Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues
The Highly Educated, Badly Paid, Often Abused Adjunct Professors
The Lawlessness of Obama
Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus
"We consider nothing philosophical to be foreign to us." This is the motto Hector-Neri Castañeda chose to place on the masthead of the philosophical journal he founded in 1967, Noûs. When Hector died too young a death at age 66 in the fall of '91, the editorship passed to others who removed the Latin phrase. There are people who find classical allusions pretentious. I understand their sentiment while not sharing it.
Perhaps I should import Hector's motto into my own masthead. For it certainly expresses my attitude and would be a nice, if inadequate, way of honoring the man. He was a man of tremendous philosophical energy and also very generous with comments and professional assistance. He was also unpretentious. His humble origins served him well in this regard. He interacted with undergraduates with the same intensity and animation as with senior colleagues. I was privileged to know this unforgettable character. What I missed in him, though, was spiritual depth. The religion of his Guatemalan upbringing didn't rub off on him. Like so many analytic philosophers he saw philosophy as a merely theoretical enterprise. A noble enterprise, that, but not enough for some of us.
How many read Hector's work these days? I don't know. But I do know that there is plenty there to feast on. I recently re-read his "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) an article rich in insight and required reading for anyone interested in the logic and ontology of fictional discourse.
Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.
Addendum
Horace Jeffery Hodges writes,
I appreciated your blog post on December 28 for your remark about the origin of the the Latin motto:Hector's motto is modelled on Terentius: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. "I am a human being; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." One also sees the thought expressed in this form: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. Hector's motto is based on this variant.Dostoevsky offers a variant (a conflation of Terentius's motto and the motto that Hector knew):
"Satan sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto." (I am Satan, and nothing human is alien to me.) – Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
I borrowed Dostoesky's variant for the motto to my novella:
It's visible on the book cover (just click on expanded view or the click to look inside). The original motto is thus a rather malleable expression, useful in various contexts.By the way, is "Fiction and Reality: Their Fundamental Connections" (Poetics 8, 1979, 31-62) a work on literary fiction, as in novels, novellas, short stories, and the like? If so, I might benefit from reading it.
Yes, Jeff, it is about literary fiction. It is not literary criticism, of course, but an attempt to explain how ficta can be integrated with the rest of what we take to be real — and unreal. It is heavy going, but you will get something out of it if you are patient and resolute. And I wouldn't be averse to fielding a few very pithy and focused questions about it.
And where in the Brothers Karamazov?
Cruciphobia
Given that the ubiquity of crosses all across this great land has not yet established Christianity as the state religion, why, as it declines in influence, do the cruciphobic shysters of the ACLU and their ilk agitate still against these harmless and mostly merely historical remnants of a great religion?
This question occurred to me after reading Michelle Malkin's Cruciphobia at Mt. Soledad.
Generation Screwed and Demographic Screwed
Obama the Lawless
Besides being incompetent and mendacious, Obama is brazenly lawless, as Mona Charen documents.
The Mad Monarchist
London Karl sent me to The Mad Monarchist, not that he agrees with it. Apparently, there is no position on any topic that someone won't defend. But we've known that for a long time. Descartes said something to that effect.
Is anarchism the opposite of monarchism?
Anarchism is to political philosophy as eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind. That is to say, it is an untenable stance, teetering on the brink of absurdity, but worth studying as a foil against which to develop something saner. To understand in depth any position on a spectrum of positions you must study the whole spectrum.
Study everything. For almost every position on any topic contains some insight or other, even if it be only negative. The monarchist, for example, sees clearly what is wrong with pure democracy. If there are any positions wholly without value, then they are still worth studying with the philosophical equivalent of the pathologist's eye and the philosophical equivalent of the pathologist's interest.
Call for Vapors: Dead Smokers’ Society to Meet in January in Scottsdale
Mike V. writes,
I am hosting the first meeting of The Dead Smokers Society on Monday, January 13th, from 10 a.m. to noon at the stoplight at Scottsdale Community College. I have invited all of my friends to smoke and vape with me on the street on the first day of school. This could be REALLY fun. I am inviting you if you can come.
The only rule is: Membership in the DSS requires use of cigarettes, cigars, pipes, or vapor devices.
I can only applaud this bit of commonsensical, liberty-affirming activism and I hope to be able to attend despite my quietism. I shall sport an Arturo Fuente 'Curly Head,' a cheap smoke, but a good smoke. Here is some background information and argument and polemic from an old post of mine dated 26 June 2012:
Tobacco Insanity in Maricopa County and the Need for Smoke-Ins
Peter and Mike teach in the Maricopa County Community College system. One teaches at Scottsdale CC, the other at Glendale CC. Over Sunday breakfast they reported that, starting 1 July (if I got the story straight), no smoking of tobacco products will be allowed anywhere on any CC campus in Maricopa County, Arizona. And that includes parking lots and closed cars in parking lots.
Now I would like to believe that our liberal brethren possess a modicum of rationality. But with every passing day I am further disembarrassed of this conceit of mine. The evidence is mounting that liberals really are as stupid and lacking in common sense as many on the Right say they are.
What does common sense suggest in a case like this? Well, that no smoking be allowed in classrooms, libraries, laboratories, restrooms, administrative offices, hallways, etc., and perhaps not even in individual faculty offices during consulation hours or if the smoke will make its way into occuppied public passageways.
This is a common sense position easily buttressed with various aesthetic, safety, and health-related arguments. The underlying principle is that we ought to be considerate of our fellow mortals and their physical and psychological well-being. It is debatable just how harmful are the effects of sidestream smoke. What is not debatable is that many are offended by it. So out of consideration for them, it is reasonable to ban smoking in the places I listed above. But to ban it everywhere on campus is extreme and irrational. For no one but Tom is affected by Tom's smoking in his car and while striding across the wind-blown campus.
You say you caught a whiff of his cigaratte as he passed by? Well, he heard you use the 'F' word while blasting some rap 'music' from your boom box. If Tom is involved in air pollution, then you are involved in cultural and noise pollution. You tolerate him and he'll tolerate you.
You say you smell the residual ciggy smoke on Peter's vest? That's too bad. He has to put up with your overpowering perfume/cologne or look at your tackle-box face and tattoo-defaced skin. Or maybe you are a dumb no-nothing punk wearing a T-shirt depicting Che Guevara and you think that's cool. We who are not dumb no-nothing punks have to put up with that affront to our sensibilities.
But there really is little point in being reasonable with people as unreasonable as liberty-bashing tobacco-wackos. So I think Peter and Mike ought to think about organizing a smoke-in. In the 'sixties we had love-ins and sit-ins, and they proved efficacious. Why not smoke-ins to protest blatantly extreme and irrational policies?
There must be plenty of faculty and staff and students on these campuses — and maybe even a few not-yet-brain-dead liberals — who would participate. Hell, I'll even drive all the way from my hideout in the Superstitions to take part. We'll gather in some well-ventilated place way out in the open to manifest our solidarity, enjoy the noble weed, and reason – if such a thing is possible — with the Pee-Cee boneheads who oppose us.
By the way, that is a joint old Ben Franklin is smoking in the graphic. In this post I take no position on the marijuana question.
Companion post: Is Smoking Irrational? Other such posts are collected in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Of Meaning and Meat
No matter how you squeeze and beat, you won't get meaning from a hunk of meat.
……………….
Addendum (12/27). It occurred to me that the above aphorism can be read in two ways. I intend that it be read in the first way!
Peter Geach 1916-2013
Here is a Commonweal obituary.
The obit contains a couple of minor inaccuracies.
1. "Under his father's tutelage, one of Geach's earliest philosophical influences was the metaphysician J.M.E. McTaggart, who infamously argues in his 1908 book The Unreality of Time for, well, the unreality of time." This title is not a book but an article that appeared in the journal Mind (17.68: 457–474), in 1908.
McTaggart presents a full dress version of the famous argument in his 1927 magnum opus, The Nature of Existence, in Chapter XXXIII, located in volume II.
McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time is one of the great arguments in the history of metaphysics, an argument as important and influential as the Eleatic Zeno's arguments against motion, St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God and F. H. Bradley's argument against relations in his 1893 Appearance and Reality, Book I, Chapter III. All four arguments have the interesting property of being rejected as unsound by almost all philosophers, philosophers who nonetheless differ wildly among themselves as to where the arguments go wrong. Careful study of these arguments is an excellent introduction to the problems of metaphysics. In particular, the analytic philosophy of time in the 20th century would not be unfairly described as a very long and very detailed series of footnotes to McTaggart's great argument.
2. "Along with Aquinas and McTaggart (whose system he presents in his 1982 book Truth, Love, and Immortality), Geach's main philosophical heroes were Aristotle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege." My copy of Truth, Love and Immortality shows the University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles) as the publisher and the publication year as 1979. The frontispiece features an unsourced quotation from McTaggart:
The longer I live, the more I am convinced of the reality of three things — truth, love and immortality.
Merry Christmas, Loyal Readers!
Ed Farrell sent me the above. Check out his fine photography here.
The Pope is Just Wrong about Economics
Pope Francis' Erroneous Economic Pontifications
Once Again, Pope Francis. Excerpt:
It is interesting that the Pope refers to compassion in the way he does, given that the contradiction that is the “welfare state” has not only ruined the most needy and has led to growing exclusion, but has degraded the notion of charity which refers to the voluntary surrender of personal resources and not to a third party forcibly taking something from someone else’s labor.
Christmas Eve at the Oldies
Merry Christmas everybody. Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.
Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie
Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick. A rarely heard alternate version.
Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas
Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas
Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells
Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate. Don't miss this one. Great video.
Bob Dylan, Christmas Bells
Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except
Tom Waits, Silent Night. Give it a chance.
A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.
Camille Paglia: It’s a Man’s World
Camille Paglia does not merit the plenary MavPhil endorsement, but C. P. is a good partial antidote to P. C. Here (HT: Kevin Wong) she talks sense (emphasis added):
It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.
[. . .]
Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.
Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!
The first article below explains why the lovely Camille does not merit the coveted plenary MavPhil endorsement.
Kenny, Geach, and the Perils of Reading Frege Back Into Aquinas
London Ed has informed me of the passing of Peter Geach. May he find the Unchanging Light that he sought through his long and productive life of truth-seeking in these shadowlands. One honors a thinker best by thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically. Here is one of my attempts. Others referenced below.
…………
I have been studying Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002). I cannot report that I find it particularly illuminating. I am troubled by the reading back of Fregean doctrines into Aquinas, in particular in the appendix, "Frege and Aquinas on Existence and Number." (pp. 195-204) Since Kenny borrows heavily from Peter Geach, I will explain one of my misgivings in connection with a passage from Geach's important article, "Form and Existence" in God and the Soul. Geach writes,
Frege, like Aquinas, held that there was a fundamental distinction in rebus answering to the logical distinction between subject and predicate — the distinction between Gegenstand (object) and Begriff (concept). [. . .] And for Frege the Begriff, and it alone, admits of repetition and manyness; an object cannot be repeated — kommt nie wiederholdt vor. (45-46)
So far, so good. Geach continues:
Understood in this way, the distinction between individual and form is absolutely sharp and rigid; what can be sensibly said of one becomes nonsense if we try to say it of the other. [. . .] Just because of this sharp distinction, we must reject the Platonic doctrine that what a predicate stands for is is some single entity over against its many instances, hen epi pollon. On the contrary: the common nature that the predicate 'man' (say) stands for can be indifferently one or many, and neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself. This point is made very clearly by Aquinas in De Ente et Essentia. Again we find Frege echoing Aquinas; Frege counts oneness or manyness (as the case may be) among the properties (Eigenschaften) of a concept, which means that it cannot at the same time be one of the marks or notes (Merkmalen) of that concept. (46)
I smell deep confusion here. But precisely because the confusion runs deep I will have a hard time explaining clearly wherein the confusion consists. I will begin by making a list of what Geach gets right.
1. Objects and individuals are unrepeatable.
2. Concepts and forms are repeatable.
3. Setting aside the special question of subsistent forms, no individual is a form, and no object is a concept.
4. Frege distinguishes between the marks of a concept and the properties of a concept. The concept man, for example, has the concept animal as one of its marks. But animal is not a property of man, and this for the simple reason that no concept is an animal. Man has the property of being instantiated. This property, however, is not a mark of man since it is not included within the latter's conceptual content: one cannot by sheer analysis of the concept man determine whether or not there are any men. So there is a sense in which "neither oneness nor manyness is a mark or note of human nature itself." This is true if taken in the following sense: neither being instantiated singly nor being instantiated multiply is a mark of the concept man.
But how do these points, taken singly or together, support Geach's rejection of "the Platonic doctrine that what the predicate stands for is some single entity over against its many instances"? They don't!
It seems obvious to me that Geach is confusing oneness/manyness as the relational property of single/multiple instantiation with oneness/manyness as the monadic property of being one or many. It is one thing to ask whether a concept is singly or multiply instantiated. It is quite another to ask whether the concept itself is one or many. It is also important to realize that a Fregean first-level concept, when instantiated, does not enter into the structure of the individuals that instantiate it. Aquinas is a constituent ontologist, but Frege is not. This difference is deep and causes a world of trouble for those who attempt to understand Aquinas in Fregean terms. For Frege, concepts are functions, and no function enters into the structure of its argument. The propositional function x is a man is not a constituent of Socrates. What's more, the value of the function for Socrates as argument is not a state of affairs with Socrates and the function as constituents. The value of the function for Socrates as argument is True; for Stromboli as argument, False. And now you know why philosophers speak of truth-values. It's mathematical jargon via Frege the mathematician.
The Fregean concept man is one, not many. It is one concept, not many concepts. Nor is it neither one nor many. It can have one instance, or many instances, or no instance. The Thomistic form man, however, is, considered in itself, neither one nor many. It is one in the intellect but (possibly) many in things. In itself, however, it is neither. And so it is true to say that the form is not "some single entity over against its many instances." It is not a single entity because, considered in itself, it is neither single nor multiple.
But this doesn't follow from point (3) above. And therein consists Geach's mistake. One cannot validly move from the "sharp distinction" between individuals/objects and forms/concepts to the conclusion that what a predicate stands for is not a single entity. Geach makes this mistake because of the confusion exposed two paragraphs supra. The mutual exclusion of objects and concepts does not entail that concepts cannot be single entities.
There is another huge problem with reading Frege back into Aquinas, and that concerns modes of existence (esse). A form in the intellect exists in a different way than it does in things. But if Frege is right about existence, there cannot be modes of existence. For if existence is instantiation, then there cannot be modes of existence for the simple reason that there cannot be any modes of instantiation.
I'll say more about this blunder in another post. It rests in turn on a failure to appreciate the radically different styles of ontology practiced by Aquinas and Frege. In my jargon, Aquinas is a constituent ontologist while Frege is a nonconstituent ontologist. In the jargon of Gustav Bergmann, Aquinas is a compex ontologist while Frege is a function ontologist.