On Private and Public Morality

Many liberals have the bad habit of confusing private and public morality.  They think that moral injunctions that make sense in private ought to be carried over into the public sphere.  Such liberals are dangerously confused.  There are those who, for example, take the Biblical injunction to "welcome the stranger" as a reason to turn a blind eye to illegal immigration.  Or consider the NT injunction to "turn the other cheek."

Although it is morally permissible for an individual to "turn the other cheek," "to resist not the evildoer," etc. in the letter and spirit of the New Testament, it is morally impermissible for government officials in charge of national defense and security to do the same. For they are responsible for people besides themselves. Consider the analogy of the pater familias. He cannot allow himself to be slaughtered if that would result in the slaughter of his spouse and children. He must, morally speaking, defend himself  and them. With a single person it is different. Such a person may (morally speaking) heed the advice Ludwig Wittgenstein gave to M. O'C. Drury: "If it ever happens that you get mixed up in hand-to-hand fighting, you must just stand aside and let yourself be massacred." (Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. R. Rhees, p. 149) That was presumably advice Wittgenstein gave himself while a combatant in World War I.  

It is a serious mistake, and one oft-made by liberals, to confuse the private and public spheres and the different moralities pertaining to each.

Imagine a society that implements a policy of not resisting (apprehending, trying, convicting, incarcerating, killing) rapists, murderers, foreign invaders, and miscreants generally. Such a society would seal its own death warrant and cease to function. It is a fact of human nature that people, in the main, behave tolerably well only under threat of punishment. People for the most part do not do the right thing because it is the right thing, but out of fear of  punishment. This is not pessimism, but realism, and is known to be true by all unprejudiced students of history and society.

As for turning the other cheek, it is a policy that works well in certain atypical circumstances. If a man has a well-formed conscience,  and is capable of feeling shame, then turning the other cheek in the face of his affront can achieve a result far superior to that achieved by replying in kind. Nonviolence can work. Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British may serve as an historical example. The Brits could be shamed and in any case Gandhi had no other means at his  disposal. But imagine what would happen if Israel turned the other cheek in the face of its Islamic enemies who would blow it off the face of the map at the first opportunity?

Once your enemy has reduced you to the status of a pig or a monkey fit only to be slaughtered, then there is no way to reach him, shame him, or persuade him by acts of forebearance and kindness. You must resist him, with deadly force if necessary, if you wish to preserve your existence. And even if you in particular do not care to preserve your existence, if you are a government official charged with a defense function, then you are morally obliged to resist with as much deadly force as is necessary to stop the attacker even if that means targeting the attacker's civilian population.

But is it not better to suffer wrong than to inflict it, as Socrates maintained? Would it not be better to perish than to defend one's life by taking life? Perhaps, but only if the underlying metaphysics and
soteriology are true. If the soul is immortal, and the phenomenal world is of no ultimate concern — being a vale of tears, a place through which we temporarily sojourn on our way to our true home —
then the care of the soul is paramount and to suffer wrong is better than to inflict it.

The same goes for Christianity which, as Nietzsche remarks, is "Platonism for the people." If you are a Christian, and look beyond this world for your true happiness, then you are entitled to practice an austere morality in your private life. But you are not entitled to impose that morality and metaphysics on others, or demand that the State codify that morality and metaphysics in its laws and policies.

For one thing, it would violate the separation of Church and State. More importantly, the implementation of Christian morality would lead to the destruction of the State and the State's ability to secure life, liberty, and property — the three Lockean purposes for which we have a state in the first place. And bear in mind that a part of the  liberty the State protects is the liberty to practice one's religion or no religion.

There is no use denying that the State is a violent and coercive entity. To function at all in pursuit of its legitimate tasks of securing life, liberty, and property, it must be able to make war against external enemies and impose discipline upon internal malefactors. The violence may be justified, but it is violence  nonethless. To incarcerate a person, for example, is to violate his liberty; it is to do evil to him, an evil necessary for a greater good that can be attained in no other way.

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.] There is a tension
     between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.

As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug-smuggler or a human-trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who apparently cannot comprehend the simple distinctions I have tried to set forth.

Religion Without Metaphysics?

Whether or not theistic or any spiritualistic metaphysics is true, we can aspire, seek the truth, pursue the good, love our neighbors, be kind, do no harm, respect, revere, cherish, be grateful . . . honor our commitments, follow our consciences . . . guard our thoughts, weaken the ego, live by a code, deny the self, seek the higher, thirst after justice and righteousness . . . .

Why then do we need doctrine? This is a question we need to ask.

Does Classical Theism Require Haecceitism?

Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? 

Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as follows.

A haecceity is a property H of x such that: (i) H is essential to x; (ii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in the actual world; (iii) nothing distinct from x exemplifies H in any metaphysically possible world.

So if there is a property of Socrates that is his haecceity, then there is a property that individuates him, and indeed individuates him across all times and worlds at which he exists: it is a property that he must have, that nothing distinct from him has, and that nothing distinct from him could have. Call this property Socrateity. Being abstract and necessary, Socrateity is obviously distinct from Socrates, who is concrete and contingent. Socrateity exists in every world, but is exemplified (instantiated) in only some worlds. What's more, Socrateity exists at every time in every world that is temporally qualified, whereas Socrates exist in only some worlds and only at some times in the worlds in which he exists.

Now suppose you are a classical theist.  Must you accept haecceitism (as defined above) in virtue of being a classical thesist?  I answer in the negative.  Franklin Mason answers in the affirmative.  In a comment on an earlier post, Mason gives this intriguing argument into which I have interpolated numerals for ease of reference.

[1] When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals he would get.  Thus [2] he didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.  Thus [3] there must be a way to individuate all possible individuals that in no way depends upon their actual existence. [4] Such a thing is by definition a haecceity. Thus [5] there are haecceities.

I don't anticipate any disagreement with Mason as to what an haecceity is.  We are both operating with the Plantingian notion.  We disagree, however, on (i) whether there are any haecceities and (ii) whether classical theism is committed to them. In this post I focus on (ii).  In particular, I will explain why I do not find Mason's argument compelling.

My reservations concern premise [1].  There is a sense in which it is true that when God created Socrates, he knew which individual he would get.  But there is also a sense in which it is not true.  So we need to make a distinction.  We may suppose, given the divine omniscience, that before God created Socrates he had before his mind a completely determinate description, down to the very last detail, of the individual he was about to bring into existence.  In this sense, God knew precisely which individual he would get before bringing said individual into existence.  Now either this description is pure or it is impure.

A pure description is one that includes no proper names, demonstratives or other indexicals, or references to singular properties.  Otherwise the description is impure.  Thus 'snubnosed, rationalist philosopher married to Xanthippe' is an impure description because it includes the proper name 'Xanthippe.'  'Snubnosed, rationalist, married  philosopher,' by contrast, is pure.  (And this despite the fact that 'married' is a relational predicate.)  Pure descriptions are qualitative in that they include no references to specific individuals.  Impure descriptions are nonqualitative in that they do include references to specific individuals.

Now if God has before his mind a complete pure description of the individual he wills to create then it could apply to precisely one individual after creation without being restricted to any precise one.  (Cf. Barry Miller, "Future Individuals and Haecceitism," Review of Metaphysics 45, September 1991, p. 14)  This is a subtle distinction but an important one.  It is possible that Socrates have an indiscernible twin.  So the complete description 'snubnosed, rationalist philosopher, etc.' could apply to precisely one individual without applying to Socrates.  This is because his indiscernible twin would satisfy it just as well as he does.  The description would then apply to precisely one individual without being restricted to any precise one.  So there is a clear sense, pace Mason, in which  God, prior to creation, would not know which individual he would get.  Prior to creation, God knows that there will be an individual satisfying a complete description.  But until the individual comes into existence, he won't know which individual this will be.

Creation is not the bestowal of existence upon a a pre-existent, fully-formed, wholly determinate essence.  It is not the actualization of a wholly determinate mere possible.  There is no individual essence or haecceity prior to creation.  Creation is the creation ex nihilo of a a new individual.  God creates out of nothing, not out of pre-existent individual essences or pre-existent mere possibles.  Thus the very individuality of the individual first comes into being in the creative act.  Socrates' individuality and haecceity do not antedate (whether temporally or logically) his actual existence.

Mason would have to be able rationally to exclude this view of creation, and this view of the relation of existence and individuality, for his argument to be compelling.  As it is, he seems merely to assume that they are false.

Could God, before creation, have before his mind a complete impure description, one that made reference to the specific individual that was to result from the creative act?  No, and this for the simple reason that before the creative act that individual would not exist.  And therein lies the absurdity of Plantingian haecceities.  The property of identity-with-Socrates  is a nonqualitative haecceity that make essential reference to Socrates.  Surely it is absurd to suppose that that this 'property' exists at times and in possible worlds at which Socrates does not exist.  To put it another way, it is absurd to suppose that this 'property' could antedate (whether temporally or logically) the existence of Socrates.

We are now in a position to see why Mason's argument is not compelling.  If [1] is true, then [2] doesn't follow from it.  And if [2] follows from [1], then [1] is false.  Thus [1] conflates two distinct propositions:

1a.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which pure complete descriptions would be satisfied.

1b.  When God created the world, he knew precisely which individuals would exist.

(1a) is true, but it does not entail

2.  God didn't need to have those very individuals in front of him to know which ones they were.

(1b) entails (2), but (1b) is false.

I conclude that classical theism does not entail haecceitism.  One can be such a theist without accepting haecceities.

Hypostatization and Plural Reference

In Plural Reference, Franklin Mason writes that "Vallicella is often a delight, but upon occasion he annoys me to no end."  Apparently I remind him of a "philosophical pugilist," a former colleague perhaps, who is obnoxious in the manner of all-too-many analytic philosophers. (One such told me once that if one is not willing to become a bit of an asshole in a philosophical discussion one is not taking it seriously.)  Now I probably irritate Mason in a number of ways since I am an outspoken conservative while he is a liberal.  But the proximate source of his umbrage is a comment I made in a quick and polemical  entry entitled In Debt We Trust.  There I wrote:

One of the people interviewed [in the movie In Debt We Trust] states that "Society preaches the gospel of shopping." That is the sort of nonsense one expects to hear from libs and lefties. First of all, there is no such thing as society. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of hypostatization.

Mason protests:

When one begins a sentence with "society", one does not thereby assent to the existence of some bizarre, spatially disconnected entity whose parts are people. (Well, very few mean any such thing, and those who do are invariably deeply misguided philosophers. Plain folk never mean any such thing. Philosophers hardly ever mean such a thing. ) One uses "society" to refer plurally to, well, a plurality of people.

I sympathize with Mason's irritation.  I once wrote a post in which I approvingly quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's great essay "Self-Reliance" the line, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."  Tony Flood, the anarcho-capitalist, took me to task for presupposing that there is some  entity 'society' above and beyond its members.  But of course I presupposed  no such thing and I was annoyed by Flood's objection.  Clearly, what Emerson meant, and what I approved of, was the idea that the members of society engage in a sort of tacit conspiracy with one another to the end of enforcing conformity.

Our nominalist friend 'Ockham' pulled the same thing on me once.  I used a sentence featuring the word 'property' and he took my use of that term as committing me to properties in some realist acceptation of the term.  It annoyed me and struck me as a perverse refusal to take in the plain sense of what I wrote. Suppose I say, of a certain person, 'She has many fine attributes.'  That is an ontologically noncommittal form of words and as such neutral in respect of the issue that divides nominalists and realists.  

I submit, however, that Mason goes too far when he confidently asserts that "Plain folk never mean any such thing."  I strongly suspect that the lady I was quoting never in her life thought about the issue now under discussion.  She was most likely just repeating some liberal boilerplate she had picked up second-hand.  She was probably confused and meant nothing definite when she said, "Society preaches the gospel of shopping."  If she meant nothing definite, then Mason cannot confidently claim that "Plain folk never mean any such thing."  And precisely  because the lady meant nothing definite it is important to point out that one commits the fallacy of hypostatization if one assumes that for every substantive there is a corresponding substance.  If I pinned the lady down, she would probably deny that there is some entity distinct from every member of society, an entity that preaches the gospel of shopping.  But then I would ask her what she did mean.  Did she mean that every member of society preaches said gospel?  Or only that some do?  I would get her to accept the latter.  And then I would get her to admit that she was allowing those few people, advertisers, for example, to influence her.  By showing her that there was no such thing as 'society,' I would be 'empowering' her — to use a squishy liberal word — I would make her see that she was not confronting some irresistible Power, but that she had the power to resist the siren song of the advertisers.

The reason this is important is that liberals have a tendency to remove responsibility from the agent and displace it onto something  external to the agent such as 'society.'  Thus 'society' made the  punk kill the pharmacist, etc.

So, contra Mason, many people do confusedly think of society as some irresistible Power over against them to which blame can be assigned.  It would be a mistake to think that no one commits the fallacy of hypostatization. 

The topics of plural reference and plural predication are very difficult.  Probably my best post on these topics is Irreducibly Plural Predication: 'They Are Surrounding the Building.'  See also Collective Inconsistency and Plural Predication, A Problem with the Multiple Relations Approach to Plural Predication, The Hatfields and the McCoys, and I Need to Study Plural Predication.

Site Stats

MavPhil readership continues to grow.  It is not uncommon now to have spikes into the 1300-1600 range.  Yesterday saw 1399 page views.  Some of its driven by the social media, Facebook and Twitter mainly.  I am approaching the 1000 page view per diem threshhold.  Not bad, given the forbidding topics I tackle in these pages. 

I owe Joe Carter of First Things a hat tip for his linkage.  Thanks, Joe!

The First Rule of Liberalism

Government failure always justifies more government.

Excerpt from this James Taranto piece:

It's a common refrain among those who lust to increase government's size and power: Every failed measure justifies more of the same. Poverty programs make it harder to escape poverty? We need more poverty programs! Racial preferences heighten racial division? We need more racial preferences! And a diversity manual for every janitor in the country! When ObamaCare ends up driving the costs of medicine up and the quality and availability down, you can bet the people who created that monstrosity will claim it failed only because it didn't go far enough.

Let's generalize this into the First Rule of Liberalism: Government failure always justifies more government. As Obama said today, complaining about Republican pressure to cut spending: "I'd rather be talking about stuff that everybody welcomes–like new programs." Fortunately for the country, the voters don't always agree.

Carpe Diem!

I quoted Jim Morrison on the eve of the 40th anniversary of his death: "The future's uncertain, and the end is always near." This morning I discovered that Rob Grill, lead singer of The Grassroots, has passed on.  Their first top ten hit, "Live forToday," made the charts in the fabulous and far-off Summer of Love (1967).  The lyrics are laden with the '60s Zeitgeist and express  something true and valuable that continues to resonate with many of us who were young in those days.

Here is a delightful clip in which none other than Jimmy Durante introduces the boys — "They don't have a manager, they have a gardener" — singing (or rather lip-syncing) their signature number. 

Carpe diem.  And while you're at it, carpe noctem.

Being as the Apotheosis of the Copula: Frege’s Eliminativism in his Dialogue with Pünjer on Existence

Some time before 1884, Gottlob Frege had a discussion about existence with the Protestant theologian Bernard Pünjer (1850-1885). A record of the dialogue was found in Frege's Nachlass, and an English translation is available in Gottlob Frege: Posthumous Writings, eds. Hans Hermes et al., University of Chicago Press, 1979. Herewith, some critical commentary on part of the dialogue.

1. We have often discussed  'thin' or deflationary approaches to Being or existence. On a thin approach, existence is not a metaphysical or ontological topic, but a merely logical one. Consider the general   existential, 'Cats exist.' For Frege, the content of such a general existential does not lie in 'exist' but "in the form of the particular judgment." (63) Frege uses the good old 19th century term 'judgment' (Urteil) but the point could also be put, with minor adjustments, in terms of  indicative sentences, statements, and propositions. Particular judgments are the I- and O-judgments of the Square of Opposition: those of the form Some S is P and Some S is not P.

Frege's contention, then, is that the content of affirmative general existentials lies in the logical form: Some S is P. But how do we put 'Cats exist' into this form? We need a concept superordinate to the   concept cat, say, the concept mammal. We can then write, 'Some mammals are cats.' If we acquiesce in the natural anti-Meinongian presupposition that there are no nonexistent items, then 'Cats exist' is true if and only if  'Some mammals are cats' is true.

This translation illustrates what Frege means when he says that the content of affirmative general existentials does not lie in 'exist'  but in the [logical] form of the particular judgment. The logical form is Some S is P, which is just a bit of syntax, whence we are to conclude that 'exists' is bare of semantic content, whether sense or reference, and merely functions as a stylistic variant of 'Some ___ is    —.'

Those who take a deflationary tack, therefore, can be dubbed someists.  We who resist deflation can then be called existentialists.

By showing that 'exist(s)' and cognates are eliminable, Frege thinks he has eliminated those hoary metaphysical subjects Being or existence which fascinate Thomists, Heideggerians, and such other 'thicks' as your humble correspondent.

2. But does Frege's schedule of elimination really work? We saw how 'Cats exist' can be rendered as 'Some mammals are cats.' But what about 'Mammals exist'? This in turn needs elimination. Assuming that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents, this can be translated salva veritate as 'Some animals are mammals.' And so on up the tree of Porphyry, or, if you deem that to be barking up the  wrong tree, then supply some other scheme of classification. 'Animals exist' becomes 'Some living things are animals.' 'Living things exist'  becomes 'Some bodies are living things.' 'Bodies exist' gets translated as 'Some substances are bodies.'

Clearly, we either now or very soon must call a halt to the ascent by resting in "a concept superordinate to all concepts." (p. 63) Superordinate to all concepts except itself, of course. And what concept might that be? Such a concept must have maximal extension and so will have minimal intension. It will be devoid of all content,  abstracting as it does from all differences. Frege suggests 'something identical with itself' as the maximally superordinate concept. 'There are men' and 'Men exist' thus get rendered as 'Something identical  with itself is a man.' (63)

3. In ordinary language, the role of maximally superordinate concept, a "concept without content," (63) is played by an hypostatization of the copula. In 'The sea is blue' the content of the predicate lies in   'blue': 'is' is contentless. But from the copulative 'is'  we form a quasi-concept — 'being' — without content since its  extension is unlimited. This makes it possible to say: men = men  that have being; 'There are men' is the same as 'Some men are' or 'Something that has being is a man.' Thus here the real content of  what is predicated does not lie in 'has being' but in the form of  the particular judgment. Faced with an impasse, language has simply created the word 'being' in order to enable the form of the particular judgment to be employed. When philosophers speak of  'absolute being,' that is really an apotheosis of the copula. (64)

This is an excellent statement of the thin or deflationary or eliminativist line: there is in reality no such 'thing' as Being or existence. Being (as a metaphysical topic) is a result of an illicit reification or hypostatization of the copula, an apotheosis (deification) of the copula.

4. Now why can't I accept this? We saw that to eliminate existence in all cases and make it disappear into the logical form Some S is P we must ascend a classificatory tree at the apex of which is a concept or "quasi-concept" unlimited in extension and empty in intension. This is the concept a being, an existent, something self-identical. Using this concept we can translate salva veritate every sentence of the form Fs exist into a sentence of the form Some being is an F. The availability of such translations seems to strip 'exist(s)' and cognates of all semantic content.

The problem with this was appreciated by Aristotle long ago when he argued that Being is not a summum genus, a highest genus, or a genus generallisimum, a most general genus. (See Metaphysics 998b22 and   Posterior Analytics 92b14). Being, as that which makes beings be, does not abstract from the differences among beings. But a concept  superordinate to every quidditative concept, which is what the concept a being and the concept something self-identical are, does abstract from the differences among beings. To put it another way, Being, as that which constitutes beings as beings, is not superordinate to every  quidditative concept since it belongs to a different order entirely, the non-quidditative order of existence. The Being of a being is its thatness, not its whatness.

The mistake that Frege makes is to think that Being is a highest quidditative determination, a highest what-determination. The concept a being, ens, is such a concept, but this concept is not Being, esse.

In sum: Frege's elimination of existential judgments by translation into copulative judgments works only if Being (esse, das Sein) is a maximally abstract quidditative concept, the concept a being (ens, das  Seiende). But this is precisely what Being is not. Ergo, etc.

‘X is the New Y’

We could call 'X is the new Y' a sentential template of laziness.  Are you sick of it yet?    (Snowclone has been introduced as a terminus technicus for the genus of which 'X is the new Y' is a species.)  If not, try these on for size:

1. Casey Anthony is the new O. J. Simpson.
2. Obama is the new Carter.
3. Yellow is the new green. (From an article urging the recycling of human urine.)
4. Michelle Bachmann is the new Sarah Palin. (The latest object of leftist sexism.)
5. Fifty is the new forty. 
6. Blue is the new pink. (Blue-staters are lefties.)
7. Blue is the new red. (Blue-staters are crypto-commies.)
8. Asians are the new Jews. 
9. Radical Muslims are the new Communists. (If Communism was the main threat to civilization in the 20th century, then radical Islam is the main threat in the 21st century.)
10. Gold is the new cash.
11. God is the new devil. 
12. Black is the new chrome. (As in the latest Harley-Davidson models.)
13. Flourescent is the new incandescent.
14. Romney is the new McCain. (A wishy-washy go-along-to-get-along Republican.)
15. Anthony Weiner is the new Eliot Spitzer. 
16. English is the new Latin. (The international language of scholarship and science.)   

Were the Greatest Philosophers Theists or Atheists?

To answer the title question, we must first answer the logically prior question as to who the greatest philosophers were. But this presupposes an answer to the equally vexing question of who counts as  a philosopher. Heidegger published two fat volumes on Nietzsche, but dismissed Kierkegaard as a mere "religious writer." Others will go him one better, dismissing both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche — and Heidegger as well. Was Aquinas a philosopher?  Or was he merely a brilliant man who used philosophical tools to shore up beliefs of an extraphilosophical provenience, beliefs that he wouldn't have abandoned even if he hadn't able to find philosophical justifications for them?

Note also that the question as to who counts as a gen-u-ine philosopher presupposes an answer to the hairy and hoary question as to what philosophy is. 

In any case, here is my ranking of the philosophers that made it onto a BBC shortlist from a few years ago. The ranking is mine; the list is from the BBC.

1. Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
2. Aristotle (384-322 BC)
3. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)
4. René Descartes (1596-1650)
5. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
6. Socrates (c. 470-399 BC)
7. Benedictus de Spinoza  (1632-1677)
8. David Hume (1711-1776)
9. Epicurus (341-270 BC)
10. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
11. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
12. Arthur  Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
13. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
14. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
15. Karl Marx (1818-1883)
16. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970)
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
18. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
19. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
20.  Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994)

Here are my criteria in order of importance:

1. Truth of the philosopher's conclusions
2. Belief in reason's power to discover some of the ultimate truth
3. Rigor of argumentation
4. Appreciation of the limits of reason
5. Depth and centrality of the problems addressed
6. Breadth and systematicity of vision
7. Originality
8. Long-term influence

The first seven philosophers on my list are great philosophers, the rest are important but not great. Kierkegaard, for example, though original and influential, and (too) appreciative of the limits of reason falls short on the other criteria.

It goes without saying that my ordering of the philosophers, my criteria, and their ordering are highly subjective. They reflect my interests, my biases, and my own philosophical conclusions. For example, my primary interest in a philosopher is not in his literary merit. If that is your primary interest, then you will probably rank Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ahead of Kant. Indeed, if you do not, then you have very poor taste!

You will notice that I am biased toward the rationalists. Thus all the philosophers I call great are either rationalists, or like Aristotle and Kant, have a strong rationalist side to their thinking. And when I   list truth as my numero uno criterion, it is clear that that is truth as I take it to be.

On the score of truth,  Nietzsche really falls short. For not only is there little if any philosophical truth in his writings, the poor soul denies the very existence of truth.

When one studies the first seven on the list, one actually learns something about the world. But when one reads Nietzsche and (later) Wittgenstein, one learns highly original and fascinating opinions that have little or no chance of being true. One learns from them, and from some others on the list, how NOT to do philosophy. But that too is something worth knowing! So they have their place and their use.

Now to our question whether the greatest philosophers were theists or atheists. The greatest philosophers on my list are Plato, Aristotle,  Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Socrates, and Spinoza. All of these are theists  of one sort or another.  But even if Spinoza is excluded, that leaves six out of seven. And if you argue that Aristotle's Prime Mover is not God in any serious sense, then I've still got five out of seven.

If you say I rigged my list so that theists come out on top, I will deny the charge and argue that I used independent criteria (listed above). But if you disagree my assessment, I will consider it par for the course.

C. J. F. Williams’ Analysis of ‘I Might Not Have Existed’

There are clear cases in which 'exist(s)' functions as a second-level predicate, a predicate of properties or concepts or propositional functions or cognate items, and not as a predicate of individuals. The   affirmative general existential 'Horses exist,' for example, is best understood as making an instantiation claim: 'The concept horse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

This sort of analysis is well-nigh mandatory in the case of negative general existentials such as 'Flying horses do not exist.' Here we have a true sentence that cannot possibly be about flying horses for the simple reason that there aren't any. (One can make a Meinongian move here, but if possible we should try to get by without doing so.) On a reasonable parsing,  'Flying horses do not exist'  is about the concept flying horse, and says of this concept that it has no instances.

But what about singular existentials? Negative singular existentials like 'Pegasus does not exist' pose no problem. We may analyze it as, 'It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is the winged   horse of Greek mythology.' Or we can take a page from Quine and say that nothing pegasizes. What we have done in effect is to treat the singular term 'Pegasus' as a predicate and read the sentence as a   denial that this predicate applies to anything.

Problems arise, however, with affirmative singular existentials such as 'I exist' and with sentences like 'I might not have existed' which  are naturally read as presupposing the meaningfulness of 'I exist' and thus of uses of 'exists' as a first-level predicate. Thus, 'I might not have existed' is construable in terms of the operator 'It might not have been the case that ____' operating upon 'I exist.'

C.J.F. Williams, following in the footsteps of Frege, maintains the draconian thesis that all meaningful uses of 'exist(s)' are second-level. He must therefore supply an analysis of the true sentence 'I might not have existed' that does not require the meaningfulness of 'I exist.' His suggestion is that

     . . . my assertion that I might not have existed is the assertion
     that there is some property . . . essential to me, which I alone
     possess, and which might never have been uniquely instantiated . .
     (What is Existence?, Oxford 1981, p. 104)

Williams is suggesting that for each individual x there is a property H such that (i) H is essential to x in the sense that x cannot exist  except as instantiating H; and (ii) H, if instantiated, is instantiated by exactly one individual. Accordingly, to say that x  might not have existed is to say that H might not have been instantiated. And to say that x exists is to say that H is instantiated.

This analysis will work only if the right properties are available. What is needed are essentially individuating properties. Suppose Ed is the fastest marathoner. Being the fastest marathoner distinguishes Ed from everything  else, but it does not individuate him since it is not bound up with Ed's identity that he be the fastest marathoner. Ed can be Ed without being the fastest marathoner. So Ed's existence cannot be equivalent to, let alone idenctical with, the instantiation of the property of being the fastest marathoner since this is an accidental property of anything that possesses it, whereas the existence of an individual must be essential to it. After all, without existence a thing is nothing at all! 

On the other hand, Ed's existence is not equivalent to his instantiation of any old essential property such as being human since numerous individuals possess the property whereas the existence of an individual is unique to it.

What is needed is a property that Ed alone has and that Ed alone has in every possible world in which he exists. Such a property will be essentially individuating: it will individuate Ed in every possible world in which Ed exists, one of these being the actual world.

Williams suggests the property of having sprung from sperm cell S and ovum O. Presumably Ed could not have existed without this origin, and anything possessing this origin is Ed. The idea, then, is that the   existence of Ed is the instantiation of this property.

The property in question, however, is one that Michael Loux would call 'impure': it makes essential reference to an individual or individuals, in this case to S and O. Since S and O each exist, the   question arises as to how their existence is to be analyzed.

For an analysis like that of Williams to work, what is needed is a  property that does not refer to or presuppose any existing individual,  a property that somehow captures the haecceity of Ed but without presupposing the existence of an individual. If there were such a haecceity property H, then one could say that Ed's existence just is H's being instantiated.

But as I argue in tedious detail in A Paradigm Theory of Existence and in this post such haecceity properties are creatures of darkness. That is one of  the reasons I reject Frege-style theories of existence.

Existence, real pound-the-table existence, belongs to individuals.  The attempt to 'kick it upstairs' and make it a property of properties or concepts or propositional functions is completely wrongheaded, pace such luminaries as Frege, Russell, and their epigoni.