Maverick Philosopher – Page 564 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Thomas Nagel, Heretic

Andrew Ferguson writes on the the explosion of hostility toward Thomas Nagel after the publication of his 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos. Here is my overview of the book. More detailed posts on the same book are collected under the Nagel rubric.

For a non-philosopher, Ferguson's treatment is accurate. Here are a couple of interesting excerpts in which he relates the thoughts of Daniel Dennett:

Daniel Dennett took a different view. While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

What amazes me is that people like Dennett fail to appreciate the utter absurdity of what they are maintaining. He obviously believes that civilization and civil order both exist and are worth preserving. This is why he thinks the sober materialist truth ought not be broadcast to hoi polloi. And yet the preservation of civilization and its order require the widespread acceptance of such illusory notions as that of moral responsibility and freedom of the will. But if these notions are illusory, then so are Dennett's value judgment that civilization is worth preserving and his factual judgment that civilization exists.

It is absurd (self-contradictory) to maintain both that civilization is valuable and that every value-judgment is illusory.

It is also absurd to urge that the truth ought to be withheld from the ignorant masses. There is no room for 'ought' in Dennett's eliminativist scheme. Nor is there any room for rational persuasion. Rational persuasion requires that there be reasons, and that people are sensitive to them. But in Dennett's world reasons must be as ultimately illusory as consciousness and free will and all the rest of Wilfrid Sellars' Manifest Image.

It is absurd to attempt to persuade rationally if reasons are illusory.

It is also absurd to put forth 'truths' on a scheme that allows no place for truth.

When all of the following are consigned to the junk heap, then the very eliminativist project consigns itself to the junk heap: consciousness, intentionality, purposiveness, qualia, truth, meaning, , moral responsibility, personhood, free will, normativity in all its varieties . . . .

It's nonsense and the various emperors of this Nonsense are naked. And yet Dennett and Co. can't see it:

“I am just appalled to see how, in spite of what I think is the progress we’ve made in the last 25 years, there’s this sort of retrograde gang,” he said, dropping his hands on the table. “They’re going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness. It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worth anything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.”

There was an air of amused exasperation. “Will you name names?” one of the participants prodded, joking.

“No names!” Dennett said.

The philosopher Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist’s Guide, leaned forward, unamused.

“And then there’s some work that is neither cute nor clever,” he said. “And it’s by Tom Nagel.”

There it was! Tom Nagel, whose Mind and Cosmos was already causing a derangement among philosophers in England and America.

Dennett sighed at the mention of the name, more in sorrow than in anger. His disgust seemed to drain from him, replaced by resignation. He looked at the table.

“Yes,” said Dennett, “there is that.”

Around the table, with the PowerPoint humming, they all seemed to heave a sad sigh—a deep, workshop sigh.

Tom, oh Tom . . . How did we lose Tom . . .

Thomas Nagel may be the most famous philosopher in the United States—a bit like being the best power forward in the Lullaby League, but still. His paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” was recognized as a classic when it was published in 1974. Today it is a staple of undergraduate philosophy classes. His books range with a light touch over ethics and politics and the philosophy of mind. His papers are admired not only for their philosophical provocations but also for their rare (among modern philosophers) simplicity and stylistic clarity, bordering sometimes on literary grace.

Bipolar Bears

These dual-residence antipodeans are an exceedingly rare subspecies of ursus maritimus. While they can be quite tame under medication, off their meds they go to extremes.

What It’s All About

I knew a guy who maintained that getting married and having kids was "what it's all about." I incline to the view that figuring out what it's all about is what it's all about. And depending on how seriously one takes that task, one might decide that having children is contraindicated. When Prince Siddartha got word that his wife had bore him a son, he name him 'Rahula,' meaning fetter. Or so the story goes.

Anecdotage

The last stop for the old raconteur.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

This, Dylan's second album, and one of my favorites, was released in May of 1963 by Columbia Records. Here are my favorites from the album.

Blowin' in the Wind, with its understated topicality, enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook. London Ed uploaded this Alanis Morissette version which is one of the better covers. Thanks, Ed!

Girl from the North Country Ah! it's even better than I remember it as being.

Understated topicality also characterizes A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, lending it a timeless quality absent in a blatant 'finger-pointing' song such as Masters of War. The Baez version is probably the best of the covers.

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right in the outstanding PP & M version. Another permanent addition to musical Americana. Said to be inspired by Suze Rotolo, the girl on the album cover.

Bob Dylan's Dream in the PP & M rendition.

Oxford Town. About James Meredith's battle for admission to the University of Mississippi.

In her memoir, A Frewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008, p. 277-8), Suze Rotolo says this about her mother Mary Rotolo:

I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob's album. I was astounded.

True, the times they were troubled. Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent. Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events. Bob Dylan was labeled a "protest singer." But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man's losing a security clearance because I am on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless. And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general.

Capital Punishment: From One Extreme to Another

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Seven Saudi men convicted of theft, looting and armed robbery were executed on Wednesday, according to the country's official news agency, more than a week after their families and a rights group appealed to the king for clemency.

The executions took place in Abha, a city in the southern region of Asir, the Saudi Press Agency said. A resident who witnessed the execution said the seven were shot dead by a firing squad, a first in the kingdom, which traditionally has beheaded convicts sentenced to death.

[. . .]

The original sentences called for death by firing squad and crucifixion.

That's the one extreme, justice Sharia-style. Here is the other, justice liberal-style, if you want to call it 'justice':

Amnesty International called the executions an "act of sheer brutality."

"We are outraged by the execution of seven men in Saudi Arabia this morning. We oppose the death penalty in all circumstances, but this case has been particularly shocking," said Philip Luther, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director. (emphasis added)

I say that what we have here are equal but opposite forms of moral insanity. That Sharia is morally insane needs no argument. But anyone who opposes the death penalty in all circumstances is equally morally obtuse and has no conception of justice at all. I argue this in detail in my Crime and Punishment category and I won't repeat myself here. In any case, argument with the morally obtuse is pointless since their lack of sound moral sense prevents them from accepting the premises from which alone one can fruitfully argue.

Arguing with the morally obtuse about moral matters is like arguing with the empirically uninformed about empirical matters

An Analysis of the Concept of Forgiveness

In my last post on this topic I advanced a double-barreled thesis to the effect that (i) unconditional forgiveness is in most cases morally objectionable, and (ii) in most cases conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. But now we need to back up and focus on the very concept of forgiveness since deciding whether (i) and (ii) are correct depends on what exactly we take forgiveness to be. So here is my preliminary stab at an analysis. After this task is completed, it may be necessary to back up once more and ask how I arrived at my analysis. Ain't philosophy fun?

1. Forgiveness has a triadic structure: to forgive is for someone to forgive someone for something. X forgives y for z, where x and y are persons (usually but not necessarily human) and z is typically an action or an action-omission. We typically forgive deeds and misdeeds, but perhaps states can be forgiven, for example, the state of being insufferably arrogant. An interesting side-question is whether x and y could be the same person. Is it possible to forgive oneself for something? I mention this question only to set it aside.

2. Only those we perceive to be guilty can be forgiven. Necessarily, if x forgives y for z, then x perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, y to be guilty of doing or having done z, or guilty of failing or having failed to do z. The necessity of this necessary truth is grounded in the very concept of forgiveness.

3. It follows from (2) that only what one rightly or wrongly takes to be a moral agent can be forgiven or not forgiven. For anything one takes to be morally guilty one must take to be a moral agent. I can neither forgive nor not forgive my cat for sampling my lasagne. Not being a moral agent, my cat cannot incur guilt.

4. It also follows from (2) that what I forgive a person for must be a wrongful act or act-omission. Tom, unlike my cat, is a moral agent; but it is not possible to forgive Tom for feeding his kids.

5. Forgiving works a salutary change in the forgiver: it alters his mental attitude toward the one forgiven. True forgiveness is not merely verbal but involves a genuine change of heart/mind (a metanoia if you will) that is good for the forgiver.

6. Forgiving cannot remove the guilt of the one forgiven if he is indeed guilty. Suppose you steal my money. You don't admit guilt or make restitution. But I forgive you anyway. Clearly, my forgiving you does not remove your moral guilt. You remain objectively guilty of theft. The demands of justice have not been satisfied.

7. Forgiving cannot retroactively make a person innocent of a crime he has committed. Suppose again that you steal my money. You admit guilt and you make restitution. My forgiving you does not and cannot change the fact that you wrongfully took my money. Forgiveness does not retroactively confer innocence. It follows that you remain guilty of having committed the crime even if you do admit guilt and satisfy the objectve demands of justice by making restitution, etc.

Assuming that the above analysis is correct, albeit not complete, does it allow for the possibility of unconditional forgiveness? It does. Suppose again that you steal my money, but don't admit guilt let alone make restitution. If I forgive you nonetheless, then I do so unconditionally, as opposed to on condition that you admit guilt, make restitution, etc.

Note that unconditional forgiveness is not an inter-personal transaction between the forgiver and the person forgiven, but something that transpires intrapsychically in the forgiver. This is because unconditional forgiveness doesn't require the one forgiven to acknowledge anything or even to be aware that he is the recipient of forgiveness. One can unconditionally forgive dead persons and persons with whom one has no contact. Since unconditional forgiveness is merely intra-personal as opposed to inter-personal, one may question whether it is forgiveness in the strict sense at all. Accordingly, one might add to the list of the concept's features:

8. Necessarily, if x forgives y, then y perceives himself as having done something wrong and admits his wrongdoing to x.

Now I don't think that features 1-7 are controversial, but #8 is. For it rules out unconditional forgiveness. The underlying issue is whether forgiveness is an inter-personal transaction or merely an attitude change within the mind/heart of the forgiver. If forgiveness is inter-personal, the one forgiven must accept forgiveness. But he can do that only if he acknowledges guilt.

But if unconditional forgiveness is possible, and not ruled out by the very concept of forgiveness, it doesn't follow that it is morally acceptable. I say it is not. To forgive unconditionally is to refuse to take a stand against it. But I will leave the elaboration of this point for later.

The other main question is whether conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness. I say it is.

One might think that there is nothing left to forgive after the offender has admitted guilt, made reparations, etc. But there is something left to forgive, namely, his having committed the offense in the first place.

A second consideration. If unconditional forgiveness is possible, then what makes forgiveness forgiveness has nothing to do with the the one forgiven: it does not require his admission of guilt, his doing penance, or even his being guilty. If I forgive a person, I must take him to be guilty, but he needn't be in fact. Unconditional forgiveness is merely an alteration of the forgiver's mental state. Now if forgiveness is what it is whether or not there is any non-relational change in the one forgiven, then it doesn't matter whether or not the conditions are satisfied. So conditional forgiveness will be just as much forgiveness as unconditional forgiveness is.

So for these two reasons conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.

A Prudent Assumption

It is prudent to assume that what can be taken the wrong way will be.

Popes and Dopes

I was planning on writing something along these lines, but James Taranto has done the job and done it well.

Atheist Malcolm Pollack gets it right too and refers us to a fine piece by Pat Buchanan.

And then there is this by Michael Brendan Dougherty on the ascendancy of Jorge Bergoglio:

But the other way to look at the dawn of this papacy is that it is one more in the pile of recent Catholic novelties and mediocrities. He is the first Latin American pope, the first Jesuit to be pope, and the first to take the name Francis. And so he falls in line with the larger era of the church in the past 50 years which has been defined by ill-considered experimentation: a “pastoral” ecumenical council at Vatican II, a new synthetic vernacular liturgy, the hasty revision of the rules for almost all religious orders within the church, the dramatic gestures and “saint factory” of Pope John Paul II’s papacy, along with the surprise resignation of Benedict XVI. In this vision, Benedict’s papacy, which focused on “continuity,” seems like the exception to an epoch of stunning and unsettling change, which—as we know—usually heralds collapse.

"Ill-considered experimentation" is right. I would go further and call it profoundly stupid. People who are drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent. Conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary. For a conservative, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of keeping things as they are, a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional formulations and usages, beliefs and practices. Now the world outside the Church is rife with change, not all of it bad, of course, but much of it unsettling. The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal.

So you drive people away from the Church by instituting 'reforms' that accommodate the Church to the crap culture outside it. This is a large topic and a fit one for a large-scale rant, but it is time to punch the clock. I will just mention three stupidities: getting rid of the Latin mass; abolishing the no-meat-on-Friday rule, and the asinine PC re-labelling of confession as 'reconciliation.' Pee-Cee crapola and just the tip of the iceberg.

Even if Catholicism is pure buncombe with no transcendent warrant, if it wants to survive immanently speaking, then it must not allow itself to be watered down into some form of namby-pamby secular humanist bullshit.

Have I succeeded in expressing my disapprobation of recent developments?

The dopes inside the Church are worse than those outside it.

More on the Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

This just over the transom:

Finally, a post on forgiveness. 🙂 But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc. But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive? Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness. That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

That is not quite right.

The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally — forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. — seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned — the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc — seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate.

BV: That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner. So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is. I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.

You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!

BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy. I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument. Either Jesus is God or he is not. If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress. If he is God, then two problems. First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition. (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him. But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.

At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them. So this passage is not relevant to our discussion. Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness. Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.

Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping. To drop a name is not to give an argument. I would have to see their arguments. Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention? No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart. I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!" Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."

You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear. His guilt has been removed. But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.

BV: This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless. You may be conflating two separate claims. I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong. This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.' But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed. I say there is: the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place. Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution. In that case the demands of justice have been met. But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place. The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed. After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent. He remains guilty as charged. The fact of his having committed the misdeed can in no way be altered. Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.

There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it. That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime. Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent — which is absurd.

Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?

BV: I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert. It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made. For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place. I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid. Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.

Remember the Derrida quote I cited:

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)

BV: John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name. So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection. The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness. He seems to be advancing the following sophism. If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one." But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.

Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.

BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.

When to Psychologize

You are free to psychologize your opponent when his position is demonstrably false or incoherent. If his reasons are worthless, then you are justified in exposing the motives that drive his commitments.

Common Ground Between Presentist and Anti-Presentist?

What the presentist affirms, roughly, is that only (temporally) present items exist: there are no nonpresent existents. The anti-presentist denies this, maintaining that there are nonpresent existents. Now there is no genuine dispute here unless the identity of the presentist thesis is perfectly clear and the anti-present is denying that very thesis.

Following some earlier suggestions of Peter Lupu, I will now try to formulate this dispute using the concept nonpresent existent. I will use 'NPE' to refer to this concept, a concept we may assume both the presentist and his opponents understand. A nonpresent existent, by stipulative definition, is one that exists in time, but is either merely past or merely future. Using NPE, presentism and anti-presentism may be defined as follows:

P. NPE is not instantiated

AP. NPE is instantiated.

The dispute, then, is about whether NPE is instantiated. NPE is a concept both parties understand. So it is common ground. The dispute is not about this concept, but about whether it is instantiated.

But note that 'is' occurs in both formulations. Does it have exactly the same sense in both (P) and (AP)? If not, then the common ground afforded us by NPE avails us nothing.

Yesterday (see link below) I distinguished five time-related senses of 'is.' Starting with (P), which sense of 'is' is operative in it? We can right away exclude the 'is' of atemporality since presentism is a thesis about temporal items. We can also exclude the 'is' of temporal presentness. The presentist cannot be charitably construed as saying that NPE is not now instantiated, for that is trivially true.

The 'is' of omnitemporality is not a suitable candidate either. For if NPE is not instantiated at every time, then we have quantification over times. But one cannot quantify over what does not exist. So nonpresent times exist. But if so, then NPE is instantiated, contrary to what the presentist intends.

On the disjunctively detensed reading of 'is', the presentist is saying that NPE was not instantiated or is not instantiated or will be not instantiated, and the anti-presentist is saying that the NPE was instantiated or is instantiated or will be instantiated.

Does this do the trick? At the moment I cannot see that it doesn't. But time is the hardest of nuts to crack and my 'nutcracker' may not be up to the job . . . .

The Putative Paradox of Forgiveness

I understand Aurel Kolnai has a paper on this topic. I haven't read it. But the paradox has been put to me as follows in conversation.

It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc. But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive? Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness. That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

This is something I need to explore, but off the top of my head I fail to see a problem. The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But I reject the second limb. I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear. His guilt has been removed. But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him.

Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. My forgiving you makes perfect sense even though you have made restitution and have apologized. For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you go to hell and get out of my life for good.

By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior. This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.

So I see no paradox. The first limb is self-evidently true while the second is false. Only conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.

It is of course possible that I am not thinking deeply enough!

Five Time-Related Senses of ‘Is’

I dedicate this post to that loveable rascal Bill Clinton who taught us just how much can ride on what the meaning of 'is' is.

Credit where credit is due: Some of the inspiration for this post comes from a conversation with Peter Lupu and from an article he recommended, S. Savitt, Presentism and Eternalism in Perspective.

1. There is first of all the 'is' of atemporality. Assuming that there are timeless entities such as God (concrete) and the number 13 (abstract), any sentences we use to talk about them must feature tenseless verbs and copulae. Consider the proposition expressed by the sentence, '13 is prime.' 13 is prime, but not now and not always. If the truth were always true, it would be in time. The truth is timeless and so is the object 13 and the property of being prime. The same goes for '13 exists.' It is not true now nor at every time. It is true timelessly. It is worth noting that the timeless is' and 'exists' do not abstract from the temporal determinations of pastness, presentness, and futurity for the simple reason that numbers and such are not in time in the first place. So the 'is' of atemporality is not the result of a de-tensing operation whereby we abtract from the temporal determinations to lay bare the pure copula, the copula that merely 'copulates.' The 'is' in question is tenseless from the 'git-go.'

Perhaps we should distinguish between grammatical tense and logical tense. Every verb has a grammatical tense. Thus the verb in 'God exists' is in the present tense. But God exists timelessly, and so 'exists' in this instance is logically without a tense.

Consider John 8:58: "Before Abraham was, I am." Is that ungrammatical? Yes, but logically it makes sense.

2. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the 'is' of temporal presentness. Examples: 'Peter is smoking' and 'There are 13 donuts in the box.' There are now 13 donuts in the box.

3. The 'is' of omnitemporality. Savitt gives the example of 'Copper is a conductor of electricity.' The sentence is true at every time, not just at present. But it is not timelessly true since it is about something in time, copper. I think the example shows that the tenseless is not the same as the timeless. What is timelessly true is tenselessly true, but not conversely.

4. The Disjunctively Detensed 'Is.' We can de-tense 'is' as follows: x is detensedly F just in case x was F or is F or will be F. We can do the same with 'exists.' Thus, Socrates is detensedly wise iff Socrates was wise or is wise or will be wise. De-tensing involves abstracting from temporal determinations. A detensed copula is a pure copula: all it does is 'copulate' or link.

The 'am' in 'I am dead' is a pure copula, and the sentence is tenselessly true, but not presently true or timelessly true or omnitemporally true. Gott sei dank!

5. The Hypertenseless 'Is.' God exists atemporally and thus tenselessly while Socrates exists temporally but not presently or omnitemporally and thus he too exists tenselessly. If there is a hypertenseless sense of 'exist' it applies to both God and Socrates and abstracts from the way each exists, atemporally in the case of God, temporally in the case of Socrates.

In 'God and Socrates both exist,' the 'exist' is hypertenseless in that it is abstractly common to both the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'God exists' and the tenselessness of the 'exists' in 'Socrates exists.'

Now what is this hypertenseless univocal sense of 'exists' that applies to both God and Socrates? Persumably it is the quantifier sense according to which x exists iff (Ey) x = y. Existence in this sense is identity-with-something-or-other. Absolutely everything, whatever its mode of existence, exists in this hypertenseless sense.

Now the presentist wants to say that, necessarily, it is always the case that only present items exist. But in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot be the first four, for reasons given in previous posts. So let's try the fifth sense. Accordingly, only present items are identical-with-something-or-other.

Does this work?