Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Suggestibility and the Language Lemming

    The language lemming hears a word or phrase, thinks it 'cool,' and just has to use it whether or not it makes sense. 'Demo' below is being used as an abbreviation of 'demolish.' Now there is something dubious about the excessive use of abbreviations these days, but let that pass.  The point I want to make is that, below, the correct word is 'replace' not 'demolish.'  Of course, you, or rather a highly suggestible 'liberal' language lemming, could demolish a carpet that has been removed, although  it is not clear how one would go about doing that.  The point is that a replacement is not a demolition.

    Does language matter? Well, does it matter if we refer to illegal aliens as 'migrants'? If not, then it won't matter that 'migrant' is now being replaced by 'newcomer.'

     

    Demo the carpet

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Suggestibility and the Language Lemming”

  • The Ambiguity of Vows

    Vows make for stability of life and put a brake on the mercurial and fickle in us. They must be taken seriously or not taken at all. But rigid commitments immaturely or prematurely entered into  are sometimes better broken than kept. Sometimes, not often. Rigidity and flexibility, both physical and psychological, are values, competing values. Each deserves its due. The topic of competing values is rich and deep and insufficiently explored. More grist for the mill. 

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “The Ambiguity of Vows”

  • A ‘Deplorable’ Straight from Central Casting . . .

    . . . 'calls out' the lying leftist scumbag mayor of Athens, Georgia. James Lee takes on Kelly Gertz.  Was this staged? No, but it certainly looks that way. One of Hillary's 'deplorables' with a redneck hat, poor English, and missing a tooth rightly attacks a mendacious SOB whose first name is 'Kelly.' 

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “A ‘Deplorable’ Straight from Central Casting . . .”

  • Getting Tough with Our Political Enemies

    If we get tough with them politically, then we may be able to avoid having to get tough with them extra-politically. Let's hope and pray that we only have to prepare to enter the extra-political and not actually go there. For it won't be pretty.

    But I see no good reason to be particularly sanguine. The Muse of Blog must be with me this morning: 'sanguine' is exactly the right word. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Remembering Bob Koepp

    Robert V. Koepp, long-time commenter at this weblog, died on Leap Day, 2012.  Here is what I had to say about him in 2012.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Remembering Bob Koepp”

  • Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Nagel, and David Benatar

    What do they have in common?

    Top o' the Stack.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Alan Dershowitz, Thomas Nagel, and David Benatar”

  • The Never-Trump Mentality

    Top o' the Stack

    Bill Vallicella

    26 responses to “The Never-Trump Mentality”

  • Pasta Puttanesca

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Fragility and Mortality

    A piece of glass is fragile in that it is disposed to shatter if suitably struck. But there is no inevitability in any fragile object's ever breaking. There is no necessity that the disposition be realized. A chocolate bar is disposed to melt in certain circumstances.  It has this disposition at every time at which it exists. But it might never be realized: the bar might cease to exist, not by melting, but by being eaten.

    Mortality is different. To be mortal is not to be dead, or moribund, but to be liable to die, apt to die, disposed to die. In his last book, Mortality, Christopher Hitchens, dying of cancer, says that we are all dying. That is not true. What is true is that we are all disposed to die. Every animal, even in the full bloom of heath and fitness, bears within itself this disposition. Its realization, however, is inevitable.

    These points are relevant to the evaluation of the Epicurean argument which some dismiss as a sophism: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. So death, where is thy sting? The argument seems to ignore the fact that the disposition to die is when I am and at every moment I am, and that therein lies the 'sting.'

    We should come back to this.

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “Fragility and Mortality”

  • Closer to the Grave, Farther from Birth

    Top o' the Stack.

    Wherein I ruminate upon the curious modality, necessitas per accidens.

    Bill Vallicella

    4 responses to “Closer to the Grave, Farther from Birth”

  • Civilization Versus the New Nihilists

     Victor Davis Hanson

    Put the question to your friends and acquaintances: Which side are you on? If they are not on the side of civilization, cut them off.  Make them pay a price for their willful self-enstupidation. Why should they get the benefit of your friendship? If enough of us ostracize enough of them, this will have an effect.  (The usual ceteris paribus qualifications apply.)

    Here's my take from 2017:

    The Nihilism of the Left

    Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:

    Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.

    The Muslim as the new proletarian.

    The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)

    Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.

    It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.

    ………………..

    And here is another by my man Hanson, the writing machine, on the insanity of leftists.  It's on the russia, Russia, RUSSIA! hoax. To hell with these TDS-ers and their self-induced lunacy.  They don't seem to grasp that they have a moral obligation to exercise due diligence in the formation of their beliefs. That is an obligation that they regularly flout. 

    There is just no moral or intellectual equivalence between Right and Left. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Say ‘When’

    Scene from "Tombstone." 

    B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out

    John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved?  This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.

    Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)

    Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In

    Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In

    Laura Nyro, And When I Die

    Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman

    Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece

    The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

    Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down

    More:

    Jackie de Shannon, When You Walk in the Room

    Warren Zevon, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

    Good theme music for a post on the difference between dying and falling asleep.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Lev Shestov on the Fall of Man”

  • America First!

    I explain what it means over at Substack. 

    I refute the fragile Kristol and articulate what the inarticulate Trump cannot. But to this man of action goes the credit of having put paid to Kristol and others of his pseudo-con ilk as well as to the Bush and Clinton dynasties. Jeb! is toast and Chelsea has been strangled in her political crib. Remember Jeb!? The mendacious Hillary has been put to pasture where she chews her cud of resentment.

    Kristol America First

    Bill Vallicella

  • Occasionalism, Omnipotence, and Matthew 23:9

     "Secondary causes are mere occasional causes, occasions of the exercise of the causality of the only true productive cause, God."

    And call no man your father upon earth, for One is your Father, who is in Heaven. (Matthew, 23:9)

    Posted by: Simon Neale | Sunday, February 18, 2024 at 03:21 PM

    Before we can evaluate Mr. Neale's suggestion we need to take a step back. Since occasionalism and divine omnipotence are related topics, consider four combinatorially possible views of the latter.  What is it for God to be all-powerful?

    A) God can do anything at all, and anything at all that gets done is done by God. God is all-powerful (omnipotent) in that (i) God has power over everything, including the laws of logic, and (ii) God alone exercises all the power that is exercised.   God is then the only genuine efficient cause, and all so-called 'secondary causes' are not causes stricto sensu, but mere occasions for the exercise of the efficient causality of the one and only 'primary cause.' Accordingly, 'secondary' in 'secondary cause' is an alienans adjective: it 'alienates' or 'others' the sense of  'cause' to such an extent that a secondary cause is not a cause. (Cognate examples: a decoy duck is not a duck; artificial leather is not leather, etc. Leather does not come into kinds, real and artificial, etc. More on this topic in my Adjectives category.)) 

    The above understanding of divine omnipotence is occasionalist and makes God out to be absolutely sovereign: he is lord of all orders, the physical, the spiritual, the logical, the moral, and even the modal.  A less extreme version of occasionalism results from the deletion of clause (i). Thus:

    B) God cannot do everything, but everything that is doable and gets does is done by God. Thus God cannot do what is logically impossible or command or do what is morally wrong. Nor does his will determine what is merely possible and what is necessary. All the power that is exercisable, which is to say permitted by logic, morality, and modality, is exercised by God alone. This too is occasionalism since it denies that so-called 'secondary causes' are genuine causes.

    C) God cannot do everything, and not every exercise of causal power is an exercise of divine power: there are genuine natural or secondary causes. On this non-occasionalist view both God and secondary causes are genuine causes.

    D) God can do everything but not everything that gets done is done by God. I don't believe anyone has held this view; I include it only for combinatorial completeness. Having brought it up, I now set it aside.

    As for the New Testament verse, I read it as logically consistent with (C) and thus as not logically requiring (entailing) the truth of either (A) or (B). Since the verse does not entail the truth of occasionalism, it is consistent with (A) and with (B).  

    Why not say the following? My biological father is a real cause (or rather part-cause, along with my mother and various other causal factors) of my coming to exist.  If I have a Father in heaven, he too is a real cause, of anything's having come to exist and of anything's remaining in existence. The 'horizontal' causality of natural causes presupposes the 'vertical' causality of the divine cause in that without the causa prima, there would be no causae secundae. 

    The difference between my two fathers is that the first is natural whereas the second is supernatural. The first is a spiritual animal, whereas the second is a pure spirit. But both are real. The word 'father' is not used univocally in application to both, nor equivocally.  It is used analogically, but literally.  Thus 'father' is being used literally of God and not metaphorically as when I say  that the subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.  That use of 'mother' is metaphorical or figurative.

    Does this 'hold water'? I fear that my glib explanation hides aporiai.  I am not in the clear when it comes to the analogia entis, and the formidable Erich Pryzwara, brilliant and erudite as he is, is too obscure to be of much help.

    Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis

    The book has been recently translated.  

    Unfortunately, I find myself in agreement with Josef Pieper as to the 'unreadibility' of the book: "The unfinished, and hardly readable book, Analogia Entis (1932), which he himself declares is the quintessence of his view, in fact gives no idea of the wealth of concrete material he spread out before us in those days."

    Of course, the book is not strictly unreadable: I am reading it and getting something out of it.   But it has many of the faults of Continental writing and old-time scholastic writing. 

    To make a really good philosopher you need to start with someone possessing a love of truth, spiritual depth, metaphysical aptitude, and historical erudition. Then some nuts-and-bolts analyst needs to beat on him with the logic stick until he can express himself clearly and precisely.  Such a thrashing would have done gentlemen such as E. Gilson and J. Maritain a world of good. Gallic writing in philosophy tends toward the flabby and the florid, and the same goes for many Europeans to the east of France.

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “Occasionalism, Omnipotence, and Matthew 23:9”

Latest Comments

  1. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  2. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  3. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

  5. https://barsoom.substack.com/p/peace-has-been-murdered-and-dialogue?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841240&post_id=173321322&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1dw7zg&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

  10. Hi Bill, So you don’t think we should be discussing logical bagatelles in a time like this? I can see…

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