Maverick Philosopher – Page 572 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

I Will Not Be Intimidated

By Steve McCann. Excerpt:

According to the current incarnation of the American left, who traffic constantly in victimhood and noble intentions, I should be in the vanguard of the mandatory gun control and confiscation movement. That somehow it was the inanimate object this soldier was holding and not him that was responsible for the attempt on my life or to ignore the fact that his mindset was such he would have used any weapon at hand to accomplish the same goal.

On the contrary, I own a handgun today because of the experience of coming face to face with the evil that permeates some men's souls. I and the girl I rescued were defenseless. There were no police or armed citizens around and the death of another homeless and unknown boy and girl, buried in an unmarked mass grave, would have been just another easily ignored casualty of the post-War period. I was determined that I would never again face a similar circumstance. I have had in my possession firearms for virtually my entire life, as I have been fortunate to live in the one nation on earth that has embedded in its founding document the right to bear arms.

Today, I am, along with a vast majority of my fellow citizens, being made the scapegoat for the failed policies of the so-called progressives — whether it is the inability of society to deal with extreme psychopaths or the mentally deranged, because the left insists they are entitled to the same rights as other citizens, or the never-ending attempt to rehabilitate criminals incapable of rehabilitation. Consistent with their inability to ever admit a mistake, the left and much of the Democratic Party instead focuses on symbolism over substance and the path of least resistance — going after the law-abiding hard working people who are the backbone of America.

But the motivation is more insidious than that. Those that self-identify as progressives, leftists, socialists or Marxists, have one overwhelming trait in common: they are narcissists who believe they are pre-ordained to rule the masses too ignorant to govern themselves. Over the past thirty years as these extremists fully infiltrated academia, the mainstream media, the entertainment industry and taken over the Democratic Party, the American people have lost many of their individual rights. They are now being told what they can eat, where they can live, who they must associate with, where and how their children must be educated, and soon what medical care they are allowed to access, as well as the type of car they can drive and the amount of energy they are permitted to use.

The last bastion of freedom is unfettered gun ownership, so that too must go. That the left is willfully and egregiously exploiting the actions of a deranged psychopath in the tragic death of 26 people (20 children) in Newtown, Connecticut to achieve this end exposes their true motivation.

Quick and Dirty: Ten Random Notes on the Gun Debate

1. Is anybody against gun control? Not that I am aware of. Everybody wants there to be some laws regulating the manufacture, sale, importation, transportation, use, etc., of guns. So why do liberals routinely characterize conservatives as against gun control? Because they are mendacious. It is for the same reason that they label conservatives as anti-government. Conservatives stand for limited government, whence it follows that that are for government. A simple inference that even a liberal should be able to process. So why do liberals call conservatives anti-government? Because they are mendacious: they are not interested in civil debate, but in winning at all costs by any means. With respect to both government and gun control, the question is not whether but how much.

2. Terminology matters. 'Magazine' is the correct term for what is popularly called a clip. Don't refer to a round as a bullet. The bullet is the projectile. Avoid emotive phraseology if you are interested in serious discussion. 'Assault weapon' has no clear meaning and is emotive to boot. Do you mean semi-automatic long gun? Then say that. Don't confuse 'semi-automatic' with 'fully automatic.' Bone up on the terminology if you want to be taken seriously.

3. Gun lobbies benefit gun manufacturers. No doubt. But they also defend the Second Amendment rights of citizens, all citizens. Be fair. Don't adduce the first fact while ignoring the second. And don't call the NRA a special interest group. A group that defends free speech may benefit the pornography industry, but that is not to say that the right to free speech is not a right for all. Every citizen has an actual or potential interest in self-defense and the means thereto. It's a general interest. A liberal who has no interest in self-defense and the means thereto is simply a liberal who has yet to be mugged or raped or had her home invaded. Such a liberal's interest is yet potential.

4. Question for liberals: what is your plan in case of a home invasion? Call 9-1-1? What is your plan in case of a fire? Call the Fire Department? Not a bad thought. But before they arrive it would help to have a home fire extinguisher at the ready. Ergo, etc.

5. The president and Congress are fiddling while Rome burns. Compared to the fiscal crisis, the gun issue is a non-issue. That really ought to be obvious. There was no talk of it last year. Why not? It looks to be a red herring, a way of avoiding a truly pressing issue while at the same time advancing the Left's totalitarian agenda. One can strut and posture and show how sensitive and caring one is while avoiding painful decisions that are bound to be unpopular and for some pols suicidal. I am talking about entitlement reform. Here's a part of a solution that would get me tarred and feathered. After a worker has taken from the Social Security system all the money he paid in plus, say, 8% interest, the payments stop. That would do something to mitigate the Ponzi-like features of the current unsustainable system.

6. Believe it or not, Pravda (sic!) has warned Americans about draconian gun control. 'Pravda,' if I am not badly mistaken, is Russian for truth. That took real chutzpah, the commies calling their propaganda organ, Truth. Well, the former commies speak truth, for once, here: "These days, there are few things to admire about the socialist, bankrupt and culturally degenerating USA, but at least so far, one thing remains: the right to bear arms and use deadly force to defend one's self and possessions." Read the whole thing. Some days I think the US is turning into the SU what with Obama and all his czars.

7. Nannystaters like Dianne Feinstein ought to think carefully before they make foolish proposals. The unintended consequences may come back to bite them. Gun and ammos sales are through the roof. Although more guns in the hands of responsible, trained, individuals leads to less crime, more guns in civilian hands, without qualification, cannot be a good thing.

8. It doesn't follow, however, that if, per impossibile (as the philosophers say) all guns were thrown into the sea we would be better off. The gun is an equalizer, a peace-preserver, a violence-thwarter. Samuel Colt is supposed to have said, "Have no fear of any man no matter what his size, in time of need just call on me and I will equalize." Granny with her .45 is a pretty good match for an unarmed Tookie Williams.

9. SCOTUS saw the light and pronounced it an individual right. You persist in thinking the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right? I wonder if you think that the right to life is also collective. If my right to life is an individual right, how can my right to defend my life and the logically consequent right to the means to such defense not also be an individual right?

10. My parting shot at the gun-grabbers.

Extremists

And then there are the conservatives (liberals) for whom a refusal to demonize liberals (conservatives) makes you one.

Here is the first stanza of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

How to Read an Online Article Without Distraction

I thank long-time blogger buddy Bill Keezer for pointing out something that should have been obvious. To read an online article at a money-grubbing site such as NRO, a site awash with advertising, moving images, noise, and what all else, click on the 'print' icon. The article should appear without the junk. But you knew that already.

I may not have the prettiest 'skin' in the 'sphere, but at my site you will find no advertising, begging, moving images, noise . . . just solid content day after day, year after year.

As one of my aphorisms has it, a blog is to be judged, not by the color of its 'skin' but by the character of its content.

I thank you for your patronage. Rare is the day when traffic dips below 1000 pageviews. In recent days spikes have been in the 3000-4000 range. 2012 was a banner year.

UPDATE: The ever-helpful Dave Lull e-mails:

Usually I prefer using the free Readability browser add-on (the page formatted for printing is often too wide for me to read comfortably and is sometimes not an option):

http://readability.com/addons

Should Newspapers ‘Out’ Those With Whom They Disagree?

Which is morally worse, killing a pre-natal human being or keeping a loaded gun in the house for self-defense? The former, obviously. Both abortion and gun ownership are legal, but one would have to be singularly benighted to think that the keeping is morally worse than the killing, or even morally commensurable with it, let alone morally equivalent to it. It is the difference between taking life and liberty and protecting them. One is wrong, the other is permissible if not obligatory. Therefore, if it would be wrong — and certainly it would be — for a newspaper to publish the names and addresses of abortionists and of women who have had abortions, then a fortiori what The Journal News of White Plains, New York did is wrong. According to the NYT:

Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps of their locations online.

[. . .]

But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.

Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).

Note the double standard. Hasson hired armed guards. Two points. First, she apparently grasps the idea of guns being used defensively when it comes to her defense. Why not then generally? Second, these armed guards are not agents of the government. They are in the private sector. Why didn't she simply rely on the cops to protect her? After all, that's the liberal line: 'There is no need for civilians to have guns; their protection is the job of the police.' Hasson's behavior smacks of hypocrisy.

Threatening and harrassing the editors and writers at the newspaper is obviously wrong. But publishing their names and addresses cannot be wrong if what the paper did is not wrong. I say both are wrong. The publisher and the editor exercised terrible judgment in a misguided attempt to drive up circulation. But now it has come back to bite them, and one hopes they will be driven out of business for their rank irresponsibility.

Responsible people consider the consequences of their actions. Not everything one has a right to do is right to do. Responsible people also consider the consequences of their speech. Contrary to what some foolish civil libertarians think, speech is not just words. Not everything one has a right to say is right to say. To say or do anything that is likely to incite violence is ceteris paribus wrong, whether it is legal or not.

Example. Blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites as a group. That is true, and one certainly has a right, in general, to say it publically. But is is easy to imagine circumstances in which saying it publically would incite violence. In those circumstances the saying of it would be wrong despite the truth and indeed the importance of what is said.

One might accuse me of being too reasonable with our enemies. One might remind me of one of my own aphorisms:

Time to be unreasonable. It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone. Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason. The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.

Applied to the present case, one could argue, or I could argue against myself, that if the leftist scumbags at The Journal News want a civil war, they ought to get one. What they do to us we should do right back at them. For all's fair in love and war. They ought also to consider, for their own good, that is is foolish for a bunch of candy-assed liberals to take on armed men and women.

Fiscal Irresponsibility as Politically Rational: The Fiscal Prisoners’ Dilemma

Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, Regaining America's Balance. Excerpt:

There are two paths toward reducing deficits and debts of the magnitude we face: raising taxes or cutting spending. A balanced compromise would involve some amount of both, but the two political parties face strong electoral incentives to do neither. If Republicans push for reduced spending, they are criticized for taking away the benefits people rely on. If Democrats push for raising taxes, they are decried for swiping workers' hard-earned dollars. Both solutions are seen as taking money away from voters, and are thus fraught with political peril.

Consider the matrix above, in which both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have two policy choices. Republicans always promise lower taxes, so their choice is whether to cut or maintain spending levels. Democrats, in contrast, want to keep spending high, so their choice is whether to raise taxes or keep them low.

A close look at the matrix shows that it is politically rational for the Republicans to maintain today's unsustainable levels of spending when faced with either behavior from Democrats. And, campaign rhetoric aside, that is what they tend to do. Republicans have learned that whenever they actually legislate spending cuts, they are attacked by their opponents and tend to lose elections. They are not keen to do the fiscally responsible thing when the price is giving up power.

Likewise, whether Republicans cut or maintain spending, Democrats are politically better off if they allow taxes to stay low. This explains why, despite President Obama's rhetoric about raising taxes, he and other Democrats have generally refrained from actually doing so, especially at the levels needed to pay for their spending. That the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was postponed until after the 2012 election was not a coincidence.

To be sure, politicians in both parties make noises about good economic choices (from their perspectives) that balance the budget, but their actual behavior is what matters. President George W. Bush oversaw the expansion of spending on entitlements, as well as on defense, education, and other discretionary programs. President Obama serially preserved Bush's tax cuts. Politicians know what is best for the country in the long term, but they have no easy way to change their behavior now during a period of polarization in which the institutions and incentives are set up for imbalance.

This amounts to an institutional failure. For most of the nation's history, the rules of the budget game worked. Today, however, they no longer function. Politically rational behavior is now fiscally perverse. Addressing this institutional failure thus requires changing the rules of game. The only remedy to our political prisoners' dilemma, therefore, is to change those rules so that they in fact rule out structural fiscal imbalance — by imposing painful penalties on lawmakers for failing to budget responsibly.

The Stove ‘Dilemma’ and the Lewis ‘Trilemma’

This from R. J. Stove, son of atheist and neo-positivist, David Stove:

When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.

Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase "By what authority?" into my mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?

This reminds me of the famous 'trilemma' popularized by C. S. Lewis: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar. I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here.

Just as I cannot accept the Lewis 'trilemma' — which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable — I cannot accept the Stovian 'dilemma' which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative. ". . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was." Why are these the only two alternatives? The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church. One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East. After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the 'rock' upon whom Christ founded his church. That is at least a possibility. If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be. It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.

Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has 'cornered the market' on all religiously relevant truth. It might even be that it is impossible that any church be the true church and final repository of all religous truth.

I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice. That is not so say his choice was not a good one. Better a Catholic than a benighted positivist like his father.

My point is a purely logical one: his alternative is a false alternative. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy. Not in this post anyway.

The Defense Mechanisms of the Anti-Gunners

Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines the Anti-Gun Mentality (Hat tip: Seldom Seen Slim)

Political Correctness: Black Thuggery not Reported as Black

Rod Dreher reports in The Mall Killers.

It is wise to remember that PC originated with the CP. Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness.

Animal Sacrifice

I recently presented an alternative to the conceit shared by both atheists and immature religionists that religion is static, a closed system of doctrines and practices insusceptible of development and correction and refinement. The following is a bit of evidence for the alternative.

The ancients sacrificed animals outside them on the altar of divine worship. Progress was made when more spiritually advanced individuals realized that it is the animal in them that needs sacrificing. Slaughtering a prized animal such as a lamb and offering it up is crude and external and superstitious. What needs to be offered up is our base nature which is grounded in our animality but is a perversion of it.

But what if God commands Abraham to sacrifice that animal outside him that is is own son Isaac? Abraham should conclude that it cannot be God who is so commanding him. I argue this out in detail in Abraham, Isaac, and an Aspect of the Problem of Revelation and in Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

Addendum (1/7/13): S.N. was reminded of this quotation fromPorphyry, De Abstinentia II, 61:

θεοῖς δὲ ἀρίστη μὲν καταρχή· νοῦς καθαρὸς καὶ ψυχὴ ἀπαθής

The best offering to the gods indeed is this: a pure mind and a soul free from passions.

That is my meaning exactly.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Three Unforgettable Albums from 1970

I can't speak for my housemates at the time, Ken Bower and Craig Fellin, but these three albums were my favorites among the ones we listened to, and the selections are my favorites from each.

1. Bob Dylan, New Morning (released 19 October 1970). Sign on a Window. If any song puts me in mind of Craig, it is this one. That's him to the left. He is the proprietor of the Big Hole Lodge in Montana.

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife
Catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me 'Pa'
That must be what it's all about
Thta must be what it's all about.

After his motorcycle accident in 1966, the protean Dylan moved closer to the earth and farther from the mind. Gone the despair and the absurdist imagery of It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding (from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) and Desolation Row (unfortunately, this is the 'stoned' version, but it too is oddly beautiful) and the haunting Visions of Johanna (from Blonde on Blonde, 1966).

2. George Harrison, All Things Must Pass (released 27 November 1970). The title song. "All things must pass/All things must pass away."

3. Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (released November 1970). The title song. The best part begins at 3:10. It still rips me up, 42 years later.

I wouldn't want to relive those early years. But what I lacked in happiness, I made up for in intensity of experience. Ken and Craig had no small part in that.

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

W. K. writes, and I reply:

I agree with most of that [Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too], except what I take to be your idea of dogma. You say that the 'dogmatic contents' of religion is 'where it is weakest' and 'dogmatics displaces inquiry'. In both cases, for Catholicism, this is not only a misconception but the opposite of what dogma is.

In the first case, the dogmatic contents of Catholicism are revealed by God, who cannot possibly err, so given sufficient rational grounds for believing that there is a God, and that he has indeed revealed himself to man, and that this revelation is to be found where it is claimed to be found, its dogmatic contents are where it is strongest. [. . .]

I can grant all your premises but one. As I see it, the dogmatic contents, i.e., the dogmatic propositions, of Catholicism are not revealed by God. They are at best human formulations of what is revealed by God, formulations that bear the mark of their human origin. As such, they are debatable, disputable, and starting points for inquiry. They are not indisputable certainties that must be accepted on pain of damnation. To discuss this concretely we need to examine some examples of dogmatic contents. Here are some:

God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty, by the natural
light of reason from created things.
The divine attributes are really identical among themselves and with
the Divine Essence.
God is absolutely simple.

If these dogmas are revealed by God, where can we find them in the Bible? As far as I know, the Bible is silent on the question of divine simplicity, which is what the second two propositions articulate. The doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), as set forth by Thomas Aquinas, has a noble philosophical pedigree, but no Biblical pedigree. I am not saying that God is not ontologically simple. In fact, I am inclined to say that God must be simple: otherwise he would not be absolute, and hence would not be God. (See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on this topic.) Nor am I saying that that DDS is inconsistent with what is in the Bible. Perhaps it is possible to render consistent the simple God of the philosophers with the living, acting, non-impassible God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who acts in history, takes sides in tribal warfare, hears and responds to prayers, etc. I am saying precisely this: the DDS is a human attempt to articulate in discursive terms the divine transcendence and aseity. As such, DDS is open to scrutiny and debate.

This ought to be obvious from the fact that prominent philosophers of religion such as Alvin Plantinga, who are also classical theists, though not Catholics, question the DDS, and with good reason. Questioning it, they do not take themselves to be questioning divine revelation, nor are they questioning divine revelation. They are questioning a philosophical doctrine that has much to be said for it, but also much to be said against it. They are questioning something that is eminently questionable.

At this point one might try the following response. "Admittedly, DDS is not in the Bible; but it is taught by the Catholic Church, the one, true, holy, and universal church, the church founded by Christ himself who is God, a church presided over and guided by by the Holy Ghost (I don't use 'Holy Spirit' which is a Vatican II innovation) in all it conciliar deliberations with respect to faith and morals, a church, therefore, whose pronouncements on matters of faith and morals are infallible. Since the Roman church was founded by God himself, its epistemic credentials are absolutely impeccable, and everything it teaches, including DDS, is not only true, but known with absolute objective certainty to be true because it comes from an absolutely reliable Source, God himself."

Is the Roman church all that it claims to be? That is the question. If it is then everything it teaches, including the dogmas about its own divine origin and utter reliability (see here, scroll down to VI #s 1-20), are true. But is it all that it claims to be? You are free to believe it of course. But how do you know? If you say you know it because the Roman church teaches it, then you move in a circle of rather short diameter. You are saying in effect: The Roman church is God's very church because it claims to be, and its claims are true and certain because they made by God's very church, the church that God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, who is absolutely inerrant and trustworthy, established.

To avoid the circle, one must simply accept that the Roman church is all that it claims to be. But ought one not be unsettled by the fact that sincere, intelligent adherents of other Christian denominations (let alone adherents of other faiths such as Judaism and Islam) reject the Roman claims?

"No, why should I find that unsettling? Those other denominations are just wrong. The Eastern Church, for example, went astray at the time of the Great Schism." That's possible, but how likely is it? Isn't it much more likely that the extreme claims that the Roman church makes on its behalf are simply the expression of an exceedingly deep need for doxastic security, i.e., an inability to tolerate the least bit of uncertainty in one's beliefs? Here is one of the extreme claims:

Membership of the Catholic Church is necessary for all men for salvation.

Extra ecclesiam, nulla salus. No salvation outside the church. Which church? The Eastern church? Well, no. Our church. It would be absurd to say that the true church is true because it is ours. It would be better to say that it is ours because it is the true church: we joined it because it is true. But how justify that claim in a non-circular way?

Some will tell me that the Roman church has softened on the dogma just quoted. But if dogmas are divinely revealed as my correspondent W. K. claims, how could there be any need for softening or modification? And why would any more dogmas need to be added, as they were added in the 19th century?

Consider another dogma:

The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and from the Son as from a single
principle through a single spiration.

This proposition contains the famous filoque, "and from the Son," which was the main doctrinal bone of contention that led to the Great Schism. (See East Versus West on the Trinity: The Filioque Controversy.) Is this Catholic dogma in the Bible? Where? Does the Bible anywhere take a stand on this theological arcanum? I don't think so.

And then there are the Marian dogmas. I count three: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and Assumption. According to the first, Mary was conceived without original sin. And so the dogma of Original Sin is presupposed. That man is a fallen being in some sense or other I don't doubt. But the Fall as a sort of 'fact' and the Fall as an explicitly formulated doctrine are two and not one. Here is what I mean by the 'fact':

. . . man is wretched and only man is wretched. Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in what Pascal calls divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but we are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

Now compare the 'fact' with the dogmatic propositions that make up the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin:

Our first parents, before the fall, were endowed with sanctifying
grace.
In addition to sanctifying grace, our first parents were endowed with
the preternatural gift of bodily immortality.
Our first parents in Paradise sinned grievously through transgression
of the Divine probationary commandment.
Through sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the
anger and the indignation of God.
Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the
devil.
Adam's sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation but by
descent.
Original sin is transmitted by natural generation.
In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and
all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity.
Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded
from the Beatific Vision of God.

I'll make a couple of quick points. There were no first parents, and there is no transmission in the manner described.(Further details and explanations in Original Sin category.)

In sum, I oppose both the critics of religion who, failing to appreciate its open-ended, quest-like character, want to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. I also oppose the (immature) religionists who also want religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage.

In a slogan: Religion is more quest than conclusions.

Religion Always Buries its Undertakers

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over a year now. He will be joined by Dennett and Dawkins, Grayling and Harris, and the rest of the militant atheists.

Religion, like philosophy, always buries its undertakers.

It was Etienne Gilson who famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers." That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat. It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead. Let that be my first law. The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus. Not so in philosophy.

I continue the thought in Philosophy Always Resurrects its Dead.

The Hypocrisy of the HollyWeird Gun Grabbers

Here is the 'viral' video in case you haven't seen it. Violent content.

As I argued earlier, the problem is not gun culture, but liberal culture. I listed four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence:

Liberals have a casual attitude toward criminal behavior.
Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.
Liberals tend to glorify the worthless, and they fail to present exemplary human types in realistic and appealing ways.
Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

But I left one out:

Liberals tend to undermine marriage, the family, and the authority of parents.

We have enough gun control. What we need now is liberal control.

Memo to self: write a post exploring the bizarre liberal combination of First Amendment absolutism with Second Amendment rejectionism.

E. J. Lowe on the Distinction Between Constituent and Relational Ontology

1. Uncontroversially, ordinary material particulars such as cats and cups have parts, material parts. Equally uncontroversial is that they have properties and stand in relations. That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. So far we are at the pre-philosophical level, the level of data. We start philosophizing when we ask what properties are and what it is for a thing to have a property. So the philosophical question is not whether there are properties — of course there are! — but what they are. Neither is it a philosophical question whether things have properties — of course they do! The question concerns how this having is to be understood.

What we want to understand are the nature of properties and the nature of property-possession. Qua ontologist, I don't care what properties there are; I care what properties are. And qua ontologist, I don't care what properties are instantiated; I care what instantiation is.

2. For example, is the blueness of my cup a repeatable entity, a universal, or an unrepeatable entity, a particular (e.g.,a trope)? That is one of several questions one can ask about properties. A second is whether the cup has the property by standing in an external relation to it — the relation of exemplification — or by containing it as an ontological or metaphysical part or constituent. Can property-possession be understood quasi-mereologically, as analogous to a part-whole relation? Or is it more like the relation of a thing to a predicate that is true of it? The predicate 'blue' is true of my cup. But no one would get it into his head to think of the word 'blue' as a part of the cup — in any sense of 'part.' 'Blue' is a word and no concrete material extralinguistic thing has as a word as a part. The relation between 'blue' and the cup to which it applies is external: each term of the relation can exist without the other. Indeed my cup could be blue even if there were no English language and no such word as 'blue.' But if x is an ordinary part or an ontological constituent of y, then y cannot exist without x. So one might analogize properties to predicates and maintain that properties are external to the things that have them and are related to them by exemplification.

3. At a first approximation, the issue that divides constituent ontologists (C-ontologists) and those that N. Wolterstorff rather infelicitously calls 'relational ontologists' (R-ontologists) is whether or not ordinary particulars have ontological or metaphysical parts. C-ontologists maintain that ordinary
particulars have such parts in addition to their commonsense parts, and that among these ontological parts are (some of) the properties of the ordinary particular. R-ontologists deny that ordinary particulars have ontological parts, and consequently deny that ordinary particulars have any of their properties by having them as parts.

4. Let us now examine E. J. Lowe's explanation of the distinction. After reminding us that C-ontologists ascribe to ordinary particulars ontological structure in addition to ordinary mereological structure, he writes: ". . . what is crucial for an ontology to qualify as 'constituent' is that it should maintain that objects have an ontological structure involving 'constituents' which belong to ontological categories other than the category of object itself." ("Essence and Ontology" in Novak et al. eds., Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, pp. 102-103.) Lowe's characterization of the distinction goes beyond mine in that Lowe requires that the constituents of an object belong to categories other than that of object. An object for Lowe is an Aristotlelian primary (individual) substance. For me it suffices for an ontology to be 'constituent' that it allow that some entities have ontological constituents.

Lowe cites hylomorphism as an example of a constituent ontology. On both Lowe's and my understanding of 'constituent ontology,' hylomorphism is a clear example of a C-ontology. On hylomorphism individual substances are combinations of form and matter where neither the form nor the matter are substances in their own right. But is it true to say or imply, as Lowe does, that forms and matters are members of categories? This strikes me as a strange thing to say or imply. Consider just the forms of individual substances. I would not say that they are members of a category of entity alongside the other categories, but that, on hylomorphism, they are 'principles' (as the Thomists say) invoked in the analysis of individual substances. Form and matter are ontological constituents of an Aristotelian primary substance. But that is not to say that these constituents belong to categories other than that of primary (individual) substance. It is true that the form of a substance is not itself a substance. It does not follow, however, that the form of a substance belongs to an ontological category other than that of substance.

So that is my first quibble with Lowe's explanation. Here is my second. It seems that Lowe's explanation rules out one-category constituent ontologies. Keith Campbell advertises his ontology as 'one-category.' (Abstract Particulars, Basil Blackwell, 1990)) The one category is that of tropes. Everything is either a trope or a construction from tropes. Campbell's is therefore a one-category constituent ontology. Lowe's explanation, however, implies that there must be at least two categories of entity, the category object (individual substance) and one or more categories of entity whose members serve as constituents of objects.

A third problem with Lowe's explanation is that it seems to rule our Bergmann-type C-ontologies that posit bare or thin particulars. Lowe's explanation seems to suggest that the constituents of a particular cannot include any particulars. If a bare particular is a particular, then an ordinary particular has a particular as a constituent in violation of Lowe's explanation. (It is a very interesting question whether a bare particular is a particular. I am tempted to argue that 'bare' functions as an alienans adjective so that a bare particular is not a particular but rather the ontological factor of particularity in an ordinary particular. But this is a separate topic that I will get to in a separate post.)

5. I now want to discuss whether Lowe's four-category ontology succeeds in being neither a C-ontology nor an R-ontology, as he claims.

First of all the question whether it is a C-ontology. Lowe's categorial scheme is approximately as depicted in this diagram:

Lowe speaks of Kinds (substantial universals) being instantiated by Objects (substantial particulars), and of Attributes (non-substantial universals) being instantiated by Modes (non-substantial particulars). Not shown in the above Ontological Square is a diagonal relation of Exemplification running from Attributes (non-substantial universals) to Objects (substantial particulars). Consider, for example, the horse Dobbin. It is an individual substance that instantiates the natural kind horse. Dobbin also has various accidental properties, or Attributes, whiteness, for example. Dobbin exemplifies the universal whiteness. The whiteness of Dobbin, however, is unique to him. It is not a universal, but a particular, albeit a non-substantial particular. It is a Mode (trope) that instantiates the Attribute whiteness. Dobbin is characterized by this Mode, just as the Kind horse is characterized by the Attribute whiteness. On Lowe's scheme there are three distinct relations: Characterization, Instantiatiation, and Exemplification. They relate the members of four distinct fundamental ontological categories: Kinds, Objects, Attributes, and Modes.

Are modes constituents of the objects they characterize? Is Dobbin's whiteness a constituent of Dobbin? If it is, then Lowe's ontology counts as a C-ontology. Lowe plausibly argues that modes are not constituents of objects. I take the argument to be as follows. Modes are identity-dependent on the objects they characterize. Thus Dobbin's whiteness would not be what it is apart from Dobbin and could not exist apart from Dobbin. It follows that the mode in question cannot be an ontological 'building block' out of which Dobbin, together with other items, is constructed. An object is ontologically prior to its modes, which fact entails that modes cannot be constituents of objects.

So far, so good. But what about modes themselves? Do they have constituents? Or are they simple? If modes have constituents, then Lowe's is a C-ontology after all. Dobbin's whiteness could be taken to be Dobbins-exemplifying-the universal whiteness, or it could be taken to be a simple item lacking internal structure, a simple instance of whiteness. If it is a simple item, just an instance of whiteness, then it cannot have any necessary connection to Dobbin or to any object. Why then would it be necessarily identity- and existence-dependent on Dobbin? Why would it be so dependent on any object? There would be nothing about it to ground such a necessary connection. And if it were a simple, then it could very well be a constituent of an object. Lowe's argument against the constituency of the whiteness mode requires that the mode have a necessary connection to Dobbin, that it be the whiteness of Dobbin and of him alone. The mode cannot have that necessary connection unless it is a complex.

If, on the other hand, Dobbin's whiteness is a complex item, then it has as constituents, Dobbin, exemplification, and the universal whiteness, in which case Lowe's ontolology is a C-ontology. For if an ontology has even one category of entity the members of which have ontological constituents, then that ontology is a C-ontology.

My argument can also be put as follows. On Lowe's scheme, modes make up a fundamental category. As fundamental, modes are not derivative from other categories. So it cannot be that a mode is a complex formed by an object's exemplifying an attribute, e.g., Dobbin's exemplifying the non-substantial universal, whiteness. But if modes are simple, why should modes be identity-dependent on objects? It is clear that the whiteness of Dobbin cannot be an ontological part of Dobbin if the whiteness is necessarily tied to Dobbin to be what it is. For then it presupposes the logically antecedent existence of Dobbin. But the only way the whiteness can be necessarily tied to Dobbin is if it is a complex — which is inconsistent with modes' being a fundamental and irreducible category.