It should be remembered that Meinong is a philosopher whom Russell (at least originally) respected; the characterization is unlikely to be a caricature.

But it is a caricature and at this late date it is well known to be a caricature. What is astonishing about all this is that Kripke had 38 years to learn a few basic facts about Meinong's views from the time he read (or talked) his paper in March of 1973 to its publication in 2011 in Philosophical Troubles. But instead he chose to repeat Russell's caricature of Meinong in his 2011 publication. Here is what Kripke could have quickly learned about Meinong's views from a conversation with a well-informed colleague or by reading a competent article:

Some objects exist and some do not. Thus horses exist while unicorns do not. Among the objects that do not exist, some subsist and some do not. Subsistents include properties, mathematical objects and states of affairs. Thus there are two modes of being, existence and subsistence. Spatiotemporal items exist while ideal/abstract objects subsist.

Now what is distinctive about Meinong is his surprising claim that some objects neither exist nor subsist. The objects that neither exist nor subsist are those that have no being at all. Examples of such objects are the round square, the golden mountain, and purely fictional objects. These items have properties — actually not possibly — but they have no being. They are ausserseiend. Aussersein, however, is not a third mode of being.

Meinong's fundamental idea, whether right or wrong, coherent or incoherent, is that there are subjects of true predications that have no being whatsoever. Thus an item can have a nature, a Sosein, without having being, wihout Sein. This is the characteristic Meinongian principle of the independence of Sosein from Sein.

Kripke's mistake is to ascribe to Meinong the view that purely fictional items are subsistents when for Meinong they have no being whatsoever. He repeats Russell's mistake of conflating the ausserseiend with the subsistent.

The cavalier attitude displayed by Kripke in the above footnote is not uncommon among analytic philosophers. They think one can philosophize responsibly without bothering to attend carefully to what great thinkers of the tradition have actually maintained while at the same time dropping their names: Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Brentano, Meinong. For each of these I could given an example of a thesis attributed to them that has little or nothing to do with what they actually maintained.

Does the cavalier attitude of most analytic philosophers to the history of philosophy matter? In particular, does it matter that Kripke and plenty of others continue to ignore and misrepresent Meinong? And are not embarrassed to confess their ignorance? This depends on how one views philosophy in relation to its history.

At this point I refer the reader to a somewhat rambling, but provocative, essay by the late Dallas Willard, Who Needs Brentano? The Wasteland of Philosophy Without its Past.

No Swisher Sweets for Old Bill

In other news,

When you pull in a half-million dollars a speech, why not celebrate with the "Rolls Royce" of cigars?

Former President Bill Clinton reportedly indulges in some of the world's most expensive cigars, from a Dominican Republic company whose smokes fetch up to $1,000 — that's per cigar, not per box.

You will recall that the late Michael Brown of Ferguson fame displayed bad taste in cigars along with bad moral judgment when he shoplifted a package of Swisher Sweets in the penultimate adventure of his short life.

Treading the Middle Path, and avoiding the extremes of our first black president and of the latest poster boy of the hate-America race baiters, I recommend to you the Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head,' under $3 per stick. Cheap but good and proportional to the speaking fees a philosopher is likely to pull down.

Is Catholicism a Religion?

Is the pope Catholic?

I would like to believe that James V. Schall, S. J. has a better understanding of Catholicism than I do, but I just now read the following from his otherwise very good On Revelation:

Catholicism is a revelation, not a religion. The word “religion” refers to a virtue by which we know what we can about God by our own human rational powers, “unaided,” as they say. Revelation means that, in addition to all we know by our own powers, another source of knowledge and life exists that can address itself to us, can make itself known to us.

The first sentence in this paragraph is the conjunction of two claims. The first is that Catholicism is a revelation. The second is that Catholicism is not a religion. The second claim is plainly false. If Catholicism is not a religion, what is it? It is not a branch of mathematics or a natural science. It is not one of the Geisteswissenschaften. It is not philosophy or a branch of philosophy such as natural theology.

Schall is of course right to tie religion to human beings: God has no religion. But it doesn't follow that Catholicism is not a religion. It is a religion based on divine revelation. God reveals himself to man, and man appropriates that revelation as best he can using the limited postlapsarian resources of intellect and will and emotion at his disposal.

Schall may be confusing the genus with one of its species, religion with natural religion the Merriam-Webster definition of which is accurate:

a religion validated on the basis of human reason and experience apart from miraculous or supernatural revelation; specifically : a religion that is universally discernible by all men through the use of human reason apart from any special revelation — compare revealed religion.

Catholicism is a revealed religion and therefore a religion. Or will you argue that 'revealed' in 'revealed religion' functions as an alienans adjective? I hope not.

Now what about the first claim, namely, that Catholicism is a revelation? That's a lame way of putting it in my humble opinion. If Catholicism is a religion based on revelation, then, since religion is a human enterprise as Schall rightly notes, it involves an interaction between God and man. So it cannot be a pure revelation which is what Catholicism would have to be if it is not a religion.

Compare the Bible. It is the word of God. But that is only half of the story. The Bible is the word of God written down by men. Similarly, Catholicism is divine revelation appropriated by men. It is therefore neither purely divine nor purely human.

I could be wrong, but I don't think what I have just written is too far from Catholicism's own self-understanding.