Maverick Philosopher – Page 513 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

The Stromboli Puzzle Revisited

Here is a little puzzle I call the Stromboli Puzzle. An earlier post on this topic was defective. So I return to the topic. The puzzle brings out some of the issues surrounding existence. Consider the following argument.

Stromboli exists.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
An island volcano exists.

This is a sound argument: the premises are true and the reasoning is correct. It looks to be an instance of Existential Generalization. How can it fail to be valid? But how can it be valid given the equivocation on 'exists'? 'Exists' in the conclusion is a second-level predicate while 'exists' in the initial premise is a first-level predicate. Although Equivocation is standardly classified as an informal fallacy, it induces a formal fallacy. An equivocation on a term in a syllogism induces the dreaded quaternio terminorum, which is a formal fallacy. Thus the above argument appears invalid because it falls afoul of the Four Term Fallacy.

Objection 1. "The argument is valid without the first premise, and as you yourself have pointed out, a valid argument cannot be made invalid by adding a premise. So the argument is valid. What's your problem?"

Reply 1. The argument without the first premise is not valid. For if the singular term in the argument has no existing referent, then the argument is a non sequitur. If 'Stromboli' has no referent at all, or has only a nonexisting Meinongian referent, then Existential Generalization could not be performed, given, as Quine says, that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."

Objection 2: "The first premise is redundant because we presuppose that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents."

Reply 2: Well, then, if that is what you presuppose, then you can state your presupposition by writing, 'Stromboli exists.' Either the argument without the first premise is an enthymeme or it is invalid. If it is an enthymeme, then we need the first premise to make it valid. If it is invalid, then it is invalid.

Therefore, we are stuck with the problem of explaining how the original argument is valid, which it surely is.

My answer is that the original argument is an enthymeme an unstated premise of which links the first- and second-level uses of 'exist(s)' and thus presupposes the admissibility of the first-level uses. Thus we get:

A first-level concept F exists (is instantiated) iff it is instantiated by an individual that exists in the first-level way.
Stromboli is an individual that exists in the first-level way.
Stromboli is an island volcano.
Ergo
The concept island volcano exists (is instantiated).
Ergo
And island volcano exists.

Now what does this rigmarole show? It shows that Frege and Russell were wrong. It shows that unless we admit as logically kosher first-level uses of 'exist(s)' and cognates, a simple and obviously valid argument like the the one with which we started cannot be made sense of.

'Exists(s)' is an admissible predicate of individuals, and existence belongs to individuals: it cannot be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, instantiation. This has important consequences for metaphysics.

For more on the topic of existence see my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis," in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, forthcoming.

A Reader’s Comments on the A. P. A. ‘Climate’ Report on The UC Boulder Philosophy Department

Philip Sheridan writes,

I read the 17 page American Philosophical Association site visit report on the University of Colorado, Boulder, philosophy department. As a consultant, I wrote many reports like this — you interview, obtain documentation and data, analyze the information, compare performance to best practices, and then finalize recommendations. Most of the time outside consultants are hired because there is a known problem; the consultant provides an 'objective' viewpoint as someone experienced in the subject area and, importantly, as someone with no personal stake in the outcome.

The troubling thing about the report is that it provides no detail, no who-where-what information that would document the basis for the conclusions. Ostensibly this lack of detail protects confidentiality, but the report was never intended to be made public. As a former consultant, I would say that the conclusions and recommendations are not supported by the content of the report. All of the allegations are vague and without specifics. No one writing such a report should want to provide salacious detail for no reason, but in fact the detail is extremely important. In a criminal trial, no accuser gets away with making vague allegations. Only the reference to 15 complaints filed with the ODH indicates that there may be specific actionable problems, but obviously the UC was already aware of those, so in fact the report contains nothing new that is specific enough to justify the recommendations. Vague comments like "the department has a reputation in the international philosophical community for being extremely unfriendly to women" are not really acceptable, as the authors appear to be merely repeating gossip obtained before their arrival in Boulder.

The 'best practices' reference is just silly. They are making all of this up as they go along, that's plain to see, and the UC philosophy department is the first department to be subjected to this inquisition, so there is no 'best practice' that even exists. The insistence that events must be "family friendly" appears to be based on some theory of academic work (or indeed, any adult work) that is not articulated but that is probably completely unfeasible. At a minimum it should be debated by all concerned, not just presented in passing as the thing that must now be done.

If a junior consultant gave me this report as a first draft, I would make these sorts of comments and would help them understand that that their report did not meet professional standards and could not be presented as is to senior management.

I conclude that the APA CSW should not be doing this sort of thing at all. Referring to the last sentence of my first paragraph above, the CSW ladies are not wholly disinterested; they are gender warriors. They are not objective as a consultant from outside philosophy and academia would be, nor are they subject area experts (they are philosophers!) and they have done a disservice to Mr. Forbes, the department, the University and philosophy in general. They should go back to teaching and writing and complaining on their blog; if this sort of thing is to be done, it should be done by professional, objective outside consultants.

Compare the above with this supine reaction to the Site Visit Report by two faculty members of the philosophy department.

The Prospects and Perils of Muslim-Catholic Dialogue

Here is a review of this new book by Robert Reilly. (HT: Monterey Tom) Excerpt:

Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture is simply the most famous of the many examples of Christian outreach in the midst of an era in which conflict and misunderstanding seem insoluble by being inevitable. As Mr. Reilly points out, the pope’s particular approach to credo ut intelligam was an example of charity, which makes the violent reaction of many Muslims to his remarks “all the more ironic.”

I would say instead that the violent reaction shows just what crazy fanatics Islamists are.

I explain this in detail in Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. My piece ends with a warning:

The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism held in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn't alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying 'infidels' — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear 'event' in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000. People who think this is 'inconceivable' or 'unimaginable' have lousy imaginations. Militant Muslims and their leftist enablers need to be opposed now, and vigorously, before it too late.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The 50th Anniversary of the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Appearance

It was 50 years ago tomorrow. Your humble correspondent was among the 73 million Americans who tuned in to see the Lads from Liverpool, the Four Moptops, the Fab Four, as they were variously known. Later, in '64 or '65 I saw them live at the Hollywood Bowl. What remains are all those great tunes, hundreds of them. So pour yourself a stiff one, and give a listen.

Thank You, Girl, 1963

In My Life, 1965

Something, 1969. Although not as prolific as Lennon and McCartney, George Harrison here proves he can write a song as good as anything they wrote. Frank Sinatra considered it the greatest love song ever written. A Sinatra version.

The Night Before, 1965

Tomorrow Never Knows, 1966. A long way from Perry Como.

Eleanor Rigby, 1966

I'm Looking Through You, 1965

When I'm 64, 1967. The boys must have thought that 64 is really old!

Penny Lane, 1967.

Rain, 1966.

Abbey Road Medley, 1969. This is how the boys' last album ends.

0:00 – You Never Give Me Your Money
4:03 – Sun King
6:29 – Mean Mr. Mustard
7:35 – Polythene Pam
8:48 – She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
10:47 – Golden Slumbers
12:19 – Carry That Weight
13:55 – The End

Still More on the Colorado Situation

Laughing Philosopher talks sense. I've corrected some typos, added a hyperlink, and intercalated some comments (in blue.) Excerpt:

I applaud the move to end sexual harassment seriously in the discipline. However, there are many ways in which the APA committee’s report seems extremely problematic. While I don’t know the nature of the alleged harassment or alleged inappropriate sexualization at Colorado, I find it very hard to believe that many of the report’s recommendations are necessary to prevent such behavior even if the report were factually accurate. Following those recommendations will, however, almost certainly damage the department and put it under the control of the administration in precisely the way Benjamin Ginsberg has warned us about in his must-read book, The Fall of the Faculty. In particular:

1. The report is overtly hostile to the dialectical/democractic model and demands that it be replaced with blatant dictatorship. The department is told to “[d]issolve all departmental listservs. Emails should be used for announcements only, as one-way, purely informational, communication. Any replies need to be made in person” (p.6). Since the department chair has now been ousted and replaced at the administration’s discretion for an indefinite period with no apparent opportunity for review at any point in the future (as urged by the report), this effectively cedes all departmental autonomy, in perpetuity, to the administration. There will be no clear avenues for discussion or dissent, and the restrictions on department members meeting outside of working hours helps to limit the ability of any faculty or students in the department to formulate dissenting views together: they may not meet to do so in the evenings or on weekends, and they may not do so via email. Moreover, the very act of reasoning or deliberating about policy is taken by the report as a sign of inappropriate resistance, according to the anti-philosophical views of the report (“Their faculty discussions… spend too much time articulating (or trying to articulate) the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior… they spend significant time debating footnotes and “what if” scenarios…” – p.7)

2. The report uses terms like ‘family friendly’ in bizarre ways to restrict productive and innocuous department activities whose elimination would significantly harm collegiality, departmental morale and the learning experience of graduate students. In a ‘Special Note’ on p.12, the report discusses and prohibits the department’s planned spring retreat. This retreat was to involve a combination of philosophical talks and ‘unscheduled time’ in a scenic mountain area over a weekend. It is difficult for me at least to imagine an event I would more like to bring my children to — what family wouldn’t love some unscheduled time outdoors in a beautiful natural area? But bizarrely enough, the very fact that this event was to take place on the weekend makes it “an examplar for a family-unfriendly event,” according to the report. The justification for this absurd claim is that “Under no circumstances should this department (or any other) be organizing the social calendars of its members.”

3. The report claims that no philosophy department should, under any circumstances, ask its members to attend events outside of the hours of 9-5, Monday to Friday. On p.12 of the report, we are told that “If there are going to be social events, then they need to be managed such that members of the department can opt out easily and without any penalty. (Please note that best practices for family-friendly speaker events include taking the speaker out to lunch instead of dinner so that participants may have their evenings free to attend to other obligations)”. In particular, we are told that “all events, including retreats, need to be held during business hours (9-5) and on campus or near campus in public venues.” Please try to imagine what departmental life would be like under such a rule.

4. The report categorically prohibits all critical discussion of feminist philosophy by all members of the department, even in a private, off-campus conversation between two graduate or undergraduate students. ”Realize that there is plurality in the discipline. If some department members have a problem with people doing non-‐feminist philosophy or doing feminist philosophy (or being engaged in any other sort of intellectual or other type of pursuit), they should gain more appreciation of and tolerance for plurality in the discipline. Even if they are unable to reach a level of appreciation for other approaches to the discipline, it is totally unacceptable for them to denigrate these approaches in front of faculty, graduate or undergraduate students, in formal or informal settings on or off campus.”

BV: This (the quoted statement) is unbelievably obtuse and an excellent example of political correctness gone wild. First of all, critical discussion is not the same as denigration even if the critical discussion is trenchant and leads to rejection of the approach criticized. To take but one example, academic philosophers rightly criticize Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Much of that criticism is harsh but on target. It is not the same as denigration or dismissal. Of course, some do denigrate and dismiss it. Well, it is their considered opinion that it ought to be denigrated and dismissed. Surely they have a right to their view, as offensive as it is to Objectivists.

Second, while there is a plurality of approaches and views in philosophy, that fact does not insulate any view from examination and criticism. Toleration is not to be confused with approval. I can tolerate your view while rejecting it.

Third, a plurality of views is not to be confused with a plurality of equally tenable views.

Fourth, toleration is not to be confused with appreciation. I tolerate the views of eliminative materialists but I don't appreciate them. Note also the confusion in the quoted statement of appreciation of plurality with appreciation of the different views constituting the plurality. One can appreciate that there is plurality in the discipline both in the sense of acknowledging it, and in the sense of thinking it a good thing; but this is obviously distinct from approving of each of the views that constitute the plurality.

Finally, what the authors say is "totally unacceptable" must be accepted. Some views deserve denigration, as should be obvious. Suppose someone were to maintain that no woman should be allowed to study philosophy beyond the undergraduate level. That is a view that deserves denigration. So denigrate it, and give your reasons.

5. The report relies in part on clearly biased survey findings. On p.15, for instance, we find that subjects were asked whether they agree or disagree with the following statement: “I am confident that if I were to raise a complaint about sexual harassment or discrimination, the judicial process at my university would be fair.” 38% of respondents felt confident about this, which seems very high for any department! Most members of most departments would have no good grounds for confidence either way. Why doesn’t the survey ask instead whether subjects are confident that the process would be unfair? More tellingly, why doesn’t it simply ask whether subjects agree or disagree with the statement, “If I were to raise a complaint about sexual harassment or discrimination, the judicial process would be fair,” and allow the responses ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’ and ‘Not sure’? Particularly among philosophers, ‘confident’ entails a very high epistemic standard. While it isn’t clear whether the committee intended to skew the results by asking such questions or whether they simply didn’t take care to prepare a fair survey, the survey is misleading at best and politically motivated at worst.

6. The report mentions, and then completely ignores, very serious graduate student concerns about damage to the department’s reputation; and in the process, it reduces the likelihood of future reporting of sexual harassment. “They [some graduate students] are worried that they will be tainted by the national reputation of the department as being hostile to women.” (pp.3-4). As a result of this, it was essential for the report to take steps to ensure that word about the department’s problems be carefully managed while steps are taken to eliminate the problem. At the very least, the report needed to ensure that the release of the report not be made into a worldwide media event. However, the report contains nothing of the sort and, as a result, the worst fears of the graduate students have now been realized (I, for one, had never heard a single negative thing about this department). This merits serious attention: if the price of reporting sexual harrassment is the destruction of one’s department’s reputation worldwide and the blackening of one’s own name by association with it, how many departmental members (student or faculty) would ever take the suicidal step of reporting it? By mindlessly neglecting these concerns, the committee’s report has surely had a dampening effect on reports of sexual harassment in departments around the world.

7. The report’s standards of ‘family friendliness’, while tangentially connected with sexual harassment, show a complete lack of understanding of philosophical work and culture. On p.6 of the report, the committee’s view on best practices is expanded upon: we are told that “[e]vents should be held during normal business hours (9-5) and should be such that you would feel comfortable with your children or parents being present.” Indeed, as we are told on p.12, children should be positively welcome at departmental events. I’m not concerned here with the disruptions that would be caused by young children at colloquia, but rather with how this might affect the content of philosophical talks. I, for one, would not feel comfortable discussing abortion, circumcision, sexual harassment and rape, cruelty to animals, pornography, torture, or the existence of God in front of someone else’s children. Should it follow from this that I should not present a colloquium paper on such a topic? What if my philosophical work deals entirely with such issues: should I never present my philosophical work in an open forum?

While we should all applaud genuine, careful and viable efforts to eliminate sexual harassment, my view (unless persuaded otherwise) is that we should certainly not endorse the actions of this committee. Instead, I think, we should quickly work out ways to prevent this from ever happening again. But I anticipate disagreement and would love to hear and engage opposing reasons.

Sex, War, and Moral Rigorism: The Aporetics of Moral Evaluation

Fr. Robert Barron here fruitfully compares the Catholic Church's rigoristic teaching on matters sexual, with its prohibitions of masturbation, artificial contraception, and extramarital sex, with the rigorism of the Church's teaching with respect to just war. An excellent article.

Although Fr. Barron doesn't say it explicitly, he implies that the two topics are on a par. Given that "the Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives," one who accepts just war rigorism ought also to accept sexual rigorism. Or at least that is what I read him as saying.

I have no in-principle objection to the sexual teaching, but I waffle when it comes to the rigorous demands of just war theory. I confess to being 'at sea' on this topic.

On the one hand, I am quite sensitive to the moral force of 'The killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances' which is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. Having pored over many a page of Kant, I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens. The Catholic doctrine implies that if Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Indeed, if the killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."

This extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.

But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know it is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism. (Not every naturalist is an eliminativist loon.)

If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that one absolutely must resist the evildoer, and absolutely must not turn the other cheek to a Hitler?

An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her rigorism remains tenable.

To sum up these ruminations in a nice, neat antilogism:

1. Some acts, such as the intentional killing of noncombatants, are intrinsically wrong.
2. If an act is intrinsically wrong, then no possible circumstance in which it occurs or consequence of its being performed can substract one iota from its moral wrongness.
3. No act is such that its moral evaluation can be conducted without any consideration of any possible circumstance in which it occurs or possible consequence of its being performed.

The limbs of the antilogism are collectively inconsistent but individually extremely plausible.

Guilt and Identity

Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then? Not very well. I was different all right, but not numerically.

One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. (Roughly, a person at a time is a bundle of mental data; a person over time is a bundle of these bundles.) But even if such a theory were otherwise in the clear it is difficult to square such a theory with what appears to be a non-negotiable datum: I and no one else did such-and-such 30, 40, 50 years ago; I am the source of that misdeed; I could have, and should have, done otherwise. We convict ourselves in memory knowing that the one who remembers is strictly the same as the one who did the deed.

The mystery of the self!

Andrew Cuomo and ‘Liberal’ Extremism

A recurrent theme of mine is that contemporary liberals are extremists. Note the qualifier 'contemporary.' I am not talking about 1960 JFK liberals, let alone the classical liberals of the 19th century. Contemporary liberals are, in my recent coinage, LINOs, liberals in name only. What in fact they are are hard leftists.

So I suppose I should thank Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York and son of Mario Cuomo for saying what he and his ilk think when their normal modus operandi is to hide what they really think and engage in stealth tactics, Obama being a prime practitioner thereof. Cuomo has spilled the beans and shown his true colors if you will permit me a mixed metaphor. Here is what he said:

Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Does this deserve a civil response? No, but it does call for a response, of the sort illustrated here.

The Philosophy Situation at University of Colorado, Boulder

I have no opinion yet on the goings-on at the UC Boulder philosophy department. I just hope it is not another instance of the US becoming the SU. If you are interested, click away.

Here, here, here, and here. And two of the articles infra.

Update (2/7)

A conservative take: Something Fishy in Colorado.

More Proof of Liberal Scumbaggery

I say you are moral scum if you willfully slander your opponents having made no attempt to understand their point of view.

This is from a Guardian piece on George Lakoff:

To liberals, a lot of conservative thinking seems like a failure of logic: why would a conservative be against equal rights for women and yet despise the poor, when to liberate women into the world of work would create more wealth, meaning less poverty? And yet we instinctively understand those as features of the conservative worldview, and rightly so.

This is beneath response.

Here are some critical comments of mine from September 2004 on Lakoff's ideas.

Nice but Dumb

I can't believe that this old 16 September 2004 post from my first weblog languished there so long before being brought over, today, to my newer digs.

……………

My cat Caissa – named after the goddess of Chess – was feeling under the weather recently, so I took her to the vet for some blood work. The twenty-something receptionist at Caring Critters was nice enough but she stumbled over my name. But I was in a good mood, so I didn’t mind it too much. She didn’t even try to pronounce it which I suppose is better than mangling it. I don’t cotton to being called Valenzuela, Valencia, Vermicelli, Varicella, Valparaiso or Vladivostok. Don’t make me into an Hispanic. In these parts, if your are not Hispanic you are an ‘Anglo.’ That doesn’t sit well with me either.

Perhaps I should be happy that I do not rejoice under the name of Znosko-Borovsky or Bonch-Osmolovsky. Nor do I stagger under such burdens as Witkiewicz, Brzozowski, or Rynasiewicz. The latter is the name of a philosopher I knew when he taught at Case Western Reserve University. Alvin Plantinga once mentioned to me, sometime in the late '80s, that he had been interviewed at Notre Dame, except that ‘rhinoceros’ was all Plantinga could remember of his name.

Actually, none of these names is all that difficult if you sound them out. But apparently no one is taught phonics anymore. Damn those liberals! They’ve never met a standard they didn’t want to erode. I am grateful to my long-dead mother for sending me to Catholic schools where I actually learned something. I learned things that no one seems to know any more, for example, grammar, Latin, geography, mathematics. The next time you are in a bar, ask the twenty-something ‘tender whether that Sam Adams you just ordered is a 12 oz or a pint. Now observe the blank expression on her face: she has no idea what a pint is, or that a pint is 16 oz, or that there are four quarts in a gallon, or 5,280 feet in a mile, or 39.37 inches in a meter, or that light travels at 186, 282 miles/sec, or that a light-year is a measure of distance, not of time.

Even Joan Baez got this last one wrong in her otherwise excellent song, Diamonds and Rust, a tribute to her quondam lover, Bob Dylan. The irony is that Joanie’s pappy was a somewhat distinguished professor of physics! In a high school physics class we watched a movie in which he gives a physics lecture.

I was up in 'Flag' (Flagstaff) a few years back to climb Mt. Humphreys, the highest point in Arizona at 12,643 ft. elevation, (an easy class 1 walk-up except for the thin air) and to take a gander at the moon through the Lowell Observatory telescope. While standing in line for my peek, I overheard a woman say something to her husband that betrayed her misconception that the moon glows by its own light. She was astonished to learn from her husband that moonlight is reflected sunlight. I was astonished at her astonishment. One wonders how she would account for the phases of the moon. What ‘epicycles’ she would have to add to her ‘theory’!

What Card does the Card-Carrying Liberal Carry?

You guessed it. Accepted everywhere. Don't leave home without it.

At MSNBC, race-baiting is a team effort.

Every Proposition is Affirmative

Nicholas Rescher cites this example from Buridan. The proposition is false, but not self-refuting. If every proposition is affirmative, then of course *Every proposition is affirmative* is affirmative. The self-reference seems innocuous, a case of self-instantiation. But *Every proposition is affirmative* has as a logical consequence *No proposition is negative.* This follows by Obversion, assuming that a proposition is negative if and only if it is not affirmative.

Paradoxically, however, the negative proposition, unlike its obverse, is self-refuting. For if no proposition is negative then *No proposition is negative* is not negative. So if it is, it isn't. Plainly it is. Ergo, it isn't.

Rescher leaves the matter here, and I'm not sure I have anything useful to add.

It is strange, though, that here we have two logically equivalent propositions one of which is self-refuting and the other of which is not. The second is necessarily false. If true, then false; if false, then false; ergo, necessarily false. But then the first must also be necessarily false. After all, they are logically equivalent: each entails the other across all logically possible worlds.

What is curious, though, is that the ground of the logical necessity seems different in the two cases. In the second case, the necessity is grounded in logical self-contradiction. In the first case, there does not appear to be any self-contradiction.

It is impossible that every proposition be affirmative. And it is impossible that no proposition be negative. But whereas the impossibility of the second is the impossibility of self-referential inconsistency, the impossibility of the first is not. (That is the 'of' of apposition.)

Can I make an aporetic polyad out of this? Why not?

1. Logically equivalent logically impossible propositions have the same ground of their logical impossibility.

2. The ground of the logical impossibility of *Every proposition is affirmative* is not in self-reference.

3. The ground of the logical impossibility of *No proposition is negative* is in self-reference.

The limbs of this antilogism are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.

REFERENCES

Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes: Their Roots, Range, and Resolution, Open Court, 2001, pp. 21-22.

G. E. Hughes, John Buridan on Self-Reference, Cambidge UP, 1982, p. 34. Cited by Rescher.

The Afterlife of Habit upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit. The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past. The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice. "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

February 3rd, 1959

The day the music died. Three days before, Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota heard Holly and friends play the Duluth Armoury, died, and was reborn as Bob Dylan. Or so the story goes.