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Wittgenstein, On Certainty #348: ‘I am Here’
Ludwig Wittgenstein writes:
. . . the words 'I am here' have a meaning only in certain contexts, and not when I say them to someone who is sitting in front of me and sees me clearly, — and not because they are superfluous, but because their meaning is not determined by the situation, yet stands in need of such determination.
Part of what LW is saying in this entry is that the meaning of an expression is determined by its use in a given context. In a slogan: meaning is use.
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Putting My Contingency Into English: Are There Legitimate Non-Epistemic Uses of ‘Might’?
I exist now. But my nonexistence now is possible. ('Now' picks out the same time in both of its occurrences.) 'Possible' in my second sentence is not intended epistemically. Surely it would be absurd were I to say, 'My nonexistence now is possible for all I know' or 'My nonexistence now is not ruled out by what I now know or believe.' If I am certain of anything, I am certain that I exist, and that rules out my present nonexistence. So in the second sentence above 'possible' is to be taken non-epistemically. The metaphysical point is that I am a contingent being. But how put this into ordinary English?
Why Do I Delete Comments?
Why do I delete comments? It is not because the commenter disagrees with what I say. In Epistemic/Doxastic Possibility I floated a definition that commenter Andrew Bailey refuted. He blew it clean out of the water. I acknowledged the refutation as soon as I became aware of it and proposed a different definition. Bailey refuted that one too. The discussion proceeded from there with what I hope was mutual benefit. Bailey's was an example of a good comment.
Philosophy and Livelihood: Build a Slave!
One reader asks:
How does an independent scholar get bread and butter on the table?
Another inquires:
How could one make a living in philosophy and the humanities besides being a professor?
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A Reader Wants to be a Professional Philosopher
From a reader's e-mail: "Now, I want to be a professional philosopher, period! It's not as if I kind of want to, or happened to be thinking about it."
My young correspondent does not tell me what he means by 'professional philosopher,' or why he wants to attend graduate school, so I'll begin by making a distinction. In one sense of the term, a professional is one who makes a living from his line of work. Now it is a fact of life that one can make a living in a line of work without being particularly good at it. There are plenty of examples in the field of education of people who are incomptetent both as teachers and as scholars. Although these people manage to get paid for what they do, they are amateurs in point of competence. In a second sense of the term, a professional is one has achieved a certain high standard of performance in his line of work. This of course is no guarantee that one will be able to make a living from it. Now if a person persists in his line of work without remuneration, there is a clear sense, etymologically based, in which he is an amateur: he does what he does for the love of it. But this is consistent with his being a professional in point of competence. There are quite a few historical examples. Spinoza and Schopenhauer were professional philosophers in point of competence but not in point of filling their bellies from it. Employing a Schopenhauerian turn of phrase, both lived for philosophy not from it.
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Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?
This piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education is something you should read. People should know what they are in for. But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to take risks and perhaps later on have to retool for the modern-day equivalent of lense-grinding, then go for it! (Hat tip: Victor Reppert.)
Message From Butchvarov
Bill, great web site! The address of mine should be corrected. It's
http://myweb.uiowa.edu/butchvar/
No "www" in it.
Best,
Butch
Make Luft Not War
An excellent saying for chess players and Luftmenschen alike. Especially apropos for those of us who are both.
Peikoff on the Supernatural
Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31:
"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature. "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed friom a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What then is a "super-nature"? It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.
The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality. It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics. It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy . . . .
Is this a good argument? That alone is the question.
One Fallacy of Objectivism
The following comment is by Peter Lupu. It deserves to be brought up from the nether reaches of the ComBox to the top of the page. Minor editing and highlighting in red by BV.
One Fallacy of Objectivism
1) Objectivists seem to hold two theses:
Thesis A: There is a fundamental conceptual distinction everyone does or ought to accept between “metaphysical facts” vs. “volitional or man-made facts”; for the sake of brevity of exposition I shall occasionally refer to this distinction as the ‘Randian distinction’.
Thesis B: The content of the traditional philosophical distinction between contingent vs. necessary facts is either reducible to the Randian distinction or to the extent it is not so reducible it is conceptually incoherent, superfluous, or cannot be clearly demarcated; for the sake of brevity I shall occasionally refer to the distinction between contingent (and possible) vs. necessary facts as the ‘Modal distinction’.
Modalities of Sin
Horace Jeffery Hodges asked me to comment on his post Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom. Inasmuch as such commentary would require exegetical skills I do not possess, not to mention time I do not have — I am under the gun to finish an article for The Monist — I shall have to beg off. Perhaps others can join in the discussion at Jeff's place. But given my longstanding interest in matters modal, I was intrigued by the following quotation from Thomas Boston, courtesy of David C. Innes:
State of Innocence – posse peccare (able to sin)
State of Sin – non posse non peccare (not able not to sin)
State of Grace – posse non peccare (able not to sin)
State of Glory – non posse peccare (not able to sin)
Imaginable, Conceivable, Possible: How Justify Modal Beliefs?
As I use them, 'imaginable' and 'conceivable' mean the following. Bear in mind that there is an element of stipulation and regimentation in what I am about to say. Bear in mind also that the following thoughts are tentative and exploratory, not to mention fragmentary. The topics are difficult and in any case this is only a weblog, a sort of online notebook.
To imagine X is to form a mental image of X. To imagine a two-headed cat is to form a mental image of (more cautiously: as of) a two-headed cat. To say that X is imaginable is to say that someone has the ability to imagine it. To envisage is to visually imagine. Not all imagining is visual.
To conceive X is to think X. To say that X is conceivable is to say that someone can think it, that is, has the ability to make it an object of thought. Trading Latin for good old Anglo-Saxon, conceivability is thinkability. Therefore, a round square is conceivable in that I now have it as an object of my thought, hence someone can have it as an object of his thought. If you balk at this, then you are probably confusing conceivability with conceivability without contradiction. Admittedly, round squares are contradictory objects. Still, one can think them. They are therefore thinkable or conceivable. If you weren't able to think of the round square you would not be able to judge that there cannot be a round square.
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Till Eulenspiegel and Heraclitus
What do Till Eulenspiegel and Heraclitus have in common? I thought about them near the end of a recent hike. I am an uphill specialist. I love the upgrade, the pull, gravity's testing of legs and lungs, the depth of breath, the honest sweat. The downclimb is less to my liking. Fearing a fall, I am too cautious to go with the flow.
So my mind turned to Till Eulenspiegel, described by Theodor Reik as follows:
German folklore tells many tales of the peculiar behavior of the foolish yet clever lad Till Eulenspiegel. This rogue used to feel dejected on his wanderings whenever he walked downhill striding easily, but he seemed very cheerful when he had to climb uphill laboriously. His explanation of his behavior was that in going downhill he could not help thinking of the effort and toil involved in climbing the next hill. While engaged in the toil of climbing he anticipated and enjoyed in his imagination the approach of his downhill stroll.
The "foolish yet clever lad" put me in mind of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus. Philosophically considered, it matters not at all whether one is climbing or descending. "The way up and the way down are the same." (Fragment 60) The interdependence of opposites is a rich and fascinating topic. We shall have more to say about it later.
Feser on Vallicella on Rand
I just discovered this post at Edward Feser's weblog. Excerpt:
Bill also evaluates Rand’s argument to the effect that “to grasp the axiom that existence exists, means to grasp the fact that nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence.” He sees in this an inadvertent echo of modal Spinozism, and not implausibly. But to me it is even more reminiscent of the even more extreme metaphysics of Parmenides . . . .
The Parmenides connection is very interesting. When I asked Harry Binswanger why he thinks that the existence of nature is logically necessary, he replied,
Well, the first part is axiomatic: "existence exists." What makes that logically necessary? The fact that "existence doesn't exist" is a contradiction. "What is, is; what is not, is not" Parmenides wisely said.
Ernst Haeckel said that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the development of the individual recapitulates the development of the species. Whether or not this is true in biology, it is often true with amateur philosophers: these members of the Philo-phylum have a tendency to 'reinvent the wheel' while at the same time failing to appreciate the defects of their primitive reinvented 'wheel.'
Now you might want to dismiss what I just wrote as a cheapshot, but you will see that it is not if you study what I say here and here and here. There is no 'Rand-bashing' here, contra what some opine; there is the careful and critical examination of ideas. That is part of what philosophy is.
Harry Binswanger asks: ". . . within the sphere not affected by human volition (the "metaphysically given") what are the grounds for asserting a difference between necessity and contingency? Aren't all the events that proceed in accordance with physical law in the same boat?"
This is large topic with several aspects. This post concentrates just one of them.