Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper.
Academic Credentials
The Ph.D. is a trapping that means something, but not that much. There are fools with doctorates, and sages without them. Should Kierkegaard go unread because he is a mere Magister? Does anyone prefer his brother Peter over Søren because the fomer was called Doktor? Should we turn a blind eye to Eric Hoffer's True Believer because its author was a migrant farm worker and stevedore who, as a pure autodidact, had no credentials at all, not even an elementary school diploma? Fifty years after it was written, in these days of Islamo-militancy, Hoffer's penetrating book has gained even more relevance.
As Schopenhauer was always keen to point out, there is a difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy, namely, the difference between someone who lives for philosophy and someone who lives from it. The professors, parading their titles and credentials, show thereby that they are more concerned with appearance than with reality, when the office of the philosopher is precisely to penetrate appearance and arrive at reality. (I am reporting Schopenhauer's view here, and would point out against him that of course a professor of philosophy can be a genuine philosopher. Schopenhauer himself would be forced to admit this given his great admiration for Kant. What he could not abide was Hegel, whom he considered a charlatan, and Fichte whose Wissenschaftslehre he mocked as Wissenschaftsleere and as Onanie.)
An important text relating to the question of academic credentials is William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" in Essential Writings, ed. Wilshire (SUNY 1984), pp. 343-348) It first appeared in 1903 in the Harvard Monthly.
In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct
The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow). I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy." I also took a course in logic from him. The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books. And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I taught.
I don't believe Morris ever published anything. The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question. But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.
The moral of the story? Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy. So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.
I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when. The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend. I've done it a number of times. I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher. I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no. What ingrates we are.
So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath. Heute rot, morgen tot.
John Hospers and the Unteachability of Ayn Rand
An extremely bright autodidact who is also supremely self-confident will often prove to be unteachable. If such a person should then acquire a worshipful cult-like following, and if she never exposes her work to professional scrutiny, and excommunicates even those well disposed to her when they dare criticize, John Hospers being one example, the result is unteachability in excelsis. This is the case of Ayn Rand. Click on the following links for some fascinating reading. The lady could have learned so much from Hospers if she hadn't been such a pigheaded ideologue.
Memories of Ayn Rand. Conversations with Ayn Rand 1. Conversations with Ayn Rand 2.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Big O
See if you can identify the famous sidemen in this live version of Oh Pretty Woman. My list in the first comment.
A Hylomorphic Solution to the Interaction Problem?
Interactionist substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is supposed to face a devastating objection, the interaction objection. In the first part of this post I will present this objection in its traditional form and suggest that it is not all that serious. In the second part, however, I take the objection seriously and consider whether Aristotelian- Thomistic hylomorphism has the resources to counter it.
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Samuel Alexander on Emergence
Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. II, Peter Smith 1979,(originally published in 1920), p. 46:
The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour. The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I would prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator. It admits no explanation.
If, however, the emergent entities admit of no explanation, if their emergence is a brute fact, then claims of emergence are open to the 'poof' objection. It would appear to be rather unbecoming of a hard-assed physicalist to simply announce that such-and-such has emerged when he can offer no explanation of how it has emerged. If interactionist dualists are supposed to be embarrassed by questions as to how mind and body interact, then emergentists are in a similar boat.
That being said, "natural piety" is a beautiful phrase.
The Pairing Objection to Substance Dualism
As I understand the Pairing Objection to substance dualism it goes like this. Let m1 and m2 be mental tokens of type M and b1 and b2 brain tokens of type B, and suppose that M-type events cause B-type events. Suppose m1 and m2 both occur at time t, and b1 and b2 both occur at a slightly later time t*. Suppose further that m1 is in Tim's mind, m2 in Tom's mind, b1 in Tim's brain and b2 in Tom's brain. What makes it the case that m1 causes b1 rather than b2, and that m2 causes b2 rather than b1? What insures that m1 is paired with b1 and m2 with b2? How, on dualist interactionist assumptions, can we insure that the picture looks like this:
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Nietzsche, Guilt, and Incoherence
I love reading Nietzsche, just as I love reading his opposite number, Kierkegaard. There is much to admire in them: their stylistic brilliance, the penetration of their psychological insight, the singlemindedness of their quest for truth. They are about as far away as one can get from the mere professor of philosophy. Nevertheless, both were hell-bent on tangling themselves up in absurdities. Herewith, yet another example.
Execution. — How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being is being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not the guilt that is being punished, even when it exists; this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that caused him to become one. (Human, All Too Human (1878), vol. I, sec. 70, tr. Hollingdale.)
So it is not the criminal who is guilty, but the circumstances in which he arose. But if the criminal is not guilty, then no one and nothing is. Either there is guilt on both sides, or on neither side. It is incoherent to displace guilt from the criminal onto his environment. (And what is a hard-assed political reactionary like Nietzsche doing making a soft-headed liberal move like this?) What Nietzsche really wants to say is that that there is no guilt on either side, since “no one is accountable for his deeds…” (Sec. 39) But if so, then we are not accountable for our judging the criminal and punishing him. If he is a deterministic system, then so are we. It follows that it is absurd to say that we ought not punish him, or that “to judge is the same thing as to be unjust….” (Sec. 39) If there is no such thing as moral responsibility, then neither ‘just’ nor ‘unjust’ are words that apply to anything.
Why can’t Nietzsche appreciate this simple point? And in section 107, where he writes, “Everything is necessity…. Everything is innocence…,” why can’t he see that if all is necessity and there is no free will (cf. Sec. 102), then both ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ fail to apply to anything? Merely paradoxical formulations, or deep underlying confusion? I incline toward the latter view.
Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.
"If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.)
The art of the aphorism at its best.
In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was an Englishman who provided what is perhaps the best refutation of hedonism we have, namely, F. H. Bradley in his "Pleasure For Pleasure's Sake" in Ethical Studies.
Supervenience, Emergence, Mind, and Magic
Peter Lupu has come out in favor of emergentism in the philosophy of mind. Here is an argument he could use to defend the thesis that mental properties are emergent properties:
1. Materialistic Anti-Dualism: Human beings are nothing more than complex material systems.
2. Anti-Reductivism: Mental properties are not identical to physical properties, nor do the former logically imply the latter.
3. Anti-Eliminativism: Human beings do in fact instantiate mental properties.
4. Anti-Panpsychism: The basic constituents of the physical world do not have mental properties.
Therefore
5. Mental properties are emergent properties, which implies that there are emergent properties.
The cases for (2) are (3) are overwhelming, so I consider them 'off the table.' Peter agrees. Panpsychism ought to be investigated, but Peter finds it highly implausible, so let's assume it to be false for the sake of this discussion. The crucial premise — the dialectical bone of contention if you will — between Peter and me is (1). He accepts (1) while I reject it. It is worth noting that there are at least three ways of rejecting (1): by being a substance dualist, or an idealist (see John Foster's work), or a Thomistic hylomorphic dualist. So I would argue from ~(5) to ~(1). But for now we assume that (1) is true.
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Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief?
I coined the phrase 'ego surfari' some years ago. To go on ego surfari is to type one's name into a search engine in order to see what turns up. The results are often surprising. Today I found Does Emergence Help in Defending Religious Belief? by Sami Pihlström, Helsinki. Excerpt:
One of the few recent contributions in which the combination of (emergentist or supervenientist) physicalism and theism is seriously challenged is William Vallicella’s (1998). [Vallicella, W.F. 1998 “Could a Classical Theist Be a Physicalist?”, Faith and Philosophy 15, 160-180.] He rejects eliminativism, type-type identity theory, supervenientism, emergentism, and ”the constitution view” (i.e., the view that persons are materially constituted beings) as five ”theologically useless physicalisms” (163ff.). The argument is largely based on Kim’s criticism of nonreductive physicalism. Regarding emergentism (167- 170), Vallicella points out that even if the human soul were seen as an emergent substance or as having emergent properties, problems would remain, as neither divine nor angelic consciousness can be understood as emerging from matter, upon any Christian construal: ”It is analytic that emergence is emergence from a physical base, and in the case of God and angels classically conceived there is no physical base. Moreover, it is analytic that to emerge is to come into being, and God’s consciousness does not come into being” (169). Vallicella (170) also argues against Stump’s (1995) Aquinian suggestion of combining materialism and dualism (and the possibility of survival), insisting that an emergent property cannot continue to exist after the physical system whose property it is falls apart.
If a reconciliation of science and theism were possible through emergentism, this would constitute an intellectual breakthrough of enormous magnitude. No doubts about the cultural or generally human significance of the notion of emergence would remain. Unfortunately, the research program run by theistically inclined naturalists seems to me hopeless; as Vallicella (1998, 176) puts it, physicalism and theism are ”competing Weltanschauungen”. One problem with views seeking to reconcile them, and with the on-going discussion of emergence and theism in Zygon (and elsewhere), is – as in the systematically philosophical emergence literature we find elsewhere – an unargued commitment to strong metaphysical realism. It is presupposed that both scientific and religious language purport to refer to a fundamentally concept- and language-independent world and that, therefore, religion and science must be coherently fitted into one grand theory of the world, if we if we want to retain both. Against this assumption, a more Wittgensteinian-oriented thinker may argue that religion and science are different human practices (or groups of practices) with their characteristic normative structures. Quite different ”moves” are allowed in these different (families of) language-games; for example, the ”soul” allegedly rendered ”scientifically acceptable” in emergentism would hardly have a place in religious language-use.
Does Substance Dualism Explain Subjectivity? The Nagel-McGinn Parity Argument
In my humble opinion, materialist theories of mind are all of them quite hopeless. All of them founder on the reef of irreducible subjectivity. But is substance dualism in a better position than materialism when it comes to explaining the subjectivity of conscious experience?
Colin McGinn, drawing on Thomas Nagel, thinks that the same problem that afflicts the materialist returns to haunt the substance dualist. Now what was that problem again?
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 40’s Proto-Rock
Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.
If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.
Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.
Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights. Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s. I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.
Classical Theism and Global Supervenience Physicalism
This is a paper I read at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, Massachusetts, August 10-15, 1998. It explains the notions of strong and global supervenience, notions which will serve as foils in getting a handle on the concept of emergence.
ABSTRACT: Could a classical theist be a physicalist? Although a negative answer to this question may seem obvious, it turns out that a case can be made for the consistency of a variant of classical theism and global supervenience physicalism. Although intriguing, the case ultimately fails due to the weakness of global supervenience as an account of the dependence of mental on physical properties.
Physicalism is popular these days, and to a lesser extent so is classical theism. It should therefore come as no surprise that a number of theists are bent on combining theism with physicalism. But could a classical theist be a physicalist? Is this a coherent doctrinal combination? The classical theist affirms the metaphysically necessary existence of a concrete, purely spiritual being upon which every other concrete being is ontologically dependent. The physicalist, however, is committed to the proposition that everything, or at least everything concrete, is either physical or determined by the physical. To be a bit more precise, physicalism is usefully viewed as the conjunction of an 'inventory thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible individuals and a 'determination thesis' which specifies physicalistically admissible properties.(1) What the inventory thesis says, at a first approximation, is that every concretum is either a physical item or composed of physical items. As for the determination thesis, what it says is that physical property-instantiations determine all other property-instantiations; equivalently, every nonphysical property-instantiation supervenes on physical property-instantiations. These rough characterizations suggest that theism and physicalism logically exclude one another. If God as classically conceived exists, then the inventory thesis is violated: not every concrete entity is either physical or composed of physical items. And if God exists, it would also appear that the determination thesis is flouted: God's instantiation of his omni-attributes does not supervene on His instantiation of any physical properties: He has none. So at first glance it seems almost crashingly obvious that the classical theist cannot be a physicalist.
But this talk cannot end just yet. For when we get down to the details of formulating precise versions of both the inventory and determination theses, it turns out that there is a way to attempt the reconciliation of theism and physicalism. It is the viability of this way that I aim to explore. But first some background.
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