Long-time reader Tony Hanson perceptively notes a contradiction in the Obama administration's attitude toward their poor minority clients:
As I read about the complexity and nightmares (or as Obama prefers, glitches) of the ACA [Affordable Care Act] marketplace roll out today, I am reminded of your posts on Voter ID. Apparently the condescension of Obama and the Dems is very selective. They think requiring poor minorities to have the wherewithal to accomplish the relatively simple task of securing an ID card is just too difficult a task for them and therefore discriminatory; at the same time the success of the new healthcare law requires them to navigate (using a computer and internet connection mostly) a rather complex system of web sites, information and rules.
And while the Feds will spend millions upon millions to provide them help, it apparently cannot provide a tiny fraction of this amount to help them get IDs (if in fact they really need this help) and thereby secure the integrity of the voting system and democracy itself.
'Selective condescension' is an apt phrase. Blacks and other minorities are thought to be too bereft of basic life skills to secure government-issued photo ID, which is free in many states, but are nonetheless expected to be computer-savvy enough to sign up for ObamaCare. But if this contradiction were pointed out to Obama or the liberals that support him, it wouldn't faze them in the least. For they care about logical consistency as little as they care about truth. For a leftist it's all about power and nothing else. They have no bourgeois scruples about truth or the rule of law. The end justifies the means.
The plain truth of the matter is that Dems oppose photo ID because they want to make polling places safe for voter fraud. This is a harsh allegation but one that is perfectly justified given the utter worthlessness of the 'arguments' brought forth against photo ID. But I have said enough about this depressing topic in ealier posts, some of which are listed below.
If one has demonstrated that one's opponent's arguments are worthless, it is legitimate to psychologize him. For motives abound where reasons are nonexistent.
You've heard of the Soup Nazi. I'm the Language Nazi.
1. Toe the line, not: tow the line.
2. Tough row to hoe, not: tough road to hoe.
3. Rack one's brains, not: wrack one's brains.
4. Wrack and ruin, not: rack and ruin.
5. Flout the law, not: flaunt the law.
6. Give advice, not: give advise. "He advised her to take his advice cum grano salis."
7. Cum grano salis, not: cum grano Sallust. (This one's a joke; I just made it up.)
8. One and the same; not: one in the same.
9. Same thing, not: same difference. One of those moronic expressions that is so bad it's good. Tom: "That's a firefly!" Dick: "Its a glowbug!" Jethro: "Same difference!" This is not to suggest that there aren't correct uses of 'same difference.'
10. Regardless, not: irregardless. Say 'irregardless' and you probably chew tobacco.
11. I couldn't care less, not: I could care less. Almost as moronic as (9).
Yahoos seem naturally to gravitate toward double negative constructions which they use as intensifiers. For example, 'I can't get no satisfaction' to mean can't get any. 'No' is an intensifier not a negator. "Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free." (Kris Kristofferson) This is probably what is going on in (9) and (10).
In each case, though, the speaker conveys his meaning. So does it matter whether one speaks and writes correctly? Does it matter whether one walks down the street with one's pants half-way down one's butt?
As
far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is
unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims
get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do
here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And
presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s.
You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being
sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the
greater glory of Allah the Merciful.
That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous
delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary
sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only
byMuslims but also by
many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic
terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life.
They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated
conception:
. . .
the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a
direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit,
not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its
interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be
something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny
after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present
attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian
Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in
original)
A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next. This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.
The epitaph
on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be,
but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of
worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer
must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?
At
funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with
the Lord. In manycases,
this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make
be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the
bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this
world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that
death is annihilation. Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit?
In any case, it is the puerile conception
with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A
mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.)
But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a
thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a
conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I
am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.
Our opponents want to saddle us with
puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic
candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in,
then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with
a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic
conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore
this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God
Concept.
Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit
Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife
except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't
get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the
harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to
conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?
Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents
were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an
improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be
adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no
pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary
deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the
adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is
limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns you would not
get through to them. For what they need is not words and arguments; they need
to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is
distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to
shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.
In this life, we
adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led
astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things,
for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we
ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos
and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious
terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we
know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can
make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot
be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective. These, I
claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral
discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a
matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not
rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally
acceptable.)
Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able,
employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that
transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who
are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no
sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.)
What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how
exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own
effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with
it.
It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death,
and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will
have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my
selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a
mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest
that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the
self survives.
And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the
'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then
the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it
can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The
existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of
eternal life.
But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0 and is something like the visio beata of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'? Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise. But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view. You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude. You want, finally, to be happy.
Would the happy vision be boring? Well, when you were in love, was it boring? When your love was requited, was it boring? Was it not bliss? Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless. We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite. Why then should participation in it be boring? Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos. Were you bored in those moments? Quite the opposite. You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.
What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below. God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls. So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same. If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."
There are two ways to become richer. One is to provide more goods and services; that's economic growth. The other is to snatch someone else's wealth or income; that's the spoils society. In a spoils society, economic success increasingly depends on who wins countless distributional contests: not who creates wealth but who controls it. But this can be contentious. Winners celebrate; losers fume.
Of course, the two systems have long coexisted — and always will. All modern societies chase growth; all redistribute income and wealth. Some shuffling is visible and popular. Until now, that's been the case with America's largest transfer, which is from workers to retirees through Social Security and Medicare. In 2012, this exceeded $1 trillion. Still, for the nation, the relevant question is whether productive behavior (generating economic growth) is losing ground to predatory behavior (grabbing existing wealth and income). There are good reasons to think it is.
I am still digesting the discussions in Prague. In this post I present part of the rambling and over-long paper I delivered, beefed up somewhat, in an attempt to formulate more clearly my main points.
The orthodox view of the Incarnation is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word or Logos, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the New Testament, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized or individualized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and an animal body. And it does this without prejudice to its divine nature. But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition) b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures, as orthodoxy maintains.) c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature. d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d). One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity. If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not a supposit.
Given the substance-supposit distinction, we can secure the coherence of both the Incarnation and Trinity doctrines. Christ is one person (one supposit) in two natures while God is one nature in three persons (three supposits).
In correspondence, Dennis Monokroussos writes, "(c) is unacceptable to the orthodox Christian. There are two natures in the Word, but not two primary substances." I admit that I should have said something in defence of (c). But I think it is clear that on orthodoxy the Son's assumption of human nature is the assumption of a particular(ized) human nature with all that that entails, namely, a particular human soul and a particular human body with the very materia signata that a human body must have to be a concrete physical entity. Thus, in the Incarnation the Son becomes one with a particular human concrete primary substance. It is not the case that the Son assumes human nature in the abstract, whether human nature as a universal or human nature as particularized but taken in abstraction from matter and existence. The Son of God become man, a man, a living, breathing, suffering man mit Haut und Haar, skin and hair. So, contra Monkroussos, there are two distinct primary substances, the Son, and the man Jesus. There are two individual natures and two individual primary substances. But there is, on orthodoxy, for soteriological reasons that needn't detain us, only one person, only one supposit of a rational nature.
The distinction between substance and supposit can now be explained as follows. Since there are primary substances that are their own supposits and primary substances that are not, to be a primary substance and to be a (metaphysical as opposed to logical) supposit are not the same. The man Jesus is not a primary substance that is its own supposit: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity. (I borrow the phrase 'alien supposit' from Marilyn McCord Adams.)
The problem that needs solving is this. If there are two individualized natures, one divine, the other human, and both including rationality, then there are two persons (assuming the Boethian definition of person.) But orthodoxy requires that there be only one person. The contradiction is avoided in the time-honored manner by making a distinction, in this case the distinction between substance and supposit. The distinction allows that an individualized rational nature needn't be its own personal supposit.
The main point of my paper is that the substance-supposit distinction is ad hoc because crafted for the precise purpose of removing theological contradictions. What makes it ad hoc is that there are no non-theological examples of the distinction.
You might grant me that the distinction is ad hoc, but then ask: what is wrong with that? What is wrong with it is that it does not advance the project of understanding how the doctrines in question (Trinity and Incarnation) are rationally acceptable. If the theological doctrines are rendered intelligible by a distinction crafted for that very purpose, then we are turning in a very tight circle: the doctrines in question are intelligible because the substance-supposit distinction is valid, and the distinction is valid because the doctrines are intelligible. In other words, the doctrines and the distinction stand and fall together. Hence the distinction, which has no application apart from the theological doctrines, does nothing to show how the doctrines are possible or intelligible to our finite, discursive reason.
If my problem is to understand how it is possible that two individualized rational natures be one person, you are not helping me if you make a distinction the validity of which presupposes the possibility in question.
"Look, the Incarnation as orthodoxy understands it is actual; therefore it is possible: esse ad posse valet illatio."
To which I respond: the precise question is whether the doctrine can satisfy a necessary condition of rational acceptability, namely, freedom from contradiction. For if it is not free of contradiction, then it cannot be actual. If such freedom is purchased in the coin of a distinction that is as questionable as the doctrine it is meant to validate, then no progress is made.
Nothing I have said entails that the Incarnation is not actual. For our inablity to understand how it is possible does not entail that it is not possible. (Compare: our inability decisively to refute Zeno and demonstrate how motion is possible is consistent with motion's being actual.) One can make a mysterian move here: the Incarnation (and the Trinity) are actual, but our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from ever understanding how they are possible. What is unintelligible to us, might be intelligible to angelic intellects or to God.
Compare the mysterianism of Colin McGinn. He maintains that consciousness is wholly natural, a brain-function, but that our cognitive architecture is such as to prevent us from every understanding how it could be a brain function. That naturalism is true, he takes 'on faith,' relying (apparently) on the magisterium, the teaching authority of Science, while insisting (rightly in my opinion) that it is utterly unintelligible to us how meat could give rise to consciousness. How could meat mean? Gushing over the complexity of brain meat cuts no ice, to mix some metaphors.
On the other hand, if we cannot understand how X is possible, is that not some sort of reason for suspecting that it is not possible?
I'm glad I lived, but I'm glad it's over. "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo) Once is enough.
I wish I'd never been born. Once is too much.
This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is, of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:
There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is — to die soon."
I love this life and wish it didn't have to end. Once is not enough.
My view is the first. Suppose a representative of Governance appears to you at life's end. He says he has the power to grant you another go-round on the wheel of becoming: if you accept his offer you will repeat your life with every detail the same. Every detail! Including the detail of accepting the offer of Noch Einmal! (Think about what that entails.) I would say, "Hell no!," not again, not even once let alone endlessly. Up or out! Either up to a better state, or annihilation.
This life is preliminary and probationary; surely no end in itself. And if not preliminary and probationary, then meaningless. In this life were are in statu viae.
If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater. But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship.
Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.' Thus they typically say to the Christian,"You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.
A consistent atheism may prove to be a difficult row to hoe. The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally. He must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment. Nice work if you can get it.
Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols? Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative? I don't know. I suspect the atheist will fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or something else obviously unworthy of worship.
Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur. In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' we read:
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.
I had the pleasure of meeting London Ed, not in London, but in Prague, in person, a few days ago. Ed, a.k.a. 'Ockham,' and I have been arguing over existence for years. So far he has said nothing to budge me from my position. Perhaps some day he will. The following entry, from the old Powerblogs site, whose archive is no more, was originally posted 25 May 2008. Here it is again slightly redacted.
…………….
I am racking my brains over the question why commenter 'Ockham' cannot appreciate that standard quantificational accounts of existence presuppose rather than account for singular existence. It seems so obvious to me! Since I want to put off as long as possible the evil day when I will have to call him existence-blind, I will do my level best to try to understand what he might mean.
Consider the following renditions of a general and a singular existence statement respectively, where 'E' is the 'existential' or, not to beg any questions, the particular quantifier:
1. Cats exist =df (Ex)(x is a cat)
2. Max (the cat) exists =df (Ex)(x = Max).
Objectually as opposed to substitutionally interpreted, what the right-hand sides of (1) and (2) say in plain English is that something is a cat and that something is (identical to) Max, respectively. Let D be the domain of quantification. Now the right-hand side (RHS) of (1) is true iff at least one member of D is a cat. And the RHS of (2) is true iff exactly one member of D = Max. Now is it not perfectly obvious that the members of D must exist if (1) and (2) are to be true? To me that is obvious since if the members of D were Meinongian nonexistent items, then (1) and (2) would be false. (Bear in mind that there is no logical bar to quantifying over Meinongian objects, whatever metaphysical bar there might be. Meinongians, and there are quite a few of them, do it all the time with gusto.)
Therefore, 'Something is a cat' is a truth-preserving translation of 'Cats exist' only if 'Something is a cat' is elliptical for 'Something that exists is a cat.' And similarly for 'Something is Max.' But here is where 'Ockham' balks. He sees no difference between 'something' and 'something that exists' where I do see a difference.
I am sorely tempted to call anyone who cannot understand this difference 'existence-blind' and cast him into the outer darkness, that place of fletus et stridor dentium, along with qualia-deniers, eliminative materialists, deniers of modal distinctions, and the rest of the terminally benighted. But I will resist this temptation for the moment.
And were I to label 'Ockham' existence-blind he might return the 'compliment' by saying that I am hallucinating, or suffering from double-vision. "You've drunk so much Thomist Kool-Aid that you see a distinction where there isn't one!" But then we get a stand-off in which we sling epithets at each other. Not good for those of us who would like to believe in the power and universality of reason. It should be possible for one of us to convince the other, or failing that, to prove that the issue is rationally undecidable.
The issue that divides us may be put as follows. (Of course, it may be that we have yet to locate the exact bone of contention, and in our dance around each other we have succeeded only in 'dislocating' it.)
BV: Because the items in the domain of quantification exist, there has to be more to existence than can be captured by the so-called 'existential' quantifier. Existence is not a merely logical topic. Pace Quine, it is not the case that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." Existence is a 'thick' topic: there is room for a metaphysics of existence. One can legitimately ask: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? and one can expect something better than the blatantly circular, 'To exist is to be identical to something.' To beat on this drum one more time, this is a circular explanation because D is a domain all of whose members exist. One moves in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one maintains that to exist is to be identical to something that exists. Note that I wrote circular explanation, not circular definition. Note also that I am assuming that there is such a thing as philosophical explanation, which is not obvious, and is denied by some.
O: Pace BV, the items in the domain of quantification admit of no existence/nonexistence contrast. Therefore, 'Something is a cat' is indistinguishable from 'Something that exists is a cat.' There is no difference at all between 'something' and 'something that exists,' and 'something' is all we need. Now 'something' is capturable without remainder using the resources of standard first-order predicate logic with identity. 'Exist(s)' drops out completely. There is no (singular) existence and there are no (singular) existents. There are just items, and one cannot distinguish an item from its existence.
Now if that is what O means, then I understand him, but only on the assumption that for individuals
3. Existence = itemhood.
For if to exist = to be an item, if existence reduces to itemhood, then there cannot be an existence/nonexistence contrast at the level of items. It is a logical truth that every item is an item, and therefore an item that is not an item would be a contradiction: 'x is an item' has no significant denial. Therefore, on the assumption that existence = itemhood, there is no difference between 'Some item is a cat' and 'Some item that exists is a cat.' And if there is no such difference, then existence is fully capturable by the quantifier apparatus.
But now there is a steep price to pay. For now we are quantifying over items and not over existents, and sentences come out true that ought not come out true. 'Dragons exist,' for example, which is false, becomes 'Some item is a dragon' which is true. To block this result, O would have to recur to a first-level understanding of existence as contrasting with nonexistence. He would have to say that every item exists, that there are no nonexisting items. But then he can no longer maintain that 'something' and 'something that exists' are indistinguishable.
In defiance of Ed's teacher, C. J. F. Williams, I deny that the philosophy of existence must give way to the philosophy of someness. (Cf. the latter's What is Existence? Oxford, 1981, p. 215) The metaphysics of existence cannot be supplanted by the logic of 'exist(s).' Existence is not a merely logical topic.
Here is an obituary of Williams written by Richard Swinburne.
Is Thomism the 'default position' among scholastics? I suggested as much and bolstered my assertion by adverting to the fact that Aquinas is sometimes referred to as doctor communis, Common Doctor. It was then claimed by someone, one of the Czech scholastics, I think, that this appellation was made up by Thomists to refer to and promote their man and is thus not neutral.
Edward Feser, Man is Wolff to Man. I was going to write this post, but Ed beat me to it. Ed beats down the superannuated Wolff for boarding the bandwagon of benighted bashers of Nagel. These lefties just can't stand Nagel even though he is a naturalist, an atheist, and a liberal. Why? Because he is not an extremist like they are. Because he could conceivably be interpreted by someone as giving aid and comfort to the enemy: the theists. For not toeing the party line. For thinking for himself. For being the Real Thing and not a leftist ideologue. It is sad to see professional philosophy ideologized like this.
Kirsten Powers, A Global Slaughter of Christians. The 'religion of peace' is at it again. But the PC-whipped churches stay silent.
By the way, I admire the hell out of Kirsten Powers, even though she's a Dem (why Lord, why?): she has beauty, brains, and (the female equivalent of) balls. And she puts up goodnaturedly with the sometimes obnoxious Bill O'Reilly. But I admire the hell out of him as well. That leftists despise a moderate such as him shows what contemptible extremists they are.
Peter Lupu wanted to see some pictures with me in them, so here we go: hiding one's vanity is perhaps a form thereof. But first a shot of Ed Buckner and his charming wife, Fiona. It was good to meet him in the flesh after many years of correspondence and weblog interaction. He has appeared in these pages under such pseudonyms as 'William of Woking,' 'ockham,' 'ocham,' and a few others.
