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!

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!"

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 philosophy, but it did him no good: the good skepticism without which philosophy in the West (arguably a pleonasm) is unthinkable apparently did not rub off on him. Dymphna teased me about this. Perhaps we can get the miscreant to read my and her blogs while he is languishing in lock-up.

An argument is a sequence of statements together with the claim that one of them (the conclusion) follows in some sense from the others (the premises). By this criterion, the sentence you quoted above is not an argument, but merely a statement.

Here is an example of an argument: "Since infanticide is morally wrong, and there is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and abortion, it follows that abortion is morally wrong." Grammatically, the foregoing is a single sentence; but it embodies an argument which can be perspicuously displayed as follows:

1. Infanticide is morally wrong
2. There is no morally relevant difference between infanticide and abortion.
Therefore
3. Abortion is morally wrong.

When one argues, one marshalls reasons for one's thesis or contention. In the above example, (1) and (2) are the reasons adduced to support the thesis or conclusion (3).

Logic is the study of arguments from a normative point of view. The aim of logic is to set forth criteria for distinguishing correct from incorrect arguments. One crucial distinction is between the truth/falsity of premises and the correctness/incorrectness of reasoning. There are four cases. One can reason correctly from true premises, incorrectly from true premises, correctly from one or more false premises, and incorrectly from one or more false premises.

The ideal, obviously, is to reason correctly from premises that are true or at least plausible. The office of logic is not to supply true premises, but to get one from true premises to true conclusions. You continue:

Lobbyists wants access to public servants
Public servants have power
Lobbyists do not have power
Thus, lobbyists have no power, no influence, until a public servant gives them power.

See? I can't even it break it down. I really want to know how. Can you help? I really want to join the blogosphere debates, but am afraid because I don't have the skills to go head on with my opposition. I want to be able to respond forcefully to editorials, political blog posts, and opinion pieces that I disagree with. Any suggestions?

One skill that you need is that of being to able recognize, reconstruct, and evaluate arguments. Even more important is the ability to construct sound arguments for propositions you wish to advance. Apparently, what you are trying to do above is construct an argument for the thesis that lobbyists do not have the power to influence legislation unless they can influence legislators. But that is a fairly obvious proposition. It is not clear that one needs to argue for it.

The only way to learn how to argue is by arguing against intelligent interlocutors. But don't waste your time with sophists or blind ideologues. A certain amount of study of formal and informal logic is useful. And of course one must know the subject-matter one is arguing about. I can't say much that is helpful in general terms. But if you have some very specific questions, I may be able to help you. Good luck!

I'm glad you asked, Jimmy. My main target in a series of posts over the past weeks and months has been metaphysical naturalism. (As opposed to epistemological and ethical naturalism which I also reject.) I haven't positively advocated substance dualism, but I maintain that it is a serious contender, along with idealism. I have been concerned to show how weak and dogmatic virtually all contemporary rejections of substance dualism are, especially those of top philosophers such as Dennett and Searle. For the moment, you could put me down as either a substance dualist or an idealist, with a preference for idealism. Idealism receives almost no discussion currently.

I would recommend the following contemporary defenses of substance dualism in no particular order: W. D. Hart, The Engines of the Soul (Cambridge 1988); John Foster, The Immaterial Self (Routledge 1991); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (2nd ed. Oxford 1997); Beloff and Smythies, ed. The Case for Dualism (U. of Virginia Press, 1989). You can find further references in Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction (Oneworld Publications, 2005, p. 37). Ed is a colleague of mine over at Right Reason, and a very good philosopher. I suggest you begin by reading his chapter on dualism before plunging into the more technical material.

And thanks for reminding me that I need to get a copy of Jaegwon Kim's new book.

I took a look at your weblog and I want to encourage you to keep at it. One of my self-appointed tasks is "To promote independent thought about ultimates" (masthead), and one way I do this is by encouraging young people such as yourself to think and write. I want to stress the importance of writing, writing well, and on a regular basis. Thinking without writing is too diffuse and inchoate to be of much value. Thoughts need to be hammered into well-crafted sentences, paragraphs, articles . . . Only then does one's thinking become concrete. Jotting down notes into a notebook is not enough. This is why blogging is so useful. Since it is a form of publication, of making public, one has a motive to make one's thoughts clear presentable. Not until you work out an idea in detail and in the teeth of possible criticisms do you know whether you have an idea of value.

So bone up and blog on! (Bear in mind, of course, that blogging is, as a liberal might say, 'addictive.')

In your anarchism post, you wrote, "The only philosopher who has defended anarchy to my knowledge is Robert Paul Wolff in his In Defense of Anarchism. I recommend you take a look at Richard Sylvan, "Anarchism" in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell, 1995. Sylvan, who used to call himself Routley, is a distinguished Australian philosopher. Unfortunately, he died relatively young. I have slogged through most of the 1,000 pages of his Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond. His later interests were in deep ecology and I gather from the article cited that he was quite sympathetic to philosophical anarchism.

Interesting that you quote a passage from John Taber's Transformative Philosophy. My copy of the book I received from Taber's hand during the time we were neighbors in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. My wife and I occupied one half of a three-story duplex, he and his wife the other half. I agree with the concept of philosophy limned in the quotation.

A very interesting letter that poses very tough metaphilosophical questions. I am not in a position to give a really good answer at the moment. But I'll venture a few remarks.

1. Any inquiry at all must presuppose that there is truth. That seems to be a rock-bottom presupposition. For if you deny that there is truth, then there is nothing to know and inquiry has no goal. Thus, if I want to know whether or not my mental states are identical to brain processes, I must assuume that there is some fact of the matter: either they are or they aren't. I must assume that there is a determinate way things are. Either reality is such that mind = brain (to put it crudely) or reality is not that way: mind is epiphenomenal or emergent or supervenient or doesn't exist at all or can exist without a physical substratum . . .

2. Connected with #1 is the assumption that I can know something about the determinate way things are. We now have two assumptions going: there is a way things are, and we can know something about the way things are. HOW we can know something about the way things are is a question that must be tackled eventually; but THAT we can know something about reality must be assumed.

Note that inability to give a satisfying answer to the question as to how knowledge is possible does not show that it is not possible. Something can be possible even if no one can explain how it is possible.

3. It seems that we must also add to our default epistemology the assumption that the logic that regulates our thoughts also applies to reality, the world to which our thoughts are directed. For example, we must assume that the law of non-contradiction is true of reality and not just of our thought-contents.

4. Connected with #3 is the assumption that reason is a route to knowledge about reality, and that a thoroughgoing empiricism must be rejected.

5. I would say that there is a presumption in favor of the foregoing assumptions, which is not to say that they cannot or ought not be questioned. But many of the attempts at denying them lead from the frying pan into the fire. See my posts on self-reference and relativism.

6. Which comes first in the order of inquiry, epistemology or metaphysics? A tough question! The knowledge of reality is itself a reality. The knower and his cognitive performances are part of the world. So must not epistemology be embedded in a prior metaphysics? Gustav Bergmann somewhere says that epistemology is the metaphysics of the knowing situation. But on the other hand, how can one do metaphysics without first undertaking a critique of the powers of reason? (Kant, but see Hegel's critique of Kant on this score) Isn't the knowing subject in some sense a transcendental subject transcendentally prior to the world? There are deep problems here that no one has solved, problems that some contemporaries are oblivious to, especially the ones in the grip of scientism.

7. I wrote and published a book on existence. The starting point was the fact that individuals exist, and my concern was to develop a theory that explained what is is for an individual to exist. I assumed both that individuals exist and that they might not have existed. Since my topic was a straightforwardly metaphysical one, I didn't want to get shunted onto an epistemological sidetrack. But the following epistemological questions arose: Do I know that anything exists? Of a thing that exists, do I know that it contingently exists? Given that I know that a thing exists, how do I know this? Given that I know that a thing exists contingently, how do I know that it has this modal status?

I answered the first question to my satisfaction by invoking Cartesian self-evidence: surely I exist even if nothing else does, or at least these present thoughts about existence exist. That seemed to me to anchor my invesigation in something real. But even without that anchorage, one could inquire into what it is for an individual to exist.

My answer to the second question was less satisfactory. I took the conceivability of the nonexistence of existing individuals as evidence of the possibility of their nonexistence, and thus of their contingent modal status. Less satisfactory, because it is not obvious that conceivability entails possibility. Still, it is quite reasonable to hold that ordinary individuals exist contingently.

The third question concerns how we know existence given that it is not an empirically detectable property. It is a properly epistemological question, but luckily one that I didn't have to treat.

The fourth question concerns the epistemology of modal knowledge. We claim to know that such-and-such is actual, possioble, impossible, necessary, etc. How do we know these things? This too was a question I didn't have to treat for my purposes.

Dear David,

Thanks for the comments. It is not clear to me what you mean by your first point. What I said was that a being omnipotent in the third sense "cannot act upon anything that already exists." The idea, which I wasn't endorsing but merely sketching, was that divine action is creation out of nothing while creaturely action is necessarily an action upon something pre-existent. The idea, in other words, is that God is ALL-powerful in that he is responsible for ALL of any effect he produces. Let the effect be the existence of the universe. Then God's all-power consist in his being the cause of the universe without the help of anything else such as any other agent or any pre-existent matter. When I bring about an effect, however, I work upon something pre-existent which must 'cooperate' with me if the effect is to come about. Thus when I make my famous guacamole, I don't conjure it up out of nothing but by mashing ripe avocados, etc.

Now the obvious objection to this is that God can both create out of nothing AND alter what he has already been created. Thus God not only creates a universe in which V. mashes avocados on 20 July 2005, but also has the power to intervene in the process by say imparting a garlic taste to the guacamole without V.'s having to mash in any garlic cloves. But this intervention is hard to make sense of. That is why I was toying with the idea of a definition of omnipotence that whould restrict God to be the cause of a thus-and-so propertied universe but not allow him to intervene in it. What I want is a wholly non-anthropomorphic conception of God in line with the divine simplicity which is essentially an affirmation of God's absolute transcendence.

And let's be totally clear that 'all-powerful' cannot mean able to do anything any more than 'all-knowing' can mean able to know anything. Not even God can know false propositions. (Of course, he can know of a given false proposition P that it is false, but then what he knows is a true proposition, namely, the distinct proposition Q that P is false.) Similarly, not even God can perform contradictory actions or violate metaphysical necessities. For example, God is a metaphysically necessary being, whence it follows that God cannot bring about his own nonexistence. His nature places a limit on what he can do. Therefore, I can do something God cannot do, namely commit suicide. The "death of God" taken literally is a nonsensical idea.

Not that you would deny anything I said in this last paragraph.

Your second point seems to be that my third definition of omnipotence would allow as omnipotent a being that creates a single hydrogen atom out of nothing but cannot create anything else. But what I was saying was this:

G is omnipotent₃ =df for any x, if G is the cause of x, then G is the whole cause of x.

Now it is clear that this definition allows as omnipotent a being that creates ex nihilo a single hydrogen atom and nothing else. But it does not allow as omnipotent a being that creates ex nihilo a single hydrogen atom but cannot create anything else. If God creates something, but not something else, it does not follow that he cannot creates that something else.

I'm glad you got something out of those two posts, Jason. My weblog has several purposes, one of them being didactic: to offer free philosophy lessons to whomever is interested. I am neither an elitist who thinks that philosophy is only for specialists, nor an egalitarian who thinks that it is for everyone. It can't be a mass consumption item, not even on the college level since it requires a level of intelligence and intellectual desire that is not exactly widespread; but more people ought to know something about it.

I mean: isn't it just appalling that people who ought to know better, politicians in particular, regularly formulate the abortion debate in terms of the question, When does life begin? That is an idiotic way of setting up the problem, as I may explain later. Here philosophy can shed a bit of light, if not towards resolving the dispute, at least by clarifying what it is about and by sending the worst arguments on both sides packing.

And yes, my approach can be described an analytic, although I wouldn't call myself an Analytic as opposed to a Continental philosopher. (Part of the 'Maverick' schtick is to express a wariness of, and nonallegiance to, either camp.) One starts with some vague notion that is bandied about, say, that 'truth is relative' and one asks what it could mean. One distinguishes the various meanings it could have and them examines each one in turn. One draws distinctions, for example, between what is true and what is believed to be true. In this way one comes to see that much that is believed by people about all sorts of things, including about truth and belief, is either meaningless or false or has some other defect.

How does one become an analytic thinker? I have nothing startling to say except that one becomes analytic by analyzing just as one becomes a writer by writing and a runner by running. Of course, reading and study are necessary as well. To become a good writer one must read good writers and study how they achieve their effects. To become a good analyst one must study good analysts and see how they do it.

I am aware that what I have said is not very helpful. In the end, there is no help other than self-help. All education is ultimately self-education. One either educates oneself or the job doesn't get done. Universities and the like merely provide a framework within which one either pursues or fails to pursue one's education.

BV: I take your point, Ed. 'System' is much better than 'collection.' I was working from the Wikipedia definition. I myself used 'system of beliefs' as synonomous with 'collection of ideas.' But you are right: 'collection' is a bad word choice. Thanks for the correction.

But you may not have appreciated my point that 'system of ideas,' though characterizing ideologies cannot be taken as defining them since there are non-ideological systems of ideas.

I think this is handy in explaining why quantum mechanics et. al. are not ideologies. QM is a system of statements about facts, not a system of ideas about things, metaphysical, physical, or abstract.

BV: Yes, QM is a system of statements. And a statement is not the same as a concept or idea, unless we are using the latter very loosely. Photon is a concept. (Obviously, that is not to say that a photon is a concept: no concept can pass through a slit or fail to pass through one.) Photons travel at the speed of light is a statement. Statements are analyzable into concepts, but not vice versa.

Why do you say that QM is not a system of ideas (concepts)? It is both a system of statements and a system of concepts.

I would add here the great quote of Nietzsche: "I distrust all systematizers. The will to a system is a sign of lack of integrity."

Keep up the good work.

I would respond that there is a distinction between a system-builder and being systematic. I would say that a good philosopher must be systematic. Fritz's febrile brain would have profited had a bit of systematicity been inculcated into it.

BV: I hope you do.

a) that some sort of consciousness is necessary for certain types of truths to exist (or perhaps I should say for them to be defined at all, in the absence of which I think they fail to exist in any interesting way - that is to say, in any sense that focuses the infinite combinatorial complexity of the world);

BV: In one sense, this is clearly true. Truths about consciousness cannot exists unless consciousness exists. For example, 'Some conscious states are nonintentional' cannot be true unless there exists at least one conscious state. But you appear to mean something more than this.

b) that some sort of material substrate is necessary for consciousness to exist, or that at least that such an assumption should be our default posture barring evidence to the contrary;

c) that the argument over primary vs. derived intentionality (often used in defense of the necessity of God as first cause) tends to overlook the possibility that first-order intentionality in humans can have arisen from the accretion of design by natural selection;

BV: The "often used" part is puzzling; whom do you have in mind?

d) that the construction of the "bridge from the physical to the mental" is well under way.

BV: No doubt there is something under construction; but it can properly be called a bridge only when it actually connects to the far shore. We shall see.

I'm sorry to be so bogged down in worldly work that I've had to let the ball drop for now. I don't want to write hasty and ill-argued postings; I feel that my last one failed properly to get my point across, and I want to be careful about that.

BV: No need to apologize. Primum vivere deinde philosophari. First live, then philosophize. Your comments are of very high quality and present a nice challenge. We'll see if we can get a bit more clear about these matters.