Maverick Philosopher – Page 715 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Leftism and Islamism are the two main threats we face. (Sorry, Al, your global warming is about as much a threat to us as your marital cooling.) Both threats are totalitarian and the threat is 'synergistic' inasmuch as leftists tolerate and enable militant Islam, which is obviously inimical to their modus vivendi, all the while displaying the most vicious intolerance of Christianity which is little or no threat to them. I develop this theme in What Explains the Hard Left's Toleration of Militant Islam?

To help you think clearly about these important matters, I recommend Dissecting Leftism and Jihad Watch.

The Trouble With Larry

I share Steve Burton's misgivings about the work of Lawrence Auster. We need a broad coalition to defeat leftists and Islamists. A certain amount of intramural squabbling is to be expected and may even be healthy, but not if it ramps up to internecine warfare.

The Existence of Infinite Sets

A reader asked whether one can prove that there are actually infinite sets. Well, let's see.

It occurs to me that 'actually infinite set' is a pleonastic expresson. If there are infinite sets, then they are actually infinite, such that a potentially infinite set would be no set at all. For if there are mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets at all, then they are quite definite objects whose identity conditions are supplied by the Axiom of Extensionality: two sets are the same if and only they have all the same members. A mathematical set is not exhausted by its membership — it is not a mere plurality — since it is a one to their many; nevertheless, sets are rendered determinate by their members. (Let us for the moment not worry about singletons and the null set which give rise to their own difficulties.)

It is worth noting that in Georg Cantor's oft-quoted definition, a set (Menge) is a collection of "definite and separate objects." (Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Tranfinite Numbers, sec. 1) If the members of a set are definite and separate, then the same is true of the set itself. We could say that a math. set inherits its determinacy from the determinacy of its members.

My point is that, if there are mathematical sets at all, then there is nothing potential, indeterminate, incomplete, or unfinished about them. Each such set is a definite single item distinct from each of its members and from all of them. It is a one-over-many. So if there are any infinite sets, then they are actually infinite sets, which is to say that talk of 'actually infinite sets' is redundant.

So our question becomes, Can one prove that there are infinite sets?

I don't know if one can prove it, but one can give an argument. (If a proof is a valid deductive argument the premises of which are self-evident, then damn little can be proven. In particular, the axioms of ZFC are far from self-evident, not that set theorists claim self-evidence for them. Is it self-evident that a null set exists? Hardly.)

Here is an argument, where 'set' is short for mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) set.

1. There are sets.

2. There are infinitely many natural numbers: no finite cardinal is the number of natural numbers. Therefore,

3. If the natural numbers form a set, then they form an infinite set. (1, 2)

4. The natural numbers form a set. Therefore,

5. The natural numbers form an infinite set. (3, 4) Therefore,

6. There exists an infinite set. (5)

This is a valid argument, and it renders reasonable its conclusion. But it does not prove its conclusion unless there are proofs for its controversial premises (1) and (4). I argued for (1) in Sets, Pluralities, and the Axiom of Pair. But what is the argument for (4)? Why must we think of the natural numbers as forming a set?

But Is It True?

Peter and I were having lunch with a pretty lady yesterday. While recounting some paranormal experiences, he expressed doubt as to whether they were true. The lady, quite sympathetic to the experiences and their contents, but having come under the influence of the PoMo crowd, piped up, "There is no truth." Peter shot back, "So it is true that there is no truth?"

Peter's response was 'knee-jerk,' reflexive, not reflective. He didn''t need to reflect. His was a stock response, but none the worse for being stock or easily come by. It is a prepared line that you should all have at the ready when confronted with PoMo nonsense. Not that it will do you much good with the PoMo crowd.

The probative force of Peter's riposte is devastating. What's amazing, though, is that the Pomo types are not moved by it. I think this shows that truth is not their concern. Something else is, power perhaps. It is no surprise that leftism is alive and well within the precincts of PoMo. I'd have to think about it some more, but 'conservative post-modernist' smacks of being an oxymoron.

Let S be a declarative sentence. Then surely

E. 'S' is true iff S.

The equivalence schema (E) doesn't say much. But what it says suffices to refute the claim that there is no truth. For anyone who asserts 'There is no truth' makes an assertion which is equivalent to "'There is no truth' is true." And so truth comes back into the picture. Truth, she's a wily bitch. Drive her out of the front door, she comes in through the back. And I don't think it matters how minimalist is your theory of truth. My argument does not assume that truth is a metaphysically substantive property. Even if no property at all corresponds to the predicate ' is true,' that predicate has a sense. If it had no sense, then (E) would be gibberish, like

E*. 'S' is schmue iff S.

I'd have to think about it some more, but it looks as if the equivalence schema by itself suffices to refute the PoMo nonsense that there is no truth. For even if there is no property of truth, and truth is merely the sense of the predicate 'is true,' that sense cannot be denied. It's always and necessarily along for the ride.

Does Sincere Belief in an Afterlife Entail Religious Zealotry?

Spencer Case e-mails:

Greetings from Afghanistan. I’d very much like to hear your response to a sketch of an argument I’m developing. It goes as follows:

1. Suppose an afterlife is obtainable based on one’s performance in this life. If this afterlife is as I understand it, it must have an infinite value while all the goods in this life have only finite values. In fact, the value of afterlife goods (as I clumsily name them) must be infinite on two planes: quantitative and qualitative; quantitative because the duration of the reward is infinite, qualitative because, I assume—and I think, based on some recent blog posts of yours I’ve read, you would agree—no mortal goods, or accumulation of them, can be qualitatively better than the eternal goods to be found in the afterlife, even when we do not consider duration (this not the case with Islamic fundamentalists, who are promised virgins. But let that pass). Perhaps there is even a punitive afterlife with similar disvalue.

I agree with this conception of the afterlife. To put it in a slightly different way, the goods of this life are vanishing quantities axiologically speaking as compared to the goods of the afterlife as portrayed in sophisticated conceptions. (We agree to set aside crude conceptions such as we find in popular Islam: endless disporting with black-eyed virgins, getting to do there all the sensual things that are forbidden here, etc.)

2. If this ranking system is correct, it is hard to see how it could ever be rational for one to pursue any set of mortal goods—no matter how well they rank on the finite scale—when one could spend the same time and resources in the pursuit of the afterlife goods or avoiding afterlife evils, which are both endless in duration and of infinitely great quality. If extreme fasts are pleasing to God, and increase my chances of obtaining salvation by a tiny bit, then the rational thing for me to do is to live in such an ascetic state for as long as possible, unless it prevents me from doing other activities that could do even more to promote my own salvation.

Well, Spencer, you have put your finger on a genuine and serious problem, a problem I will rephrase in my own way. If (i) this world and its finite goods is soon to pass away, and if (ii) one sincerely believes that there is a world to come the value of whose goods infinitely surpasses the values of the goods here below, and if (iii) whether or not one participates in this Higher Life or is excluded from it (either by being sent to the Other Place or by being simply annihilated at death) depends on how one lives in this world, then how can it be rational to pursue mortal goods beyond what is necessary for living in accordance with the precepts of one's religion? The rational course would be to orient all one's activities to the achievement of the afterlife goal.

For example, if a young person is a Roman Catholic and sincerely believes the teachings of his church, especially as regards what are called the Last Things, and this person is free of such encumbrances as children or aged parents to care for, and has the health and other qualifications necessary to join a monastery, then why doesn't the person do so, and join the most rigorous monastery to be found? Wouldn't that be the most rational course of action given (i) the end in view, (ii) one's beliefs about this end, and (iii) one's beliefs about the means for securing this end?

Converts often follow this course. Unlike those who have been brought up in a faith, they are seldom lukewarm. They have found the truth with a majuscule 'T' (they think) and their authenticity demands that they act on it. Thomas Merton, for example, after renouncing his worldly life and joining the RC church was not content to be a good practicing Catholic, or become a parish priest even; no, he had to go all the way and join not just any monastic order but the Trappists! One can appreciate the 'logic' to it. And then there is Edith Stein, the brilliant Jewish assistant of Edmund Husserl. She was not content to convert to Catholicism; she abandoned her academic career and all the usual worldly blandishments (sex, love, children, travel, etc.) to spend the rest of life behind the walls of a strict Carmelite convent until the Nazis murdered her at Auschwitz.

I hope the conversion 'logic' is clear: if in a few short years we will be pitched head first into Kingdom Come, then pursuing and fretting over the baubles of this life is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Let's note en passant that the same 'logic' is found in the thinking of adherents to nonreligious ideologies. Thousands of young people, some of them among the best and the brightest, sacrificed their lives to the Communist illusion in the 20th century. They wasted their lives in pursuit of a fata morgana, while at the same time contributing unintentionally and indirectly to the murder of over 100 million people.

3. Anyone who pursues only afterlife goods in this way is a paradigm case of a religious zealot.

This formulation needs improvement. Merton and Stein did not pursue ONLY afterlife goods. They pursued this-worldly goods too but only insofar as they were instrumental to the achievement of afterlife goods. (I ignore Merton's lapses.) A better formulation is as follows:

3*. Anyone who pursues afterlife goods primarily, and this-worldy goods only insofar as they are instrumental in the achievement of afterlife goods, is a religious zealot.

I can accept (3*), but I would add that being a zealot is not necessarily bad, despite the fact that the word generally carries a pejorative connotation. Aren't we all legitimately zealous when it comes to the preservation of our lives and the lives of those animals and humans in our care? Suppose Al Gore is right, and global warming is about to do us all in, then GW zealotry would be justified would it not?

4. So, accepting these very basic religious propositions makes one rationally committed to religious zealotry and denying our normal reasons for acting.

I don't think your conclusion follows in quite the way you intend it. For one thing, you seem to be assuming that zealotry as such is bad. But surely not all zealotry is bad. To modify a saying of Barry Goldwater: Zealotry in the defense of liberty is no vice! (He had 'extremism' where I have 'zealotry.') You may also be assuming that the religious claims are false. Suppose they are true. Then one would have a good reason for denying/modifying our normal reasons for acting. (The same would hold in the case of nonreligious ideologies.) A 'normal' person, if if he is a practicing adherent of a religion, pursues all sorts of pleasures and diversions which do not advance him toward his spiritual goal, but rather, in many cases, impede his realization of it. The 'normal' Buddhist, for example, does not carry the precept "Conquer desire and aversion!" to the point where he eats whatever is put on his plate. (If a fly lands in his soup he does not practice nondiscrimination and eat the fly with the same relish or lack thereof with which he eats the rest of the soup.) But if our Buddhist really believed Buddhist teachings would it not be rational for him to modify 'normal' behavior and bend every effort towards achieving enlightenment?

What I hope this shows is that religious belief (at least in the religions you and I are most likely to debate about) disallows moderation, which I take it, is a bad thing. What I especially like about this argument is it seems to be an argument that appeals to conservatives, because conservatives are most likely to have strong intuitions against ideologies that tell us to ignore our ordinary reasons for acting.

I think you are right that religious belief, if sincerely professed and lived, disallows moderation of the sort that the average worldly person displays. But it is not just religious belief that has this property. So do many ideologies or action-guiding worldviews. I gave the example of Communism above. Other examples readily come to mind.

You are assuming that moderation of the sort displayed by 'normal' worldly people is a good thing. But if Communism or Catholicism were true, then moderation of that sort would not be good! True-blue reds devoted all their energies to their chimerical Revolution just as true Christians consecrate their lives, without reservation, to Christ. They don't 'hedge their bets' they way most people do. Whether that singlemindedness is good or bad depends on whether the underlying beliefs are true or false. Of course we now know that Communism is a god that failed, but the religious God is safely insulated in a Beyond beyond our ken.

So if your thesis is that sincere belief in an afterlife entails (or maybe only leads to) religious zealotry, and is for that reason objectionable, then I don't think you have made your case. Genuine belief in an afterlife will lead to behavior that is 'abnormal' and 'immoderate' as measured by the standards of the worldly. But this won''t cut any ice unless worldly standards can be shown to be correct and truly normative, not just statistically 'normal.'

Of course, as you’ve no doubt noticed, this argument does not take into account epistemic uncertainty. Uncertainty about the existence of the afterlife might make it more rational for us to go ahead and pursue other goods. I haven’t yet done the research in probability theory, but I’d be willing to guess our levels of epistemic confidence in religious propositions would have to be very low in order for it to be rational to pursue anything else.

This is another important side to the problem of balancing the claims of this world with the claims of the next. People fool themselves into thinking they KNOW all sorts of thinks they merely BELIEVE. Now it seems to me that no imtellectually honest person can claim to KNOW (using this word strictly) that there is an afterlife: the evidence from parapsychology, though abundant, is not conclusive, and the philosophical arguments, though some of them impressive, are not compelling. But I do KNOW the pleasures of good food, and strong coffee, and fine cigars, and chess, and good conversation, and scribbling away as I am now doing, all of them activities which are not necessary for my salvation, and perhaps stand in the way of it. (Not to mention disporting with ladies of the evening, etc.)

So what is the rational thing to do given my epistemic predicament in which what I KNOW is confined to this ephemeral world which cannot be worth much, and my access to the other is via mere belief and the occasional religious/mystical experience whose veridicality is easily called into question?

A difficult question. I don't know that there is an afterlife, and I don't know that there isn't. It strikes me as highly irrational to live for this life alone since it is nasty, brutish, short, miserable, full of natural and moral evil, and of scant value if it doesn't lead to anything beyond it. It also seems irrational to forego every positive value in this world which is not conducive to otherworldly salvation on the strength of mere belief in that otherworldly possibility.

So my tentative answer is that the rational course is to inquire ceaselessly into the matter in a critical, exploratory and tentative spirit; avoid being bamboozled by the dogmas of churches and sects which claim to have the Truth; enjoy the limited goods of this life in a measured way while realizing that, in and of themselves, they are of no ultimate value.

In short, be neither a worldling nor a monk. Be a philosopher! (Not to be confused with being a paid professor of it.)

Sets, Pluralities, and the Axiom of Pair

In a thread from the old blog, resident nominalist gadfly 'Ockham'/'William' made the fascinating double-barreled claim that:

. . . (a) there are such things as sets and (b) the axiom of pairs is false. Briefly, I claim that 'a set of x's' is just another way of saying 'those x's'. The fundamental error of set theory is using a logically singular expression {a, b} to refer to what in ordinary language a plural term refers to, using an expression such as 'a and b' or similar.

I take O to be saying that there are sets, but they are not the sets we read about in standard treatments of axiomatic set theory, and whose properties are all and only the properties ascribed to them in axiomatic set theory, Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice, to be specific. Suppose we call the latter mathematical sets, and the former ordinary language (commonsense) sets. Then what O is claiming is that there are ordinary language (OL) sets, but there are no mathematical sets. That there are no mathematical sets on O's view follows from O's denial of the Axiom of Pair, a crucial ingredient of ZFC. Here is a formulation of the latter:

PAIR. Given any x and y, there is a set {x, y} the members of which are exactly x and y.

X and y can be either sets or nonsets. So given that Socrates exists and that Plato exists, it follows by PAIR that a third item exists, namely, {Socrates, Plato}. (I use 'there is' and 'there exists' interchangeably.) That a third item exists is what I affirm and what O denies. For O, the plural term 'Socrates and Plato' does not refer to a single third item, the set consisting of Socrates and Plato; and yet it does refer to something, a thing that is an ordinary language set. For O, there are exactly two items in our example, Socrates and Plato, and not three, as I claim.

Let us say that the referent of a plural term such as 'Socrates and Plato' or 'the British Empiricists' or 'the Hatfields' is a plurality. A plurality is an ordinary language set. A gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a coven of witches, a bunch of grapes, a pack of wolves — these are all pluralities or OL sets. That there are OL sets, or pluralities, is presumably not in dispute. Nor, I think, could anyone rationally dispute their existence. That there is such a thing as a pair of shows cannot be reasonably denied; that the two shoes form a mathematical set can be reasonably denied at least prima facie.

If I understand O, he is saying that all reference to sets is via plural referring expressions such as 'these books,' 'Dick Dale and the Deltones,' 'the barristers of London,' etc. There is no reference to any set via a singular referring device such as the singular definite description, 'the set consisting of these books.'

Now consider the question whether there are sets of sets. I claim that it is a fact that there are sets of sets, and that this fact causes trouble for O's nominalist view that all sets are pluralities. Consider the Hatfields and the McCoys. These are two famous feuding Appalachian families, and therefore two pluralities or OL sets. But there is also the two-membered plurality of these pluralities to which we refer with the phrase 'the Hatfields and the McCoys' in a sentence like 'The Hatfields and the McCoys are feuding families.'

If, however, a plurality of pluralities has exactly two members, as in the case of the Hatfields and the McCoys, then the latter cannot themselves be pluralities, but must be single items, albeit single items that have members. That is to say: In the sentence, 'The Hatfields and the McCoys are two famous feuding Appalachian families,' 'the Hatfields' and 'the McCoys' must each be taken to be referring to a single item, a family, and not to a plurality of persons. For if each is taken to refer to a plurality of items, then the plurality of pluralities could not have exactly two members but would many more than two members, as many members as there are Hatfields and MCoys all together. Compare the following two sentences:

1. The Hatfields and the McCoys number 100 in toto.

2. The Hatfields and the McCoys are two famous feuding Appalachian families.

In (1),'the Hatfields and the McCoys' can be interpreted as referring to a plurality of persons as opposed to a mathematical set of persons. But in (2), 'the Hatfields and the McCoys' cannot be taken to be referring to a plurality of pluralities; it must be taken to be referring to a plurality of two single items.

Or consider the following said to someone who mistakenly thinks that the Hatfields and the McCoys are one and the same family under two names:

3. The Hatfields and the McCoys are two, not one.

Clearly, in (3) 'the Hatfields and the McCoys' refers to a two-membered plurality of single items, each of which has many members, and not to a plurality of pluralities. And so we must introduce mathematical sets into our ontology.

This is connected with the fact that '___ is an element of . . .' in axiomatic set theory does not pick out a transitive relation: If x is an element of y, and y is an element of z, it does not follow that x is an element of z. Socrates, a nonset, is an element of various sets; but he is clearly not a member of any of these set's power sets. (The power set P(S) is the set of all of S's subsets. Clearly, no nonset can be a member of any power set.) But if there are no mathematical sets, and every set is a plurality, then it seems that the elementhood or membership relation would be transitive. A set of sets would be a plurality of pluralities such that if x is an element of S and S an element of S *, then x is an element of S*. My conclusion, contra 'Ockham,' is that we cannot scrape by on OL sets, or pluralities, alone. We need mathematical sets or something like them: entities that are both one and many.

REFERENCES

Max Black, "The Elusiveness of Sets," Review of Metaphysics, vol. XXIV, no. 4 (June 1971), 614-636.

Stephen Pollard, Philosophical Introduction to Set Theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.

Plato

Both his greatness as a thinker and the probity of his quest for truth are revealed in the fact that Plato is not only the father of the Theory of Forms, but also the author of the most penetrating criticisms of them.

(By the way, the above aphorism is crafted in such a way as to demonstrate that the antecedent of a pronoun need not be its antecedent in the order of reading.)

Thinker and Doer

The thinker, because he is a thinker, cannot naively live his life of thought, but must be tormented by doubts regarding it. The doer, because he is not a thinker, can naively live his life of action.

The Vital Imperative: Live Well, Live Now

This is it. This is your life, right here and right now. The present is as real as it gets. If you are not doing with your life right now what you think you ought to be doing with it, then you are doing something wrong.

After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Towers, The New York Times published short pieces on those who had perished. The story of one fellow in particular remains in memory. He was a bond trader whose office was high up in one of the towers. A man in his late thirties, early forties, his dream was to live in a small town in the Rockies and operate a bait and tackle shop. But first he had to earn his grubstake, or so he thought. So he slaved away in the certain present for an uncertain future. He did what he did not love so that he might do what he did love. He did what he did not love for a present that never came.

His living was not a true living, but a postponing, a placing after. He placed his real life after his present life, forgetting that the present alone is real and that the present, not the future, is in one's secure possession.

When St Augustine was asked what he would do if he knew he would die in the next hour, he replied, "Nothing other than what I am now doing." He was living as he thought he ought to be living, realizing rather than postponing his Ideal.

From these lessons we may infer a Vital Imperative: As far as possible, live in the present as if the next hour were to be the hour of your death. How do you want death to find you? Living self-sufficiently in the riches of the moment? Or standing on tip-toe craning your head toward a nonexistent future?

Freud or James? Wish-Fulfillment or Inducement to Strenuous Living?

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), The Future of an Illusion:

It would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life. But at the same time it is
very odd that this is all just as we should wish it for ourselves.

William James (1842-1910), "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life":

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Both of these passages support the view that God is a posit, a postulate, a projection. But there is a striking difference. Freud, seeing the origin of the God-projection in weakness, takes this as
discrediting the God-idea. Having its genesis in our neediness, the God-idea is false or at least unworthy of belief. James, however, viewing the God-idea as an expression of our robustness, takes this fact as a verification of the idea of God.

Of course, there are two different notions of truth in play. I don't know whether Freud ever discussed theories of truth, but I'd guess he is a correspondence-theorist: an idea is true if it corresponds to reality. But James is a pragmatist: an idea is true if it works, if it is something good for us to believe in the long run. For James, we get more out of the game of existence when we believe in God and all that entails: a moral world order that places an ethical demand on us; an ultimate explanation of why anything exists and why we exist; a final guarantor of the veridicality of our ideas; a provider of sense and purpose; a repository of hope; a securer of immortality and adjustor of happiness and virtue. Believing in God, we live better, richer, fuller lives; we wring from existence its "keenest possibilities of zest."

To resolve the debate between Freud and James one would have to get clear about the nature of truth and its connection to human flourishing. The problems are deep and perhaps insoluble. But that doesn't stop them from being fascinating and worth pursuing. And we don't know they are insoluble. If we believe that they are soluble, that truth about ultimates is attainable, and we strive for it, then too we will wring from "the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest."

Companion post: Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion

A Day on the Salt River

Mike Valle and I spent four and a half hours floating down the Rio Salado on truck tire inner tubes yesterday. That's Mike and a bit of my left knee in the first shot. The second depicts some thirsty wild horses. The third offers a fine view of Red Mountain.

What is Philosophy?

I found the following on Keith's blog. It is so good I simply must reproduce it here.

The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.

(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)

This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

John Pepples Wants a New Left

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepples, aims to develop a self-critical leftism. Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike: why does Pepples hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important. What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepples. In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy." Sounds very familiar! The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring." I started out in Electrical Engineering but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy." I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us 60s types end up in philosophy? Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic. I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded. She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.