Maverick Philosopher – Page 763 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Is Religion Dangerous? Is Philosophy?

Is Religion Dangerous? is the title of a very good book by Keith Ward (Lion Hudson, 2006). It is a good answer to the Dawkins-Hitchens junk-critique of religion as dangerous. I've got the book on loan from the local university library, but some fellow had the chutzpah to issue a recall. So I must return the book today, and cannot say anything further about it until I get it back again.

Consider the parallel question, Is philosophy dangerous?

The question makes little sense seeing as how there is no such thing as philosophy as doctrinal system. There are only philosophies, many of them, in conflict with one another. At most one could say that there is philosophy as a type of inquiry. (But the minute we ask what type of inquiry, by what method or methods, we will find ourselves confronted with a host of competing metaphilosophical answers. The nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question, and metaphilosophy, despite the meta, is a branch of philosophy.)

One cannot therefore sensibly ask whether philosophy is dangerous. There is no such doctrinal system as philosophy. One can, however, sensibly ask whether, say, Kant's philosophy is dangerous. The same goes for religion. It makes little or no sense to ask whether religion is dangerous. For there is no such thing as religion as a system of doctrines and practices. One can however ask, with a show of sense, whether Islam is dangerous. But even here one must be careful. No doubt certain sects of Islam are dangerous as hell, but would you say the same about Sufism, Islam's mystical branch? The Whirling Dervishes of Konya seem not to be much of a threat to anyone.

Free Speech and the Fairness Doctrine

(Written 29 July 2007)

Philip Terzian gets it right in his piece Radio Free America:

Revival of the Fairness Doctrine is not intended to facilitate "both sides of the story" but to shut down conservative talk radio. Why? Because efforts to invent a successful left-wing Limbaugh have consistently failed, and what Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, and Al Franken's Air America cannot manage on the air might be accomplished by congressional action. This has been a forlorn cause of the left since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed 20 years ago; but now that Democrats control Congress, new life has been breathed into the effort. A Democratic president could appoint enough compliant commissioners to the FCC to accomplish the mission. Or Congress could act.

The threat is not idle. Left-wing activists are not especially enamored of free speech–especially when the open marketplace of ideas puts them at a political disadvantage. [. . .]

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Oakeshott on the Conservative Temperament

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. Or at least this is a thesis with which I am seriously toying, to put it oxymoronically. The idea is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then comes the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the Oakeshottian upshot.

But rather than pursue the question whether temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments, let us address, with the help of Michael Oakeshott, the logically preliminary question of what it is to be conservatively disposed. Here are some passages from his On Being Conservative (from Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Basic Books, 1962, pp. 168-196, bolding added):

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October in the Railroad Earth

Jack Kerouac reads from "The Railroad Earth," a chapter of Lonesome Traveler. I bought my copy on 12 April 1973 on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans. I had been accepted at East Coast graduate schools and was traveling east from California to check them out, a copy of On the Road in my rucksack.

Political Correctness and Gender Neutral Language

I am writing a review of J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009). It is a very good book, and J. P. Moreland is one of my favorite philosophers. I don't know the man personally, but I rather doubt that he is politically liberal. And yet throughout his book one find sentences like the following: "If a naturalist is going to admit into his/her ontology an entity whose existence cannot be explained naturalistically, then he or she must adopt a dismissive strategy that in some way or other shows why it is no big deal that we do not have such an explanation." (p. 169)

Why the political correctness as indicated by "his/her" and "he or she"? The PC jargon might have been foisted upon him by an editor, but if so, Moreland could have removed it. For Ed Feser's adventures with a PC copy editor, see here.

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The Woman’s Body Argument

The following is an abortion argument one often hears. It is sometimes called the Woman's Body Argument. I will argue that it is not rationally compelling.

1. The fetus is a part of a woman's body.
2. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with any part of her body.
Therefore
3. A woman has the right to do whatever she wants with the fetus, including having it killed.

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Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?

Is it consistent to support both fetal rights and the moral acceptability of capital punishment? That depends on what is meant by 'consistent.' Let us begin by asking whether the following propositions are logically consistent.

P1. A living human fetus has a right to life which cannot be overridden except in rare cases (e.g. threat to the life of the mother).

P2. Capital punishment for certain offences is morally justified.

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Arguments and Conditionals

The early Stoic logicians were aware of a distinction that most of us make nowadays but that certain medieval logicians, according to David H. Sanford (If P, then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning, p. 31), either missed or did not make. I am referring to the difference between arguments and conditional statements. Note the difference between

1. Since murder is wrong, suicide is wrong

and

2. If murder is wrong, then suicide is wrong.

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An Elementary Confusion Regarding Dispositions and Potentialities

C. B. Martin, "Dispositions and Conditionals," The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 174, January 1994, p. 1:

We must see that dispositions are actual, though their manifestations may not be. It is an elementary confusion to think of unmanifesting dispositions as unactualized possibilia, though that may characterize unmanifested manifestations.

Consider two panes of thin glass side by side in a window. The two panes are of the same type of glass, and neither has been specially treated. A rock is thrown at one, call it pane A, and it shatters. The other pane, call it B, receives no such impact. We know that A is fragile from the fact that it shattered. ("Potency is known through act," an Aristotelian might say.) We don't have quite the same assurance that B is fragile, but we have good reason to think that it is since it is made of the same kind of glass as A.

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‘Probative Overkill’ Objections to the Potentiality Principle

Here is a simple version of the Potentiality Argument (PA):

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
2. The human fetus is a potential person.
—–
3. The human fetus has a right to life.

Does PA 'prove too much'? It does if the proponent of PA has no principled way of preventing PA from transmogrifying into something like:

1. All potential persons have a right to life.
4. Everything is a potential person.
—–
5. Everything has a right to life.

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Rock Salt and Nails

Enjoy it before it is pulled. If I may wax pedantic, the jilted lover loads her shotgun with two sorts of stuff, not three: rock salt and nails, not rock, salt, and nails. Pedantry aside, a most haunting tune from the pen of Utah Phillips sung by the angel-voiced Joan Baez.

Oh the nights are so long/Lord sorry runs deep/And nothing is worse than a night without sleep/I walk out alone/I look at the sky/Too lonesome to sing, too empty to cry.

If the ladies was blackbirds and the ladies was thrushes/ I'd lie there for hours in the chilly cold marshes/ If the ladies was squirrels with high bushy tails/ I'd fill up my shotgun with rock salt and nails.

Three Friends

The blogosphere has been good to me, having brought me a number of friends, some of whom I have met face to face. For now I will mention just three.

Having read my announcement that PowerBlogs will be shutting down at the end of November, Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly sent me a number of unsolicited e-mails explaining how I could import the PowerBlogs posts, together with comments, en masse into this Typepad site. I had forgotten that the Typepad platform allows for multiple blogs. Keith's idea was simply to set up an archival blog and dump the old posts there. As usual, the devil is in the details. But a careful perusal of his-emails gave me all the clues I needed to get this project underway. Eventually, I will install a link to the PowerBlogs archive on my front page.

Keith is one my oldest blogospheric friends. We met early in 2004 not long after I had entered the 'sphere. He has been more than kind in promoting my efforts over the years. I fear that I have not reciprocated sufficiently. So I want you to go to his site right now and read his current batch of offerings. I should also mention that if it weren't for Keith I would never have met philosopher Mike Valle who lives a few miles from here.

I can't recall how exactly I met Ed Feser; it may have been via Keith's old Conservative Philosopher group blog. In any case, we have had a number of invigorating discussions. We have our differences, but our common ground makes their exfoliation fruitful. I am presently gearing up for another round as I study his latest book, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (One World, 2009), an inscribed copy of which he kindly sent me. Ed chimes in on his blog in agreement with my recent rant about copy editors and their political correctness. Please check it out.

Last but not least, Peter Lupu, who, though not a blogger, is the Real Thing as philosophers go. Such birds are rarely sighted even within (especially within?) the academic aviary. He discovered me via the old PowerBlogs site and left the best comments there that I have received in five years of blogging. To my great good fortune he flourishes here in the Zone and we see each other regularly. Last Thursday he came by and we talked from 2 to 9 P.M. He would have gone on til midnight had I let him. I have met in my entire life only one other philosopher with whom I could have as deep and productive a discussion, and that is my old friend Quentin Smith who I met in my early twenties. Like Smith an avis rara, Lupu has become the Smith of my late middle age.

So the blogosphere has been good to me. Today's stats hit an all-time high of 1,212 page views. I have nothing to complain about. Thanks for reading.

Unbelievable if True: Illiteracy and Innumeracy

David K. Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 139:

Some 37 percent of American adults cannot figure a 10 percent discount on a price, even using a calculator. (Emphasis added.) The same percentage cannot read a bus schedule or write a letter about a credit card error. According to the National Adult Literacy Survey, last taken in 1992 by the Department of Education, 14 percent cannot total a deposit slip, locate an intersection on a map, understand an appliance warranty, or determine the correct dosage of a medicine.

This is astonishing, if true. One thing that struck my conservative eye was 'Department of Education.' One wonders what the percentage of incompetents was before the inauguration of this behemoth agency. I'll bet it was less.

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The Human Predicament: Not to be Taken Too Seriously

I've been loved, hated, feared, loathed, respected, scorned, unjustly maligned, praised for what I should not have been praised for, lionized, demonized, put on a pedestal, dragged through the mud, understood, misunderstood, ill-understood, well-understood, ignored, fawned upon, admired, envied, tolerated, and found intolerable. And the same most likely goes for you.

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