Maverick Philosopher – Page 578 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Be Gracious

Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch? Give you a gift? Bring something to the dinner?

Be gracious. Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch," or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that." Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a donor.

Lack of graciousness often bespeaks an excess of ego.

We were re-hydrating at a bar in Tortilla Flat, Arizona, after an ankle-busting hike up a stream bed. I offered to buy Alex a drink. Instead of graciously accepting my hospitality, he had the chutzpah to ask me to lend him money so that he could buy me a drink!

Another type of ungraciousness is replying 'Thank you' to 'Thank you.' If I thank you for something, say 'You're welcome,' not 'Thank You.' Graciously acquiesce in the fact that I have done you a favor. Don't try to get the upper hand by thanking me.

I grant that there are situations in which mutual thanking is appropriate.

Some people feel that they must 'reciprocate.' Why exactly? I gave you a little Christmas present because I felt like it. And now you feel you must give me one in return? Is this a tit for tat game?

Suppose I compliment you sincerely. Will you throw the compliment back in my face by denigrating that which I complimented you for, thereby impugning my judgment?

James Kalb on the ’60s

A tip of the hat to Monterey Tom for hipping me — as we used to say in the 60s — to James Kalb's Out of the Wreckage. Excerpt:

So the Sixties led to what it thought it hated most, a consumerist, conformist, careerist, and bureaucratic lifestyle, guided by the heirs of Madison Avenue and deprived of spontaneity and close human connections. The revolution had gone nowhere. Instead of the dry martinis and marital cheating of the 1950s, we had free-floating relationships and designer beers. Instead of the creativity once promised, we had commercial pop culture that only becomes cruder and more crudely commercialized. And instead of musical rebellion, the cover of Rolling Stone now features admiring images of the President.

Ego, Sin, and Logic

Ego is at the root of sin, but also at the root of obsessive preoccupation with one's sinfulness. If the goal is to weaken the ego, then too much fretting over one's sins in the manner of a Wittgenstein is contraindicated.

There is such a thing as excessive moral scrupulosity.

Though Wittgenstein's ego drove him to scruple inordinately, he was a better man than Russell. Russell worried about logic. Wittgenstein worried about logic and his sins.

The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen’s Remains Found

The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing. Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching. Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest of a nonexistent object, he went missing in December of 2009.

I've seen the movie and it ain't bad. And of course any self-respecting aficionado of the legends and lore, tales and trails of the magnificent Superstitions must see it. Tom Kollenborn comments in Lust for Gold I and Lust for Gold II.

As I wrote in Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold,

. . . to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Of Rice and Race

Victor Davis Hanson on Susan Rice:

We are asked to believe that a multimillionaire African-American woman, who boasts that those who “mess” with her end up badly, is a victim of racism for not being welcomed as a nominee for secretary of state — a position that has not been held by a white male in 15 years — after she went on five television shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack in an effort to convince Americans of the absurd myth that their ambassador had been killed in the course of a demonstration gone bad, rather than being murdered in a preplanned al-Qaedist hit.

Politics is War and Conservatives Need to Learn How to Fight

The Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means. (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.) The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is. This puts them at a serious disadvantage.

David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their
heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.

Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An
Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties
deploy. Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard. He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles. Joe needs to be fired up and energized. The Left understands this. You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America." That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective. Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances, as the 2012 election showed. The nice man Romney was just no match for the street fighter Obama and the slander machine behind him.

The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions. But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions, then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to
similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.

As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over. If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting. But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.

Although I incline toward the Horowitz view, I am not entirely comfortable with it. I would like to believe that amicable solutions are available. You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation. Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.' I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming. Things are about to get very interesting indeed.

Constituent Ontology Versus Relational Ontology and an Argument Against the Latter

Two Different Aproaches to Ontology

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. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup. So far we are at the 'datanic,' pre-philosophical level. 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.

For example, is the blueness of my cup a universal or 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 a 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?

It is this second question that will exercise me in this post.

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, and that among these 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.

Bundle theories are clear examples of C-ontology. If my cup is nothing more than a bundle of compresent properties, then (i) it has parts that are not ordinary physical parts, and (ii) its properties are these parts. The properties could be either universals or particulars (tropes, say). Either way you have a constituent ontology.

Suppose you think that there has to be more to an ordinary particular than its properties suitably bundled. You might reason as follows. If properties are universals, and it is possible that there be two numerically distinct particulars that share all property consituents, then there must be an additional constituent that accounts for their numerical difference. Enter bare or thin particulars. Such substratum theories also count as C-ontologies.

Hylomorphic theories are also examples of C-ontology. The form of a thing is not a property external to it to which the thing is related by exemplification or instantiation, and this is a fortiori true of its matter, whether proximate or prime. It follows that form and matter are ontological constituents of ordinary particulars.

The notion that ordinary particulars have ontological parts in addition to their commonsense parts is admittedly not the clearest. 'Part' in exactly what sense? So it is no surprise that many of the best analytic metaphysicians are R-ontologists. These philosophers think of properties as abstract objects residing in a realm apart. Having decided on that view of properties, they naturally conclude that it makes no sense to maintain that a coffee cup, say, could have causally inert, nonspatiotemporal abstract objects as constituents. So they maintain that for a concrete thing to have a property is for it to stand in a exemplification relation or tie or nexus to an abstract property. According to Michael J. Loux, relational ontologists

. . . restrict the parts of ordinary objects to their commonsense parts. Nonetheless, they insist that ordinary objects stand in a variety of significant nonmereological connexions or ties to things that have character kath auto or nonderivatively; and they tell us that in virtue of doing so those objects have whatever character they do. ("What is Constituent Ontology?" in Novak et al. eds. Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag 2012, p. 44, emphasis added)

Why I am Inclined to Reject Relational Ontology

What follows is a sketch of argumentation more rigorously presented, with the standard scholarly apparatus, in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer 2002, pp. 170 -176, "Rejection of Nonconstituent Realism."

1. The 'Nude Particular' Objection

Relational ontologists don't deny that things have properties; what they deny is that those properties are at or in the things that have them in a way that would justify talk of properties being special metaphysical parts of ordinary concrete things. They maintain that properties are abstracta in a realm apart, and that things are related to them. Hence the phrase 'relational ontology.' It seems to me, however, that on this view of properties and property-possession, ordinary particulars turn out to be what I will call 'nude particulars.'

Nude particulars are similar to, but not to be confused with, Gustav Bergmann's bare particulars or David Armstrong's thin particulars. Bare and thin particulars are constituents of ordinary or thick particulars. Nude particulars are not ontological constituents of anything. A nude particular is an ordinary particular all of whose properties are abstracta. Like bare particulars, nude particulars lack natures. Lacking natures, there is nothing about them that dictates which properties they have. This won't stop an R-ontologist from speaking of essential properties. He will say that an essential property of x is a property x has in every possible world in which it exists. He cannot say, however, that what grounds this circumstance is that ordinary particulars as he conceives them have natures in them or at them.

I maintain that (i) R-ontologists are committed to nude particulars, but that (ii) there are no such critters. Certainly, the meso-particulars that surround me now are not nude. My trusty coffee cup, for example, is blue at this time and in this place.

The cup is blue, and I see (with my eyes) that it is blue. This seeing is not a visio intellectualis, after all, a 'seeing' wth the 'eye of the mind,' as would befit the inspection of some colorless, atemporal, nonspatial, abstract Platonic object in a realm insulated from the flux and shove of the real order. It is a seeing with the eyes of the head. When I see the cup's being blue, I am not seeing a state of affairs that spans the abyss separating concreta from abstracta; I am seeing a state of affairs that is itself concrete.

Moreover, I see blue (or blueness), again with my eyes. (How could I see that the cup is blue without seeing blue?) It is therefore phenomenologically evident that at least some of the properties of my trusty cup are empirically detectable via ordinary outer perception. But they wouldn't be empirically detectable if they were abstract objects in a realm apart, a Platonic or quasi-Platonic topos ouranos. Empirical detection involves causation; abstracta, however, are causally inert. Therefore, at least some of a thing's properties are at it or in it, and in this sense ontological constituents of it. If so, R-ontology is mistaken.

The empirically detectable properties of an ordinary particular cannot be stripped from it and installed in a realm of abstracta. For then what you would have here below would be a nude particular.

You might object that I have made a travesty of the R-ontologist's position. After all, doesn't Loux in the bolded passage above imply that ordinary particulars have "character" where they are, namely, in the sensible world and that they are therefore not nude? If this is the response that is made to my first objection, then it triggers my

2. Duplication Objection

Suppose the R-ontologist grants that my cup has the character blue (or blueness) and other empirical features at the cup, and that this character can be seen with the eyes of the head, and is therefore not a denizen of a realm of abstracta separated by an ontological chasm from the realm of concreta. I will then ask what work abstract properties do. Why do we need them if the blueness and hardness and so on of the cup are already right here at or in the cup? What is the point of positing 'duplicates' of these empirical characters in a realm of abstracta? They are explanatorily otiose.

The R-ontologist appears to face a dilemma. Either he must say that my coffee cup is a nude particular in denial of the plain fact that the blueness of the cup is an empirically detectable feature at the cup and not a colorless abstract object in a realm apart; or, denying that the cup is nude, he must admit that his abstract properties are explanatorily idle and fit candidates for Occam's Razor.

3. Conclusion

Can we infer that C-ontology is in the clear? Not so fast! Loux brings powerful arguments against it, arguments to be considered in a separate post. My suspicion is that that both styles of ontology lead to insurmountable aporiai.

Gilson and the Avicennian-Thomistic Common Natures Argument

Chapter III of Etienne Gilson's Being and Some Philosophers is highly relevant to my ongoing discussion of common natures. Gilson appears to endorse the classic argument for the doctrine of common natures in the following passage (for the larger context see here):

Out of itself, animal is neither universal nor singular. Indeed, if, out of itself, it were universal, so that animality were universal qua animality, there could be no singular animal, but each and every animal would be a universal. If, on the contrary, animal were singular qua animal, there could be no more than a single animal, namely, the very singular to which animality belongs, and no other singular could be an animal. (77)

This passage contains two subarguments. We will have more than enough on our plates if we consider just the first. The first subargument, telescoped in the second sentence above, can be put as follows:

1. If animal has the property of being universal, then every animal would be a universal. But:

2. It is not the case that every animal is a universal. Therefore:

3. It is not the case that animal has the property of being universal.

This argument is valid in point of logical form, but are its premises true? Well, (2) is obviously true, but why should anyone think that (1) is true? It is surely not obvious that the properties of a nature must also be properties of the individuals of that nature.

There are two ways a nature N could have a property P. N could have P by including P within its quidditative content, or N could have P by instantiating P. There is having by inclusion and having by instantiation.

For example, 'Man is rational' on a charitable reading states that rationality is included within the content of the nature humanity. This implies that everything that falls under man falls under rational. Charitably interpreted, the sentence does not state that the nature humanity or the species man is rational. For no nature, as such, is capable of reasoning. It is the specimens of the species who are rational, not the species.

This shows that we must distinguish between inclusion and instantiation. Man includes rational; man does not instantiate rational.

Compare 'Man is rational' with 'Socrates is rational.' They are both true, but only if 'is' is taken to express different relatons in the two sentences. In the first it expresses inclusion; in the second, instantiation. The nature man does not instantiate rationality; it includes it. Socrates does not include rationality; he instantiates it.

The reason I balk at premise (1) is because it seems quite obviously to trade on a confusion of the two senses of 'is' lately distinguished. It confuses inclusion with instantiation. (1) encapuslates a non sequitur. It does not follow from a nature's being universal that everything having that nature is a universal. That every animal would be a universal would follow from humanity's being universal only if universality were included in humanity. But it is not: humanity instantiates universality. In Frege's jargon, universality is an Eigenschaft of humanity, not a Merkmal of it.

Since the first subargument fails, there is no need to examine the second. For if the first subargment fails, then the whole Avicennian-Thomist argument fails.

It’s a Running Argument

Dave Lull points us to The Too-Much-Running Myth Rises Again. Excerpt:

(1) One of the major pieces of evidence the group cites is a study that was presented at a conference over the summer. The WSJ description:

In a study involving 52,600 people followed for three decades, the runners in the group had a 19% lower death rate than nonrunners, according to the Heart editorial. But among the running cohort, those who ran a lot—more than 20 to 25 miles a week—lost that mortality advantage.

But here, from the actual abstract, is the part they never mention:

Cox regression was used to quantify the association between running and mortality after adjusting for baseline age, sex, examination year, body mass index, current smoking, heavy alcohol drinking, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, parental CVD, and levels of other physical activities.

What this means is that they used statistical methods to effectively "equalize" everyone's weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. But this is absurd when you think about it. Why do we think running is good for health? In part because it plays a role in reducing weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on (for more details on how this distorts the results, including evidence from other studies on how these statistical tricks hide real health benefits from much higher amounts of running, see my earlier blog entry). They're effectively saying, "If we ignore the known health benefits of greater amounts of aerobic exercise, then greater amounts of aerobic exercise don't have any health benefits."

Companion post: Running: Gain, No Pain

The Crisis of American Self-Government

Harvey Mansfield interviewed. Excerpt:

Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

Exactly right. As I say in "One Man, One Vote: A Dubious Principle":

Suppose you have two people, A and B. A is intelligent, well-informed, and serious. He does his level best to form correct opinions about the issues of the day. He is an independent thinker, and his thinking is based in broad experience of life. B, however, makes no attempt to become informed, or to think for himself. He votes as his union boss tells him to vote. Why should B's vote have the same weight as A's? Is it not self-evident that B's vote should not count as much as A's?

I think it is well-nigh self-evident. The right to vote cannot derive simply from the fact that one exists or has interests. Dogs and cats have interests, and so do children. But we don't grant children the right to vote. Why not? Presumably because they lack the maturity and good judgment necessary for casting an informed vote. Nor do we grant felons the right to vote despite their interests. Why should people who cannot wisely order their own lives be given any say in how society should be ordered?

Read the rest of that meaty post. It is like a red flag before a liberal bull(shitter).

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 1956

Mickey "Guitar" Baker died this last week at age 87. He is perhaps best known as one half of the Mickey and Sylvia duo whose Love is Strange was a hit in 1956. Also from '56:

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind

Elvis Presley, Love Me Tender

Doris Day, Que Sera Sera. It was a different world, muchachos.

Big Joe Turner, Corrine, Corrina. I don't remember hearing this in '56. Hell, I was only six years old. I remember the tune from the 1960 cover by Ray Peterson. Youtuber comments, which in general are the worst in the whole of cyberspace, on this one are good. There is a lovely version by Bob Dylan on his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, under the slightly different name, Corrina, Corrina.

The Mind’s Centrifugal Tendency

Meditation is a battle against the mind's centrifugal tendency. In virtue of its intentionality, mind is ever in flight from its center, so much so that many have denied that there is a center or a self. The aim of meditation is centering. To switch metaphors, the aim is to swim upstream to the thought-free source of thoughts. Compare Emerson: "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." Could there be a stream without a source? A wind blowing towards objects (Sartre) that blew from no direction and for no cause?

Changing metaphors once again: you say you like riding the wild horse of the mind into dispersal and diremption? Then do so, and see where it gets you. If self-loss in the manifold proves to be unsatisfactory, you may be a candidate for re-collection.

Restatement No Response

He who merely restates his position in the teeth of criticism has not responded to it.

Forgive

Forgive lest ye be unforgiven.

Running: Gain, No Pain

No pain to speak of, leastways. And I've been at it over 38 years. Your mileage may vary, as does Malcolm Pollack's who, in his Pain, No Gain, reports:

I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.

Mileage is indeed the key. Malcolm never ran far enough to experience what running is really about. He didn't take the first step. Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):

The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness. I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing. I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.

That's one hell of a first step. But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand
its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week. I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked. And then the real run begins. Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for yourself.

I don't move very fast these days. I do the old man shuffle. But I've got staying power. Completed a marathon at age 60. Enjoyed the hell out of last week's 10 K Turkey Trot. Surprisingly, the satisfactions of running are the same now as they were in fleeter days.

To avoid injuries, limit your running to two or three days a week and crosstrain on the other days. I lift weights, ride bikes, use elliptical trainers, hike, swim, and do water aerobics.

And don't forget: LSD (long slow distance) is better than POT (plenty of tempo).