Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation

0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.

1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.

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Apples and Sparkplugs

All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, etc.

Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference.

This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper, the Post Advocate. (We paper boys called it the Pest Aggravate.) A man  ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites.  He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.

But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed throught the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently watered down. So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my 4th grade teacher Sr. Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."

The Medical-Industrial Complex, Part II

Part I is here.

The liberal-leftist animus against corporations is undoubtedly excessive, as is their pollyannish trust in Big Government solutions to every problem under the sun; but this should not blind us to corporate irresponsibility especially when the corporate types work hand-in-hand with liberals to 'medicalize' the ordinary difficulties of life.

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Meaning and Immortality

Some feel that if the fact of bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then this fact, if it is a fact, consigns human life to meaninglessness. This is a very strong intuition among those who have it, and I have it. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. I will now examine some of these arguments.

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The Medical-Industrial Complex

No doubt you have heard of ADD. Recently I learned of a new medical condition known as ADHD: attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

What could be called the medical-industrial complex is a curious alliance of soft-headed liberals eager to invent diseases and celebrate their 'victims' and money-grubbing corporate types out to turn a quick buck. Liberals invent the diseases and syndromes, while the big pharmaceutical companies supply the drugs for their alleviation. Compliant shrinks and medicos write the prescriptions and serve as go-betweens while Big Government programs divert tax dollars from legitimate uses to enrich the doctors and drug companies.

Emerson on Thoreau’s Lack of Ambition

Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry from June, 1851:

Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of [the] huckleberry party. (Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart of Emerson's Journals, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, p. 256.)

As a former student of engineering, I am glad Thoreau stuck to his walking and writing. Like Kierkegaard, he served as a much-needed corrective to the hustle and frenzy of his age.  There is need of slackers to counterbalance the go-getters, and if slackers need a patron saint, Henry David would be a fine choice as would Walt Whitman. 

Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

Abandoning Ambition, Let Us Repair to the Portico. . .

Thanks to open library stacks, I stumbled across the epigrams of Martial a while back. (Therein lies an argument for open stacks.) Marcus Valerius Martialis was so-named because he was born on March 1. He first saw the light of day circa A.D. 40 at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis. So far to me he seems a scribbler of no great importance, though he is entertaining, and, like Samuel Pepys, another scribbler of no great importance, he affords an insight into the times in which he lived and into the invariability of human folly. If I knew more of Martial, and more of Truman Capote, perhaps I would compare them: superficial, sycophantic, but prodigious in their quill-driving. In any case, here for leisurely consumption is one of Martial's more substantial epigrams, addressed to another Martial, his old friend Iulius Martialis:

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Idiotic Marginalia From Marginal Idiots

Have you noticed that the same people who are morally obtuse enough to underline and annotate public library books tend to be the same people who are too intellectually obtuse to make good comments? If they are going to deface public property, they should at least have the decency to stun us with the brilliance of their commentary, the magnificence of their marginalia, the glory of their glosses. I don't believe I have ever read a good marginalium in a public library book.

And why do the cretins return the volumes?  Having littered the margins with their precious observations, they would have some reason to keep the books.

Library Stacks: Open or Closed?

Some punk having badly defaced a  book I was about to check out, I had the librarian make a note to that effect lest I be accused of the barbarism.  I mentioned to the librarian that the widespread disrespect shown to public property is an argument against socialism.  He responded that it is an argument against open stacks.  He had a point, but on the other side of the question:

Open library stacks allow for browsing and finding books that otherwise might have gone undetected. I was on the prowl in the BDs a while back looking for BonJour's In Defense of Pure Reason and Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction. Searle's book hangs out at BD 418.3.S4. Nearby, at BD 418.3.S78, I spied Leopold Stubenberg, Consciousness and Qualia (1998). Though published by an obscure press, and obviously a reworking of the author's dissertation, it is turning out to be an outstanding resource. I'm glad he wrote it, and I'm glad I found it. But I might not have, had the stacks been closed.

On the other hand, open stacks allow any Tom, Dick, or Mary to cause mischief by stealing, defacing, hiding and otherwise mishandling books. A common problem is the removal of a volume and its return to the wrong position. Such a book is as as good as lost. A librarian acquaintance tells me that the problem is worse than one might think.

No doubt there are other considerations relevant to the open/closed question. But for the moment, I'm for open stacks. In a society as tolerant of bad behavior as ours is, however, one wonders how long libraries can remain unprotected. 

Islam and the Euthyphro Problem

Horace Jeffery Hodges  has a couple of informative and well-documented posts, here and here, on the divine will and its limits, if any, in Judaism and Christianity on the one hand, and in Islam, on the other. One way to focus the issue is in terms of the Euthyphro dilemma.

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Four Kinds of Ontological Argument

The essence of ontological argumentation is the inferential move from the concept/essence of F to the existence/nonexistence of F. We are all familiar with ontological arguments for the existence of God. They have been a staple of philosophy of religion discussions from Anselm to Plantinga. But there is nothing in the nature of ontological argumentation to require that God be the subject matter, or that the argument conclude to the existence of something. There are nontheistic ontological arguments as well as ontological disproofs. Thus there are four possible combinations.

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