Maverick Philosopher

To pursue philosophy on a Spinoza-like basis you need the modern day equivalent of lens-grinding, that is, an occupation in some new, expanding, and lucrative technology. How computer-savvy are you? That would be one way to go. There are still many middle-aged and elderly people who don't use computers but want to. You could go into business as a computer consultant and offer a wide range of services from simple set up of computers and peripherals to software installation, troubleshooting, DSL setup, virus removal, web design, instruction in the use of word processors and other applications, and the like. I suspect you could turn a reasonable buck in such retirement hotbeds as Arizona and Florida.

I myself wouldn't be able to take high school teaching; I couldn't even stand college teaching. But no doubt you are a better man than me in this regard. So you might try to land a high school teaching gig in the States upon return, and then during summer vacation try to launch some such business as the one I have outlined, eventually transitioning out of the teaching job.

The best approach is one that you may be too old for. That is to spend the years from 20-40 or thereabouts in some highly lucrative occupation building up a large grubstake that will see you through from 40-90 and allow you to live the life of leisure in the classical sense. You would have to live like a monk during your earning years while building your 'slave'; properly monitored, however, he should be able to take care of you for the rest of your life if you know how to live frugally. But most people's approach to life is far too extravagant and front-loaded for this solution to be viable.

A loving and psychologically supportive wife who pulls down a substantial salary is of course also a great boon for the would-be man of leisure!

It is not, in fact, rational to accept the proposition, "No set has a proper subset of the same cardinality" if you have any idea what those terms mean. So, to follow the analogy you propose, the only way one could rationally accept the contradiction offered by the problem of evil is to fail to understand part of it. Is this really the solution you want to offer to your readers? Besides the fact that it isn't philosophically acceptable*, you're encouraging your readers to react stupidly to things they don't understand instead of endeavoring to learn more about them.

*if it is, please tell me so that I can start publishing papers and building my reputation: "Berkeley claims that objective matter is a contradictory idea, but I don't believe him - don't ask me why..."

I'll grant that this fellow has chutzpah: he wants me to show him some consideration by allowing him on my site after suggesting that I have no idea what 'set,' 'proper subset,' and 'cardinality' mean. He also seems to think that I was saying that contradictions are rationally acceptable. But any intelligent person who actually reads what I wrote can see that I said no such thing.

Perhaps my correspondent will be helped by a simple scope distinction, that between

1. It is rationally acceptable that (p & ~p)

and

2. It is rationally acceptable that p & it is rationally acceptable that ~p.

(1) is obviously false for all values of 'p,' while (2) is true for some values of 'p.' (2) is obviously what is intended by "A proposition and its negation can both be rationally acceptable."

Still, one might press me: why exactly are No set has a proper subset of the same cardinality and its negation both rationally acceptable? Well, consider first the negation, Some set has a proper subset of the same cardinality. If you know anything about the work of Georg Cantor, you know that this proposition is eminently rationally acceptable. If the positive integers form a set, which is not obvious, then the set of positive integers is an infinite set, and the set of even positive integers is an infinite proper subset thereof. And yet the two sets have the same cardinality, namely, aleph-null.

But No set has a proper subset of the same cardinality is also rationally acceptable. For this proposition is certainly true if every set is finite. But that every set is finite, that every infinity is merely potential, are rationally defensible propositions.

One of the perils of blogging is that it opens one up to the attacks of the half-educated and the uncivil.

So if I were to sit down with my young correspondent, I would press him on whether he seeks a career teaching philosophy in a college or university. If that is his goal, and I assume it is, then I would feel it my responsibility not to lead him astray. I would give it to him straight: it is very difficult to get a tenure-track job at a reasonably good institution where there is a good chance of tenure. I managed to get a good tenure-track job right out of graduate school, and I got tenure. But I was single, single-minded, hell-bent on achieving my goal, I have some talent, and I was lucky. One hundred candidates applied for the job I got, ten were interviewed at the A. P. A. Eastern, four were invited on campus for a day-long interview, and somehow, they hired me. Not even I believe I was the best person they could have hired. Despite sending out dozens of applications, I had secured only three interviews, one for a one-year position, one at an institution where I had the chance of a snowball in hell, and one for the job I got. That says something about the job market, which I don't think is much better now (though I am 'out of the loop').

So it's a long shot. I am assuming that my young correspondent does not want to spend five or six years earning a doctorate only to end up teaching ten courses a year at slave wages as an adjunct professor in a community college in Fargo, North Dakota or Hibbing, Minnesota, or some such place. Only slightly better would be the life of the gypsy scholar who after a string of one-year full-time appointments spread out over these United States ends up in Beirut or Ankara.

From a 'practical' and 'economic' point of view, then, pursuing a doctorate in philosophy, and in many fields and not just humanities fields, is a loser. See Can I Afford a Ph.D.? for more pessimism. (Consume cum grano salis.)

But I'm an idealist, not a money-grubbing 'practical' type, and the way I thought about the problem as a young man was as follows. Philosophy for me is the only thing that ultimately matters, I consider it my vocation in the root sense of that word, and so I will pursue my vocation come hell or high water. I will apply to grad schools and see what happens. As it turned out, I got a couple of offers that included full tuition remission and a stipend to live on. So I was set to live the kind of life I wanted to live for four or five years. My thought was that even if I didn't get a job, I would have done what I wanted to do for a good period of time while getting paid to do it.

So to my young correspondent I would say this. If philosophy is the unum necessarium in your life, and your teachers tell you that you have some philosophical ability, and you are accepted at schools that pay your way, and you are willing to pay some serious dues living like a monk and foregoing the blandishments that most people in our society think essential, and you go into it with eyes wide open apprised of the very real possibility of having to re-tool later, then I say: go for it!

1. Make Good Use of Your Mornings

A. Read no newspapers. A thoroughly bad way to begin the day is by reading a newspaper. For it is not only the hands that get dirty, and the house cluttered; the mind in its early morning freshness is degraded by useless facts, polluted with badly written opinions, and suborned by seductive advertising. There is plenty of time later in the day to load up on the sort of drivel with which one must deal in order to survive in an imperfect world. The mornings should be kept free and clear under the aegis of Thoreau’s admonition, “Read not The Times, read The Eternities.”

B. Read good books. The morning is to the night as virtue is to vice. It follows that one should so arrange one’s life as to secure the maximum quantity of morning. Arise early, before the birds. The true lover of silence finds even the birds too noisy. In the morning all is cool, clean, and quiet. The worldlings are asleep, the universe is yours. Now read something worth reading, something that inspires, improves, ennobles, challenges. There are the great scriptures to choose from: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Old and New Testaments. There are great writers such as Shakespeare and Melville. Great philosophers such as Plato and Augustine wait patiently to engage us from across the centuries. If if it is self-help you need, why read the latest New Age hustlers when Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca lie to hand?

C. Keep the early morning hours free of electronics. No radio, television, Internet, not to mention such other mind-dirempting outrages as cell phones, ipods, blackberries . . . .

2. Be Careful of Your Evenings.

As important as the proper organization of the morning is the proper organization of the evening. A night spent in pursuit of the female ass and the whisky glass will obviously ruin the next morning, and something similar goes for imbibing media dreck such as movies, going to parties, and so on: one is not properly priming oneself for the next day's work. Alphonse Gratry is very good on this:

A very serious question of practice is involved in the use of your evenings, in respecting your evenings. We have just spoken of what can be called the consecration of the morning. Let us now speak of consecrating our evenings. It is at this point or never, that you must have the strength to break with your present customs. I declare flatly that minds are formed and grow, just according to the real organization of their evenings. (Logic, Open Court, 1944, pp. 533-534)

Gibson is right about one thing: I failed to mention the effect of air resistance on a falling object. But it is not just air resitstance that would prevent the projectile's terminal velocity from reaching its muzzle velocity. One has also to consider that some standard round such as a .38 Special fired vertically will go up only so far, and hence will fall only that same distance. In any case, I do not dispute that the terminal velocity will not equal the muzzle velocity (and not just because the direction has changed: velocity, we will recall, is a vector not a scalar.)

The more interesting questionis whether a .38 Special round, say, shot straight up by Bonehead would kill Bonehead when it came down, assuming it hits him in his bony head. Malcolm Pollack comments:

A bullet fired on such a trajectory, would, of course, hit the shooter with exactly the same velocity (albeit of opposite sign) as it had when it left the muzzle of the weapon, were air resistance not a factor. Even with that factored in, it is still easily lethal.

Pollack is here contradicting Gibson. Pollack says the falling round would be lethal were it to hit the shooter; Gibson denies this: "it wouldn't kill you." Who is right? I suppose one could calculate an answer, but one would have to know the muzzle velocity of the round, its mass, it aerodynamic properties (which affect its air resistance), the altitude at which the shooter is standing (Is he on Mt Whitney? In Death Valley?), the thickness and resistance to penetration of Bonehead's bony skull, and perhaps other factors that escape me.

I remember you well, John. It's great to hear from you. As I recall, you took three courses from me in the period 1989-1991: Introduction to Philosophy, Nietzsche, and Metaphysics. You were one of those students who made teaching worthwhile. Intro is hard to teach, but you were one of the students who made it go. Remember the Chinese guy, Didi Hu? I also remember you on account of the chess book you presented me with: Robert Byrne, Great Chess Victories and Defeats (Times Books, 1991). You wrote on the flyleaf: "To Dr. Vallicella, for excellence in teaching. John Wright, CWRU 1991." That book is a treasured possession. I also remember the times we played chess at the old Arabica coffee house on Coventry Road in the Coventry district of Cleveland Heights.

I remember one trap you fell into. It was a Goering Gambit, or something similar. I had the white pieces. The game went something like this: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 ed 4. c3 dc 5. Bc4 Nf6 6. e5 Ne4?? 7. Qd5! 1-0

No doubt you beat me a few times. But those games have been conveniently forgotten. Yes, my rating was in the 1500s when you knew me. The highest I got was 1736 in August of 1993. But then the underrated scholastic players did me in. I currently languish at 1526.

A free action is a not a random or uncaused action but one caused by the agent. (This is why quantum indeterminacy has no bearing on the free will problem. The existence of uncaused events in the brain or elsewhere cannot be used to show that there is free agency.) My answering your e-mail is libertarianly free in that (i) I am the agent-cause (as opposed to event-cause) of this action; (ii) I could have done otherwise, say, by just ignoring your e-mail. Since the act has a cause, the act is not random.

So it it not clear to my what your difficulty is. Given that I freely determine my course of action, the course of action is not random or uncaused. And it seems not to matter whether I have a reason to act or not. I don't need to have a reason for my act to not be random.

There is indeed a "strong connection" between truth and reality. This is a huge topic, but briefly and somewhat roughly: the truth is the truth about reality, and whatever is real is at least possibly such that there are truths about it. So if you have truth, you have contact with reality.

Truth is absolute. The notion that there is such a thing as 'relative truth' is radically confused. It may be difficult in a given situation to know that one has truth, but if one does, then one has something absolute. People who speak of a proposition's being true for one person but not true for another -- moronic people like Ward Churchill -- are typically confusing the property of being true with the property of being believed. It is trivial that a proposition can be believed by one person but not by another. But this does not by a long shot show that truth is relative.

Besides, if someone maintains that truth is relative, then he is either maintaining that it is absiolutely true that truth is relative -- in which case he contradicts himself -- or else he is maintaining that it is relatively true that truth is relative. In the latter case, he undermines his own position. If someone tells me that 'all truths are relative' is true only for him and his pals, then I reply: Very interesting, but what does that have to with me? For me, truth is absolute. (I discuss this and cognate questions more rigorously in numerous posts on this site.)

So truth is absolute. And it is absolute because reality is absolute. Veritas sequitur esse: truth is consequent upon reality, and the absoluteness of reality gets transmitted to truth.

I once saw a bumpersticker: "Don't Fuck with my Reality!" That's doubly offensive, first because of the 'F' word, and second because of the implication that there is such a thing as my reality. There is no such thing as my reality if that is meant to imply that there are alternative realities. Of course, there are alternative takes, views, versions, etc. of reality. And of course there are multiple real items. But there cannot be multiple realities.

If there are multiple realities, then they are either parts of one all-embracing reality, in which case there is after all an absolute reality; or the multiple realities are incommensurable. If incommensurable, then there is no sense to the claim that there are multiple realities.

So I agree with Mr Gallegos when he writes, "that those on the left who relativize truth would not then be justified in calling themselves members of a 'reality-based community'." Leftists who relativize truth have no right to speak of reality, or being based in reality.

There is more. 'Reality-based' is supposed to contrast with 'faith-based.' But it is characteristic of leftists, who deny 'pie in the sky,' to aspire to 'pie in the future.' (Some of them have also shown themselves to be willing to murder millions to get a taste of this pie.) But how can a utopian, someone who hankers for what never has and arguably never will exist, be called reality-based?

Leftists are typically not based in reality; they are based in illusions about human beings and what they are capable of. We can't even say that leftists are ideality-based. For nothing counts as a genuine ideal unless it is realizable. Another way to look at it is that leftists are just as faith-based as their opponents: it is just that they put their faith in something different, something less likely of coming true.

This is a good objection. I was a bit sloppy in my exposition. I stated the Regularity Theory in the way I did because I wanted to stay close to Hume, or at least Hume on one standard interpretation. That explains the spatiotemporal contiguity and temporal precedence clauses. These are relevant for the billiards balls cases that exercised Hume. His main concern was physical-physical macrocausation. But they drop out in the mental-physical case, or at least the spatiotemporal contiguity clause drops out. This is something I failed to make clear. Setting aside the historical Hume (or one interpretation of the historical Hume), the essence of the Regularity Theory is that one event causes another just in case the pair instantiates a regularity. Causation just is regular succession. This is hard to swallow, of course, but if this were all there is to causation, then there would not need to be any physical contact between cause and effect, or any transmission of a physical magnitude from cause to effect. There would be no need for a locus of interaction. If so, Sober-type objections (col)lapse.

Sober asked: "But if it [the mind] lacks spatial location, how can it be causally connected to the body?" This question presupposes that there is a locus of interaction, a place where the mental event makes physical contact with a physical event or the beginning of a physical process. But if causation just is instantiation of a regularity, then there is no need for a locus of interaction.

The main point of the post was that the sort of objection Sober makes, an objection endlessly and thoughtlessly repeated, is of value only if accompanied by a theory of causation according to which physical contact/transfer are essential to causation. But it is not clear that they are essential to causation. One cannot just assume that causation requires physical contact/transfer.

The links I have assembled under 'Philosopher's Tool Box' are mostly too technical for one starting out. Your question is a tough one, and I am going to pass it on to the members of my elite Commenter Corps, some of whom teach philosophy, in the hope that some of them will make some useful suggestions.

I will, however, point you to Norman Swartz's Notebooks which contain a wealth of materials that may prove useful.

And on a self-serving note: Having found my blog, you have found a good resource where critical thinking about ultimates and proximates is pursued on a daily basis. With apologies to Dennis Prager, "If you like to think, you'll love my blog; if you don't like to think, you need my blog!"

Good analysis, although when one deals with liberal dimwits the question arises whether it even makes sense to try to engage them on the plane of reason. They will say almost anything regardless of its coherence or connection with reality. Just consider recent statements by Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Harry Reid. House Minority Leader Reid (D-NV), on the floor of the Senate, called a proposal to make English the official language "racist." "This amendment is racist. I think it's directed basically to people who speak Spanish." See here. People ought to be astonished that a senator, on the floor of the Senate, could make an assertion as preternaurally asinine as this. Dennis Prager offers outstanding commentary in his Harry Reid and the End of Liberal Thought. The Donkey Party has become the asinine party.

As for Harkin, his style of verbiage fits a broader pattern: Liberals tend to deny that one can make moral judgments while making such judgments themselves. They think one is being 'judgmental' if one makes moral judgments, and that this is something one ought not do! Thus they make the moral judgment that it is wrong to make moral judgments. But to point out this incoherence to these people does no good since they are beyond the reach of argument. They don't need refutation, what they need is to be voted out of office.

I was a Dem until 1991. I stayed until I just couldn't stand it anymore. One thing I don't understand is why so many Jews are Democrats. That makes no sense to me at all. Are they just living in the past?

Dear Prof,

You saved my blog from extinction. I'm busy writing something completely different, and was going to close it down to reopen it sometime in the future, but after your words I had to reconsider. Fancy you calling me Sophia, wisdom/knowledge. Great!!!

With best regards,

Joy

----- Original Message ----- From: BillVallicella@cs.com To: jok@email.com Subject: Blog On, Joyful Sophia Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 18:33:58 EDT

Dear Joy,

I visited you today, and found much to enjoy and agree with, in particular, the posts on narcissism and Nazism. Please keep up the good work.

Best regards,

Bill Vallicella

Thanks, Dave. I'll try to answer your questions. In one sense of 'imaginary,' it is quite clear that imaginary items do not exist. Something that does not exist, I maintain, cannot have properties or stand in relations. Something that does not exist is nothing at all. How could nothing at all have properties? I take no firm stand on the difficult question of presentism, according to which only present items exist, though there is much to be said for it. It does, however, face serious objections.

The phrase, "participate in some sort of pseudo-properties or pseudo-relations," is not one I have employed. I don't know what you mean by it.

This strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome. There is a well-established theory of relations; that theory applies as well to these pseudo properties and relations as it does to your properties and relations "strictly speaking". There is, for example, a relation "happens before" that can apply equally to past, present and future (speculative) events. The American Revolutionary War happens before the American Civil War. This relation is a common pedagogical example of a transitive, irreflexive, antisymetric relation, yet you would say that it is not a relation at all.

You are failing to make a number of important distinctions. First of all, there is a difference between a predicate and a property/relation. Predicates are linguistic items; properties/relations are not. The existence of a predicate does not suffice to show the existence of the corresponding property/relation. For example, '...is either a screwdriver or a loaf of bread' is a perfectly good predicate, but it doesn't follow that there is a disjunctive property, the property of being either a screwdriver or a loaf of bread. David Armstrong and others have given powerful arguments against disjunctive properies.

Similarly, 'x is earlier than y' is a perfectly good two-place predicate. But it doesn't follow that there is a dyadic relation corresponding to this predicate. There might be or there might not be. It depends on what conditions an item must satisfy to be a relation. If relations obtain only if their relata all exist, and if presentism is true, then 'x is earlier than y' does not pick out a relation. A predicate and its sense may or may not have anything corresponding to them in reality.

You say that there is a "well-established theory of relations." No doubt, but that has to do with the logic of relational expressions and their senses. But there is no well-established, and widely agreed upon ONTOLOGY of relations. And it was the ontology of relations that we were discussing.

If you think I am denying that 'earlier than' or 'happens before' is transitive, etc., then you simply haven't been paying attention. Consider 'loves.' It is nonsymmetric, which is not to be confused with asymmetric. If x loves y, it does not follow that y loves x, but it also does not follow that y does not love x. But from the mere fact that there is the predicate 'loves' and that is has a certain logic, it does not follow that in reality there is a relation corresponding to it. An eliminativist in the philosophy of mind might well deny that there is any relation, loves.

Or consider the two-place relational predicate 'is the same color as.' Suppose ball A and ball B are the same shade of red. Since each is red, it follows immediately that A is the same color as B. Now should we say that, in ultimate reality, there are three items, A, B, and the same color relation? Or should we say that the relational fact of A's being the same color as B reduces to a conjunction of two monadic facts: A's being red & B's being red? If you say the latter, then you are denying that there is a relation corresponding to the relational predicate. This question cannot ve resolved simply by staring at the relational expression.

I just don't see the motivation for what (I see as) such a wholesale redefinition of a well-defined word. Furthermore, I'm having trouble seeing the utility of the distinction that you are trying to draw. There are these items, let us call them relation-like items, that all have a bunch of similarities with a beautiful formal theory to tie them altogether, and you want to divide them up into the "relations properly speaking" and the pseudo-relations on the basis of one property: whether their domain contains items that do not exist. But this property seems irrelevant to what makes a relation-like item a relation-like item.

Honestly, Dave, I don't know what you are talking about. And I note that you have not quoted me or responded to anything I actually said.

But is there a totality of all the things that actually exist? Well, is there a totality of books in this room? There is this book here and that one there, and all the ones on all the shelves, and so without visually surveying them all, I naturally assume that they form a totality under the description, 'books in my study.' There is also the larger totality of books in my house. And so on up to the totality of everything that exists.

But of course there is a difference. One can count books; one cannot count existents. This is because an existent is not kind of thing. Being is not a genus as Aristotle remarks in the Posterior Analytics at 92b10 and in the Metaphysics at 998b22. How could one count existents?

Do I count my coffee cup as one existent or as many? It has many properties, and they exist. If the property of being blue did not exist in some mode or manner, then the cup couldn't have it. Now anything blue is colored, and so the property of being colored has to be counted, and presumably also the relation of inclusion that the latter bears to the former. One sees how tricky this becomes.

Still, it seems to make sense to say that there is a totality of things that exist. Given that there are many things, even infinitely many, it seems it must be possible to regard that manifold as one sum-total. They all exist and are unified by this fact. In what sense is this manyness a sum-total? This question is not easy to answer positively. Negatively, we can say it is not a set since, if I recall my set theory, it is provable within Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory that there is no set of everything.

Questions about realism and idealism come in here. Is the world-whole merely an horizon we project rather than an existent whole independent of us? And these are only some of the questions that arise.

Hi, I am a photographer in Yosemite, CA (yes, I do live in Yosemite Valley). I came across your site while searching for an Ed Abbey essay. I am relieved to find someone who understands the need for philosophical reasoning to be brought back to compete with pundits. Many are too disgusted with the nasty political world to bother. I'm glad someone is sticking with it.

I am beginning a photo article on modern nomads, people who have left behind their homes and roots for a new/wilder place and never quite landed. Your CV indicates you might understand this experience.

I am mainly focusing on Rock Climbers. They comprise my community and personal experience as an endorphine addict. Your work is extensive and I have searched for essays regarding your personal thoughts in this vein, and finally decided I would just ask you if you had anything sitting around for me to chew on. Poetry, quotes, whatever.

If you don't have time I understand, but if you have had any sparks on this subject I would greatly appreciate your input. (Saw you spent time at IU, I was born and raised in Bloomington.)

Thanks for writing, Katie. I enjoyed browsing your site. Here are some essays of mine on outdoor themes that might interest you. I am not a climber, strictly speaking, but a hiker, backpacker, runner and mountainbiker. And although I love high places, I can't say I like exposure, so the little climbing I have done has been nerve-wracking. Anyway, here are some short pieces you may like:

Strenuous, but Without Destination
Today's Infernal Hike
Pack it In, Pack it Out
The Range of Light
Desert Hiking in Summer
Moonsets and Microclimates
The Pleasures of the Mountain Bike
Running at Sunrise with Thoreau
Phantom Runners
Runner, Jogger, Plodder
Ruminations After a Road Race; Philippians 4:13

I suggest that you first read the Tropes entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. As for whether trope theory permits a solution to Bradley's regress, I return a negative answer in my draft Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress. You may also want to consult my article, "Relations, Monism, and the Vindication of Bradley's Regress," Dialectica vol. 56. Fasc. 1 (2002), pp. 3-35, and my article, "Bradley's Regress Argument and Relation-Instances," The Modern Schoolman vol. LXXXI, no. 3 (March 2004), pp. 159-183.

You might find "Augustine's Trinitology and the Theory of Groups" by Thomas Ryba in Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum to be of interest. Ryba argues that the notion of a non-transitive identity relation (such that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, but the Father is not the Son or Holy Spirit, etc.) can coherently be conceptualized in set theory, meaning that the Augustinian notion of the Persons as "subsistent relations" is at least logically possible. Ryba took a similar position to you regarding the value of such a demonstration in showing whether the doctrine is coherent and rationally believable, even though we must presume that Augustine didn't have any such thing in mind.

Thanks for putting the site together, BTW. I lurk here from time to time, and I always find something interesting. I confess to being quite curious about your differences with Barry Miller on existence, as I found his defense of divine simplicity in A Most Unlikely God based on his theory to be the most convincing treatment I had encountered in my (albeit-limited) investigation of the subject, so I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts on that whenever you happen to get around to them. (Hyperlinks added by BV)

Thanks for the kind words and the reference to Ryba. The book you mention is checked out of the local university library, but I found another by Ryba which I will get today. As for Barry Miller, I reviewed A Most Unlikely God for Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review (vol. XXXVIII, no. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 614-617). I'll see if I can post the review on this weblog. You might say that Miller and I are workers in the same vineyard, but we have some differences on the topic of existence that I haven't discussed in print. I need to dust off some old manuscripts and perhaps post some of the material here. Thanks for the encouragement, and best wishes. BV.

Mr. Purdy: Thanks for writing and for the kind words. Until just now, Korzybski was just a name to me. I recall Quine mentioning him and his Science and Sanity a few times en passant, but I know little about Korzybski or his work. Perhaps other readers of this weblog can be of assistance.

But this site mentions Max Black's 1949 critique, "Korzybski's General Semantics," in his book Language and Philosophy: Studies In Method. Black is a distinguished philosopher and I would start here if you want to read something rigorous and professional about Korzybski. The fact that Black wrote about him, and Quine mentioned him, shows that Korzybski is worth studying. I gather that he developed a critique of the various uses of 'is' (as expressive of identity, predication, existence, etc.). This is up my alley, so I'll try to get hold of Black's article, and perhaps report back later.

Like you, I have found little that appears solid on Korzybski on the Web. I don't need to warn you about Wikipedia.

From CNN:

Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, 22, who graduated in December after studying psychology and philosophy, was in the custody of campus police. They intended to charge him with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, said police Capt. George Hare.

The Baron has his own take on it...of course, he doesn't use CNN.

I'm overdue with a response; have been under the weather for awhile. But the Baron told me you said I was a good writer...thanks for the compliment. Being able to blog has been a great outlet for me.

The case of the Mowdown Man prompts the question of why we are so lenient about whom we let into the country. Is it hard to understand that comity is possible only among people who share fundamental assumptions? How do we make a society work with people who don't share such values as the five enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? (Exercise for the reader: name the five.) Even with basic agreement on such things as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, there will still be plenty of bitter controversy concerning their interpretation and application. How then can we live in peace with people who are theocrats (in the correct, not the leftist, sense of the term) and cannot tolerate dissent and free expression?

How can we tolerate people who do not respect the principle of toleration? Are you lefties so tolerant as to tolerate just anything, including your own destruction? We always knew there was a deep cesspool of nihilism in many of you, but maybe it is deeper than we thought.

Curiously, the Mowdown Man studied philo