For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview. Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism. But you would never know it from his technical work which has no direct relevance to the Big Questions. (Possible qualification: the business about the necessity of identity discussed in Naming and Necessity allows for a Cartesian-style argument for mind-body dualism. See here.)
So I would characterize Kripke as a compartmentalizer. (My use of this term does not have a pejorative connotation, at least not yet.) His work in philosophy occupies one of his mental compartments while his religious convictions and practices occupy another with little or no influence of the one on the other. It is not that his technical work is inconsistent with his religious worldview; my point is that the two are largely irrelevant to each other. No doubt some of Kripke's examples 'betray' his religious upbringing — e.g., the fascinating bit about Moloch as a misvocalization of the Hebrew 'melech' in Reference and Existence, p. 70 ff. et passim – but his technical work, or at least his published technical work, is not a means to either the articulation or the rational justification of his worldview.
You may appreciate my point if you compare Kripke with Alvin Plantinga. He too is a religious man and a theist, an anti-naturalist, and an anti-materialist. But all of Plantinga's books that I am aware of contribute directly to the articulation and defense of his theistic worldview. He is out to explain and justify theistic belief and turn aside such objections to it as the ever-popular arguments from evil. This is clear from the titles of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom, and Evil, Does God Have a Nature. But it is also clear from Nature of Necessity the penultimate chapter of which treats of God, evil, and freedom, and the ultimate chapter of which is about God and necessity. The same is true of his two volumes on warrant one of which includes a critique of naturalism, not to mention his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies.
The late David M. Armstrong is an interesting case. While he respects religion and is not a militant naturalist or atheist, his technical work articulates and defends his thoroughly naturalist worldview, where naturalism is the thesis that all that exists is the space-time world and its contents. The naturalist worldview comes first for Armstrong, both temporally and logically, and sets the agenda for the technical investigations of particulars, universals, states of affairs, classes, numbers, causation, laws of nature, dispositions, modality, mind, and so on. Broadly characterized, the agenda is to show how everything, including what appear to be 'abstract objects,' can be accounted for naturalistically using only those resources supplied by the natural world, without recourse to anything nonnatural or supernatural.
For Plantinga, by contrast, it is his theistic worldview that comes first both temporally and logically and sets the agenda for his technical work.
And then there is an acquaintance of mine who attends Greek Orthodox services on Sunday but during working hours is something close to a logical positivist.
This suggests a three-fold classification. There are philosophers whose
A. Technical work is consistent with but does not support their worldview;
B. Technical work is consistent with and does support their worldview;
C. Technical work is inconsistent with and hence does not support their worldview.
I will assume that (C) is an unacceptable form of compartmentalization, but I won't try to explain why in this post. Brevity is the soul of blog. This leaves (B) and (C).
Now it has always seemed obvious to me that (B) is to be preferred over (A). But do I have an argument? But first I should try to make my thesis more precise. To that end, a few more distinctions and observations.
I distinguish philosophy-as-inquiry from philosophy-as-worldview. (And you should too.) Roughly, a worldview is a more or less comprehensive system of more or less precisely articulated action-guiding beliefs and values. (Transfinite cardinal arithmetic is not a worldview: you can't 'take it to the streets.') Obviously, there are many philosophies in this sense, and therefore no such thing as philosophy in this sense. There is the philosophy of your crazy uncle who has an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Kant, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Observe also that a philosophy in the sense of a worldview need not be arrived at by rational inquiry. Philosophy-as-inquiry, by contrast is rational inquiry by definition. To put it paradoxically, there needn't be anything philosophical about a philosophy. I trust my meaning is clear.
Note too that philosophy-as-inquiry need not result in a worldview. It can end aporetically, at an impasse, the way a number of the Platonic dialogs do, in Socratic nescience, even if the intention was to arrive at a worldview. And sometimes even the intention is lacking: there are philosophers who are content to devote their professional hours to some such narrow topic as counterfactual conditionals or epistemic closure principles, or anaphora. They can be said to engage in hyperspecialization. There are also those less extreme specialists who are concerned with ethics or epistemology but give no thought to the metaphysical presuppositions of either.
We should also distinguish between engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to arrive at a worldview versus engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to shore up or defend a worldview that one antecedently accepts. This is the difference between one who seeks the truth by philosophical means, a truth he does not possess, and one who possesses or thinks he possesses the truth or most of the truth and employs philosophical means to the end of defending and securing and promoting the truth that he already has and has received from some extraphilosophical source such as revelation or religious/mystical experience. The latter could be called philosophy-as-inquiry in the service of apologetics, 'apologetics' broadly construed.
It should now be evident that (B) conflates two ideas that need to be split apart. There are philosophers whose
B1. Technical work is consistent with and supports an antecedently held worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and whose source is not philosophy-as-inquiry;
B2. Technical work is consistent with and supports a worldview the source of which is philosophy-as-inquiry.
My main thesis is that (B2) is superior to (A), but I also incline to the view that (B1) is superior to (A). But for now I set aside (B1).
But why is (B2) superior to (A)? I am not saying that there is anything wrong with satisfying a purely theoretical interest either by (i) hyperspecializing and concentrating on one or a few narrow topics, or (ii) specializing as in the case of Kripke by working on a fairly wide range of topics. What I want to say is that there is something better than either of (i) or (ii).
My thesis: Since philosophy is a search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, one is not true to the spirit of philosophy in the full and normative sense of the word if one is content to theorize about minutiae that in the end have no 'existential' relevance where 'existential' is to be taken in the sense of Kierkegaard, Jaspers, et. al, and their distinguished predecessors, Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, et al. One's own existence, fate, moral responsibility, and existential meaning are surely part of the ultimate matters; so to abstract from these matters by pursuing a purely theoretical interest is, if not logically absurd, then existentially absurd. In philosophy one cannot leave oneself out and be objective in the way the sciences must leave out the subject and be objective.
Of course I am not a narrow existentialist who rejects technical philosophy.
What I am maintaining is that one ought not compartmentalize: one's technical work ought to subserve a higher end, the articulation and defense of a comprehensive view of things. As Wilfrid Sellars says, "It is . . . the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise." (SPR 3) "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (SPR 1) But I am saying more than this, and words like 'view' and 'worldview' don't quite convey it since philosophy as I 'view' it ought not be purely theoretical. Somehow, oner's theory and one's Existenz need to achieve unity.
I still haven't made my thesis all that clear, but it is perhaps clear enough.
One argument for my thesis is that specialization gets us nowhere. It is notorious that philosophers have not convinced one another and that progress in philosophy has not occurred. And the best and brightest have been at it for going on three thousand years. That progress will occur in future is therefore the shakiest of inductions. Given that shakiness, it is existentially if not logically absurd to lose oneself in, say, the technical labyrinth of the philosophy of language, as fascinating as it is. Who on his deathbed will care whether reference is routed through sense or is direct? The following may help clarify my meaning.
Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:
My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.
The suggestion is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and perhaps just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?
If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.
Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145)
As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?
American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system — particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.
Suppose you were a Christian living in an Iraqi village about to be conquered by ISIS, and you’ve already heard about your co-religionists murdered at the conquered village up the road. You have the choice between fleeing to a just arrived team of U.S. church pacifists trained in “interpersonal conflict transformation.” Or you could accept the protection of U.S. armed Kurdish or Iraqi armed forces, supported by U.S. air power. Which would you choose?
Radosh is rock-solid. A former lefty, he knows whereof he speaks. And of course leftists hate him mindlessly for his apostasy. Somebody ought to explore the connection between the attitudes of leftists and radical Islamists toward apostates.
In 1949, sociologist Jules Monnerot described communism as 20th century Islam. To which I add: radical Islam is the communism of the 21st century.
If Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri fame had been properly brought up to have self-control and to respect authority he might be alive today. Police have the authority to issue commands in certain circumstances as when people are violating laws by, say, walking in the street. Cops are often rude and arrogant. No doubt about it. But you still must obey their lawful commands even if rudely barked. Here is where self-control and respect for authority come in. If Brown had possessed self control, he would have kept a lid on his feelings and would have refrained from stupidly initiating an altercation with an armed officer of the law. Apart from questions of morality and legality, fighting with cops is almost always a highly imprudent thing to do. And if Brown had been properly brought up, he would have known that in a situation like this he had a duty to submit to the cop's legitimate authority. What's more, it was imprudence on stilts for Brown to act as he did right after stealing from a convenience store and roughing up the proprietor.
Similar lessons may be gleaned from the fateful encounter of Trayvon Martin with George Zimmerman. The case is worth revisiting.
One 'take-away' is the importance of self-control. If Martin had been taught, or rather had learned, to control himself he would most likely be alive today. But he didn't control himself. He blew his cool when questioned about his trespassing in a gated community on a rainy night, cutting across lawns, looking into people's houses. He punched a man in the face and broke his nose, then jumped on him, pinned him down, and told him that he was going to die that night. So, naturally, the man defended himself against the deadly attack with deadly force. What George Zimmerman did was both morally and legally permissible. If some strapping youth is pounding your head into the pavement, you are about to suffer "grave bodily harm" if not death. What we have here is clearly a case of self-defense.
Does race enter into this? In one way it does. Blacks as a group have a rather more emotional nature than whites as a group. (If you deny this, you have never lived in a black neighborhood or worked with blacks, as I have.) So, while self-control is important for all, the early inculcation of self-control is even more important for blacks. Otherwise, the case has nothing to do with race. It has to do with a man's defending himself against a thuggish attack.
Hard looks, hateful looks, suspicious looks — we all get them from time to time, but they are not justifications for launching a physical assault on the looker. The same goes for harsh words.
If you want to be successful you must learn to control yourself. You must learn to control your thoughts, your words, and your behavior. You must learn to keep a tight rein on your feelings. Before leaving your house, you must remind yourself that you are likely to meet offensive people. Rehearse your Stoic and other maxims so that you will be ready should the vexatious and worse heave into view.
Unfortunately, too many liberals in positions of authority have abdicated when it comes to moral education. For example, they refuse to enforce discipline in classrooms. They refuse to teach morality. They tolerate bad behavior. They abdicate their authority when they refuse to teach respect for authority. So liberals, as usual, are part of the problem.
But that is to put it too mildly. There is no decency on the Left, no wisdom, and, increasingly, no sanity. For example, the crazy comparison of Trayvon Martin with Emmett Till. But perhaps I should put the point disjunctively: you are either crazy if you make that comparison, or moral scum. You are moral scum if you wittingly make a statement that is highly inflammatory and yet absurdly false.
When it comes to sports I'm a participant, not a spectator; when it comes to politics, I'm a spectator, not a participant. I watch politics, not football; I run races, not for office.
I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Maria Reicher, ed., States of Affairs (Ontos Verlag, 2009). I didn't find it in the ASU catalog and so I headed over to Amazon.com where I found a used copy for the entirely reasonable price of $9,999.99 plus $3.99 shipping and handling. I kid you not. You might think they'd throw in free S & H on orders over $5,000.00.
Maybe it is like this. The whole world is Amazon's oyster, and in that wide world there are quite a few ontology freaks, your humble correspondent one of them, and probably a couple crazy enough to fork over $10 K for this collection of essays. So why not ask a ridiculous price? You just might get it.
Does anyone in Ontology Land have a copy of this collection that he or she is willing to part with?
I will put it to good use. I have been invited to contribute an essay to a volume commemorating the late David M. Armstrong. My essay is tentatively entitled "Facts: Realism, Anti-Realism, Semi-Realism." So I need to be en rapport with all the latest literature.
Update (9/3). My explanation three paragraphs supra is mistaken. See Mark B.'s comment for a much better one.
Christina Hoff Sommers exposes five leftist-feminist falsehoods. My favorite example is the following one which provides yet another example of the idiocy of Jimmy Carter, the Obama of the 1970s:
MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.
FACTS: This sensational claim is a favorite of politicians, celebrities and journalists. Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore turned it into a cause célèbre. Both conservatives and liberal reformers deploy it. Former President Jimmy Carter recently said that the sexual enslavement of girls in the U.S. today is worse than American slavery in the 19th century.
The source for the figure is a 2001 report on child sexual exploitation by University of Pennsylvania sociologists Richard Estes and Neil Alan Weiner. But their 100,000–300,000 estimate referred to children at risk for exploitation—not actual victims. When three reporters from the Village Voicequestioned Estes on the number of children who are abducted and pressed into sexual slavery each year, he replied, “We’re talking about a few hundred people.” And this number is likely to include a lot of boys: According to a 2008 census of underage prostitutes in New York City, nearly half turned out to be male. A few hundred children is still a few hundred too many, but they will not be helped by thousand-fold inflation of their numbers.
Here's a tip for you. When some activist or advocate makes a claim, be skeptical and run the numbers, especially when the advocate has a vested interest in promoting his cause.
Do you remember Mitch Snyder the advocate for the homeless who hanged himself in 1990? I heard him make a wild claim sometime in the '80s to the effect that the number of homeless in the U. S. was three million. At the time the population of the U.S. was around 220 million. So I rounded that up to 300 million and divided by three million. And then I knew that Snyder's claim was bogus, and probably fabricated by Snyder, as was later shown to be the case. It is simply not credible that one in 100 in the U. S. is a homeless person.
It is similarly incredible that one in 1000 girls in the U. S. is pressed into sexual slavery each year.
When Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that he made up his number, advocates for the homeless defended his tactic as "lying for justice." See here. A nice illustration of the leftist principle that the end justifies the means. Obama implemented the principle when he lied some 30 times about the Affordable Care Act . But let's not go over that again.
There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege. I don't believe I have discussed this topic before.
1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege. What is a privilege? This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is. Let's consider some definitions.
D1. A privilege is a special entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.
Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition. It is not a right one has just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen. It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc. Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked. By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government. They can't be revoked. Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government.
Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc. Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.
Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege. Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government? No. But there is black privilege by (D1). It is called affirmative action.
So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege! Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:
D2. A privilege is any unearned benefit or advantage that only some people have in virtue of their identity. It needn't be granted by any corporate entity, nor need it be conditional. Aspects of identity that can afford privilege in this sense include race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, wealth, ability, or citizenship status.
People who speak of white privilege probably have something like (D2) in mind. The idea is that there are certain unearned advantages that accrue to whites just in virtue of their race, advantages that do not accrue to members of other races.
One question arises right here. What justifies the broadening of the term 'privilege' to cover any unearned benefit? If the term is used strictly, there is no white privilege. To speak of white privlege one has to engage in a semantic stretch. What justifies this stretch? Is it a legitimate stretch or a example of linguistic distortion? And what is the agenda behind it?
One thing to note about (D2) is that it leads to a proliferation of privileges. There will be as many privileges as there are unearned benefits possessed by some but not all. For example, there will be the 'privilege' of being right-handed since this is a minor advantage — better to be right-handed than either left-handed or ambisinistrous — and it is unearned and not possessed by everyone. And the same goes for being ambidexterous. I lack the 'privilege' of ambidexterity, being right-handed only, and so I am disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous. But I am not as disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous as the ambisinistrous. They are the worst off when it comes to handedness. Should they receive something like reparations for nature's niggardliness?
Now clearly all of us enjoy all sorts of unearned benefits. Tall men, of whatever race, have an unearned advantage over short men, as long as they are not too tall. In the USA at least it is better to be 6'1" rather than 4'11". (D2) therefore implies that there is a tallness privilege in some cultures. Is this a problem? Does justice demand that heights be equalized? And who will appoint and equalize the Procrustean equalizers? Or are the equalizers exempt from equalization? If so, this would be an immunity, hence a 'privilege,' a leftist privilege.
Blacks born in the post-war USA have an unearned advantage over both whites and blacks born in some other parts of the world. Blacks born into two-parent homes in the USA have an unearned advantage over blacks born into single-parent homes in the USA. Blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over blacks born with birth defects. Many blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over some whites born with birth defects. And so on.
If there is an advantage to being white, is this an advantage enjoyed by all whites? And if it is not shared by all whites, why should this advantage be called white privilege? Do 'poor white trash' share in white privilege? Wouldn't it be better to be born into a solid, middle-class two-parent black or Hispanic family than to be born into a 'poor white trash' family? Do rednecks and Southerners generally share in white privilege? It didn't seem to help Paula Deen very much.
What is the relation between white privilege and majority privilege? I grant that, ceteris paribus, it is better to be white than black in the USA at the present time. But how much of this advantage is due to whites' being a majority? When Hispanics become a majority in California, say, will there be talk of Hispanic privilege? Should Hispanics then start feeling guilty about their unearned advantage?
Here is an important question. Am I not entitled to my unearned benefits despite the fact that I have done nothing to earn them? My being tall is not my own doing, and I don't do much of anything besides staying alive to keep myself tall. I don't work at it in the way I work at improving my mind and work at maintaining my physical and fiscal fitness.
Suppose you are a black male born in the post-war USA into a middle-class, two-parent, loving home. You have all sorts of unearned benefits. Do you feel guilty because you have unearned benefits that a lot of 'poor white trash' lack? Should you feel guilty? Change the example slightly: you were born in London and have the unearned benefit of a British accent. You come to the States and are hired by CNN or FOX News, beating out white competitors, in large part because of that beautiful and charming accent. Do you 'check' your privilege or feel guilty about it? Does it bother you that a Southern accent is a definite disadvantage?
So those are some questions that come to mind when I think about white privilege. I'll end with a bit of analysis of an interesting quotation (from second article below):
Those of us who are white and male in the U.S. were born with significantly more chips to play the poker game of life than were people of color or women. Although our white, male status is a biological reality, the unearned benefits that our race and gender identity provides us are a social construction, that is—they are special perks granted by a white patriarchal society.
The second sentence is gibberish. Males are on average taller than females. Being tall is an unearned benefit, but surely it is no social construction. The very notion of social construction is dubious by itself. What does the phrase mean? Care to define it? It smacks of the fallacy of hypostatization. There is this entity called 'society' that constructs things? I am not saying the phrase 'social construction' cannot be given a coherent meaning; I'm just saying that I would like to know what that meaning is. Define it or drop it.
Perk? Isn't that what the coffee does — or used to do back in the day? The word our 'professor' wants is 'perquisite.' As I suggested above, perquisites are privileges. So what the 'professor' is doing is conflating privileges with unearned benefits. That conflation needs to be either justified or dropped. We are told that these 'perks' are granted by a white patriarchal society? Smells like the fallacy of hypostatization again. Where can I find the group of people who collectvely decide to grant these special 'perks' to white people?
I could go on, but this is enough 'shovelling' for one day.
Summer once again subsides into the sweetness of September. This calls for a song, September in the Rain, not that there is much that could be called rain in these parts. But the Arizona monsoon looks to be over, the lambent light and delicious dryness have returned, and autumn's in the air. Life is good, for some of us leastways, and pro tempore.
