"The Heart Has Its Reasons . . .

which reason knows nothing of."

Pascal

Russell's Sets

This graphic explication of the ideas of Bertrand Russell are getting good reviews.

Quine's Empiricism

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

In his book from which you quote, Quine rejects the analytic (true by the meaning of the words) -synthetic (true by virtue of facts) distinction. The fact of a physical object is not subject to falsifiability while theories that contain those facts are. I think Quine is suggesting a cautious or humble approach to facts as the selection of those facts may be just as dubious as the theory that Thor controls thunder.

Spinoza's Monism

"Great spirit and monist, now considered atheist, Spinoza used the term God to refer to the total of Being and Nature which constitute the only one substance that exists."

There is a curious verse in the Bible that also seems to suggest monism.

Acts 7:28: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being."

We Continue To Talk

1) Moral licentiousness and decay weakens a society
2) The left champions moral licentiousness and decay
3) Therefore, the left champions policies that weaken society
If you want to deny the conclusion you must deny one or more of the premises.

Which premise(s) do you wish to deny?

I deny both premises. As to #1, and speaking as a father of two teenagers, I think exposure to moral licentiousness and decay are not unmitigatedly bad as it exposes them to the real world and thus innoculates them for the real world. Of course, exposure to such is not the same as consent to such. I take a quasi-Nietschean, social-Darwinian view that a world without evil is a world without struggle and a world without the potential for good.

As to #2, I see that as neither a premise or a fact. To the contrary, who do you suppose it is that owns and manages the vast and effectives engines of moral corruption but rightist business people, most of whom are conservative Christians? Why? Because it is in their financial self-interest to do so. Fox is a stirling example. O'Reilly, who I admire for his tough-minded (albeit wrong-minded) independence of thought (in contrast to Beck who is a lunatic and Hannity whom is a GOP apparatchik) nevertheless almost always has a needlessly salacious segment on his show. But drill down a bit more. Who do you suppose are the people who are having abortions, the people who are getting divorced, the mobsters, the pediophiles, the murderers? They are not just generally Christians but conservative Christians, and repeated statistical studies support this. The denial of this ("No true conservative Christians are morally depraved") is of course the No True Scottsman fallacy, which takes this form:

Argument: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."
Reply: "But my friend Angus likes sugar with his porridge."
Rebuttal: "Ah yes, but no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

The problem with this argument is that it derives an unproved predicate ("puts sugar on porridge") from the subject ("Scotsman"). The move is from a synthetic-contingent proposition (one that can be falsified by facts) to an analytic-necessary assertion (one that is true by definition but has no relationship to the facts). Now, sometimes the argument is valid as when the predicate derives from the subject, as in "no true vegetarians eat beef".

The family was generally in accord with that stipulation. This is a good example of the vast spread between principle and application and where deeply held principles are chucked in favor of situational ethics. We clearly don't see eye to eye on the pro-life issue although we are in accord with the general principle of an undivided reverance for human life. It is the application in real time under the fog of crisis that is the rub. At the time, I was disappointed at my family for thisi decision, although I've tried hard not to conceptualize in in legals terms such as homicide or suicide. I can conceive of a situation where it may be acceptable to remove nourishment from me if I was in my mother's place. However, I would never want this to happen if I was still conscious, as was the case for my mother, and nor should such decisions be compelled one way or another by the legislature. These kind of decisions are difficult, which is why I am suspicious of moral absolutist claims of any kind as compelleing as they may seem at the time. Such people who make them simply have not lived enough life or thought deeply enough to make them in my opinion.

I'm sorry it has taken me a while to get back to you on this. The account of your mother's late life and death is very moving.I take it that your family, supposedly pro-life as it was, was in accord with the stipulation to withhold nutrition and hydration?It is my own view that extraordinary measures may be withheld when it is pretty clear that a person's natural life-expectancy has reached its course, but that basic necessities such as nutrition and hydration should never be intentionally withheld. Those things, I believe, are the right of any human person, if they are available. So I think I'm with you on this one, and I am truly sorry for the suffering your mom had to endure at the end of her life, and I'm sorry that you had to witness it. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm sure it is not easy.

Do you see my mother's death in terms of either suicide or homicide?
I think many Kantians (although not Kant!) claim to be moral objectivists rather than moral absolutists. I see no incompatability with situational ethics or utiliterianism and Kantianism so long as the former is rooted in moral objectivity.

I agree there is a distinction between utiliterianism and deontological ethics in that the former considers consequences while the latter does not. However, there can be an overlap as well, as they both try to root moral rules in something other than God or feelings. In the case of Bentham's utiliterianism, it is happiness for the greatest number and Fletcher's situational ethics, in which agape love is the great goal, and in the case of Kant's categorical imperative, it is to treat others as an end rather that as a means to an end. I'm aware that both Bentham and Kant tried to turn their principles into absolutes, but that need not be the case. Consider for example Kant's discussion in Grounding for the Methaphysics of Morals on suicide: "A man reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes feels sick of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether taking his own life would not be contrary to his duty to himself. Now he asks whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. But his maxim is this: from self-love I make as my principle to shorten my life when its continued duration threatens more evil than it promises satisfaction. There only remains the question as to whether this principle of self-love can become a universal law of nature. One sees at once that a contradiction in a system of nature whose law would destroy life by means of the very same feeling that acts so as to stimulate the furtherance of life, and hence there could be no existence as a system of nature. Therefore, such a maxim cannot possibly hold as a universal law of nature and is, consequently, wholly opposed to the supreme principle of all duty." The contradiction is framed in terms of the conflict of universalizing self-love with self-hate. There are historical episodes when suicide has been regarded not just as a heroic act but as a moral act, as in the Masada deaths. In my mother's case, there is both ambiguity as to consequences but also good will by all concerned, not that that mitigates the act by my mother and the doctor. I disagree with the existentialists that suggest that the action is meaningless or the cause for that action so long as we act in good faith. I'm looking for more.

I don't know enough about the circumstances surrounding your mother's death to say whether it might have been suicide, homicide, both, or neither. I'm only pointing out that you can use those terms morally and not just as legal terms.As for Kant, the principles generated by the CI, whatever they may be, are supposed to be absolute principles. That's the whole point of their being universalizable.You may not see any incompatibility between utilitarianism (or situationalism, or whatever you wish to call it) and Kantianism, but Kant sure did. That was the whole point behind his so-called second formulation of the CI: "Now I say man...." It was to preserve the dignity of the human person against any calculations of utility, which is what he took Hume to be pointing at and presciently feared would become a widely accepted moral theory.There is a lot more to Kantianism than mere objectivism. Utilitarianism is an objectivist moral theory, and Kant was a staunch opponent of (what we now call) utilitarianism.Kant would not have struggled with the permissibility of terminating innocent human life. He would have said it was impermissible because he thought it could not be absolutized as a universal moral law.

If the principles in either of these systems are not taken to be absolute, then one has moved into a different system of ethics all together.

I feel like seconding William James' "damn the absolute." It seems that absolute principles of morality are both nonsensical (unless we want to endorse an application such as "death to all killers" and dangerous. My father, for example, is a wonderful man in many respects. But there is not the slightest doubt that having to make a false choice between Jesus and my death, he would choose my death, and fanatics make choices like that constantly. In the more sane world, we also have doctors and generals who struggle with difficult lifeboat choices that confound deeply held principles. I'm not quite as dismissive as you are toward existentialism, especially when such choices are attached to a spiritual goal. It seems to be based on a realistic view of man and society and it upholds the notion of man's freedom of to make choices, as does Kant.

I wouldn't say "there are no absolutes" (even in the metaphysical sense) is a credo of any existentialism of which I'm aware. It also seems to me that you greatly mischaracterize existentialism in your comment below and also incorrectly tie the philosophy to "pro choice" impulses.

The Existentialists are crass non-cognitivists with respect to morality.. They held that something becomes morally permissible simply on the basis of its being chosen by an agent, and no truth-values attach to statements about morality. This intellectually jejune and socially naive exaltation of will and "choice" in ethical decision-making is still alive and well. It allows people to resort to violence against the innocent when they deem it convenient to do so."

In my years of debate, I've encountered only one person who tried to argue that "everything is relative" and "that we can be sure of nothing" including even trivial facts of science, i.e. the earth circles the sun. In my view, it isn't even something worth debating as it is a variation of solipsism.

I was introduced to the existential imagination in a honors literature class in high school. My teacher Richard Delzingero (we called him "Mr. D.") was one of a small handful of those rare teachers who really pushed me to think and write. He later went on to become a Barnabites priest.

http://www.catholic-church.org/barnabites/b56vocn1.html

Soren Kierkegaard is regarded as the father of existentialism, and his thinking came out of his critique on the Danish People's Church for its secularism, politicization, and hypocrisy, and attack that hasn't lost its relevancy. (If you haven't already, I recommend you take a look at his writing.) One of his key concepts is the "leap of faith" to God. I also have come to see theistic apologetics as arguing in circles and there is not a single proof for the existence of God that compels my respect at least. His "subjectivity is truth" statement doesn't mean that principled ethics are chucked. It does mean, as I understand him, that an interior quality of acceptance needs to take place before ethical action can commence.

Some people think that existentialism is devoid of faith, because of the anti-clerical writings of Nietzsche and atheistic writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. However, most existentialists were theists. I see the same false dichotomy between Christianity-- love for God-- and humanism--love for man. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book defining and defending Christian humanism Such belief are not in opposition to each other, and nor is existentialism necessarily in opposition to Christianity. Of theists who influenced existentialism, we must include Hegel, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and others. Unlike much of religious and modern thought that minimizes or suppresses the idea of man's free will, in existentialism man's free will provides the axiomatic backdrop that asks us to choose in a morally ambiguous world. Man defines himself by the sum of his choices, according to Sartre. Man is free. The coward makes him cowardly. The hero makes him heroic. Because God doesn't exist, Sartre says, man defines his essence though his actions. But I don't think this follows. Why should the non-existence of God have any bearing whatever on our actions? Why should it matter if our death results in nothingness, heaven, or reincarnation, so long as we act morally and authentically today? It makes as much sense to say: Because God exists man defines his essence through his actions. Bad faith emerges when we attribute to God consequences to our actions, or when we allow a creed to dictate our life rather than our conscience. As Dostoyevsky says: "Thou shalt love life more than the meaning of life."
The architects of the Cambodian genocide studied the existentialism of Sartre in the Paris of the early 1950s. Were Satre's children correct to make the leap from life is meaningless tohumans are worthless? Can we attribute the veneration of any kind of choice, no matter how willfully ignorant or immoral it is, to Kierkegaard? To me, that makes as much sense as blaming Hiroshima on Thomas Jefferson. All that they heard was that life is absurd, reality nauseating, and that man was free of commandments and obligations, while entirely forgetting the dimension of hard moral choice and hard moral courage. While Sartre was a Stalinist fellow traveler, he certainly wasn't advocating the abdication of morality that would result in pyramids of skulls under an Asian sun. The syllogism is not that since all is absurd, every act we take is absurd, including the claim that all is absurd. Rather, these are starting points to allow us to find meaning in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. I cannot deny that in existentialism we find nihilism and violence for its own sake. E. M. Cioran defined the case for total pessimism: "Life is a passionate emptiness, and intriguing nothingness" He writes that "I cling to the world no better than a ring on a skeleton's finger" but also says that "I fall back on God if only out of a desire to trample my doubts underfoot. Since all life is futility, the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all." But what the existentialists generally emphasize about man is that is a decision-making creature blessed or cursed with the freedom to choose among a number of possibilities in a mysterious. Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity for the soul to be free, but discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom, it led him into tragedy and evil. To be truly human, must man must accept this freedom by a commitment to authenticity. That authenticity can translate into either acts of immorality or acts of morality, but the act rests entirely with in our hands. This message can be become bracing in the religious version of existentialism in which choice is directed at a transcending spiritual goal.

Is Perfection Possible?

Says a reader: "Perfection, I believe, is a state of being."

Actually, wouldn't perfection be a state of non-being? A biography of Walt Disney ended with his death and the ironic remark that finally he (or at least his body) had found perfection. If something is inert, it is devoid of possibility-- anything more than what it can be, which would have to be an atom. Perhaps the reducability of that atom through fission or fusion into a mushroom cloud is the apotheosis of perfection. It is a grim throught that perhaps mankind will only reach perfection by being finally consumed in a sea of fire from a thousand mushroom clouds.

Another reader opines: "In reality, God is Perfect, so is His Law, so is His Book, so is His Envoy, so are His Law Enforcement Officers."

I'm not sure what your theology is, but it cannot be Christian. No such canonical claim is made that God is "perfect". To the contrary, we see an evolution of God from the polytheism of Genesis to the monothesism of the Old Testament to (what many Christians believe) is the Triniterianism of the New Testament and from an anthromorphic God that walks with some humans and smites others to a redemptive God that is the spirit or logos of the Greek testaments. That God's "law enforcement officers" (I assume you mean the clergy) are perfect makes no historical sense to me.

"You are right. It's not christian. I am a Muslim."

My apologies. Granting however that Allah, The Koran, and The Prophet are perfect, what is your warrant this "His Law Enforcement Officers" are perfect? Does perfection mean dogmatic correctness? And if so how does that differ from the perfection of the gods, holy writs, and officers of the Hindus?

"God said He perfected them and then ordered their utmost love and respect. His Law Enforcement Officers are perfect in that they never go against God's will. They have perfect knowledge of the Divine Law, and they implement it perfectly. If Hindus system has similiar perfection, then it is the same. Although I don't hear Hindus making such claims."

You haven't talked to enough Hindus. I grew up in Asia where I saw rampaging Hindus battle rampaging Buddhists, burning to the ground entire city blocks, because they claimed the perfection of their respective theisms. True believers-- fanatics-- populate and drive all mass movements be they religious or political. Those Hindus and those Buddhists along with the Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages and the 21st century and the Islamists that drove jets into skycrapers and strap dynamite to thir daughters are all brothers under the skin in that they have a cast of mind that cannot allow for the possibility that all value systems and god conceptions including their own are imperfect and defective and thus are subject to challenge and reformation.

Fanaticism will be the death of our planet, and, as I said in a previous post, perhaps the annhilation of humanity in a sea of nuclear fire will be a kind of ironic perfection.

Hmm

"Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.” -Jean-Paul Sartre

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” -Albert Camus

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And If I am compelled to take part in it, Where is the director? I want to see him.” - Soren Kierkegaard

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it." -Andre Gide

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

"Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" - William Butler Yates

The Frustration of Will

Epictetus postulated that it is desirable to will whatever occurs; in this way one's will is never frustrated.Is this a plausible position? Is it possible for a Stoic to live a human life, or merely "the life of a stone"?

I prefer Nietsche's "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Fatalism of any kind is not reasonable. The corollary is that we must welcome the frustration of our will to do anything that really matters.

The Prism of Ideology

Says a reader:

Webster says a prism is “a medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”.

It appears to me that Marx was the first great thinker to have coined the word “ideology”. Ideology is a distinctive form of reasoning about the individual and about the individual in society. Ideology is a systematically biased mode of thinking. Ideologies vary extensively in so far as the idioms used, the extent of bias, the degree of sophistication, the manner in which bias permeates various aspects of theory, and so on.

While ideologies vary widely in certain aspects all ideologies share some common characteristics. An identifiable logical structure is shared by all. This structure includes: 1) a moral dimension, 2) it is biased toward a specific group and is biased against those out side this group, 3) an ideology cannot not directly defend it self because it rests on assumptions that have never been critically examined or even formulated, and 4) Marx believes these assumptions to be “nothing more than the intellectual ‘transcripts’ of the conditions of existence of the social group whose point of view it reflects”.

"Like viewing the world through a prism, the ideologue experiences the world in a distorted manner. “What a man does not transcend in reality, he cannot effectively transcend in thought either. The limits of his existence are the limits of his thoughts. His basic assumptions are therefore ultimately nothing but his conditions of existence ‘reproduced’ in thought.”

Quotes from Marx’s Theory of Ideology, Bhikhu Parekh

My response:

Marx is correct in so far as he is attaching a world view ("ology") to an idea ("ide-"), and that can blind us to other possibly more correct or important ideas. Better metaphors are "looking at life through rose-colored glasses" or "wearing blinders". But prisms do not distort but refract. The angle of light refraction depends on its wavelength. White light is split up into the spectrum. The spectral composition of ight can be measured by spectrometers. But there is nothing distorting about either the white light or its analysis into its spectrum of red, yellow, green, and purple. To the contrary, prismatic thinking suggests analytical and honest thinking-- an effort to accurately reflect reality by decomposing it accurately. There is nothing intrisically dishonest or harmful about animating your life with an overaching ideology, for example, the "ideology of truth" or "the ideology of safety". Nor does an ideology necesserily need a moral component or need to be directed against another group.

I don't know who this Webster is but my dictionary gives a definition closer to Philip's and even Pesla's. And this is one case where I would definitely differ with Marx. First, from my perspective we all have ideologies. Its just that some people don't like to think that because they like to think they are biased free and objective. To use the prism metaphor, I would actually say that the prism in this case can break an ideological system into its constituent parts. The ideology, in fact, produces the white light by blending the seemingly disparate parts into an artificial whole. Of course the problem with a lot of this is that the metaphor falls apart in some ways. Should the light be the blended white or broken down into the constituent parts. In fact the metaphor here could well be that the ideology of Newton was to indeed break it down into parts for study and analysis. The ideology of reductionism. However, in many ways, as I have argued elsewhere, it is the blended white light, not the constituent parts, that may actually provide the better illumination.

Another post.

Prisms distort. Curved prisms distort. Straight sided prisms distort. See Jenkins and White, for example. The ordinary physics experiment simply doesn't show that distortion.

Well, I suppose you are coming down to the meaning of words. If by distortion you mean dispersal, I agree. I also agree that on a case specific basis, there may be distortions in the prism itself. But the refracting of light per se is not a distortion of that light.

To invoke another metaphor, it is akin to a bunch of blind people with hands on different parts of the elephant, each stating dogmatically that "this tail/tusk/ear is an elephant." Or, if I can invoke yet one more metaphor, it is akin to a frog on a lilly pad, the frog saying that this lily pad and no other is the lilypad of all truth.

But knowledge is as you suggested undifferentiated to some degree, and the challenge is to analyze to understand but to recombine again to get meaning. Endless discussions over mind/body or science/religion or religion/state are a consequence of our inability to rise above allowing ourself to be as it were immersed in one color of the spectrum.

My Worldview In A Nutshell

Here is the way I generally look at life.

"Fact" pertains to the "isness" of life, without regard to our interior world, such as feelings and ideas. It is that part of reality over which we have no control, such as to whom we were born, where we were born, and our individual genetic makeup.

"Acts" is behavior. Axiomatically, behavior drives thoughts. Reinforcing and promoting of good behavior leads to good thoughts. The converse-- that good thoughts leads to good behavior-- is a fool's errand. Thus, parents and teachers expend great effort trying to teach kids the Golden Rule in the hope that they won't bully their playmates. But what they really should be focusing on is learning moments that come out of their children's behavior-- either rewarding good behavior or punishing bad behavior.

The last column is entitled "thought". This is both the most interesting and the least significant part of my view of life. It is the most interesting part because it embraces the greatest and most challenging ideas and ideals of humanity, including religion, politics, and art. It is the least significant because excessive rumination in distinction to acts leads to errors and evil.

I was watching a biography last night of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhold Heydrich. He was a Renaissance man-- a gifted musician, highly intelligent, a skilled sportman-- and also an architect of the holocaust. His genocidal impluses flowed out of his inner world informed as it was with anti-semitism and ambition, constrained only by his assassination in Prague. Heydrich's future would have been different if his behavior was shaped at an early age by more positive forces. This is an extreme example, but it is true also wiuth theists and atheists, liberals and conservative, Hindus and Catholics, Republicans and Democrats, Marxists and liberterians. These are but labels put on ideas that do not always flow out of behavior. Rather than debating the labels-- does God exist, for example-- it seems to me it would be much more worthwhile to focus on questions of behavior-- what does it mean to raise truthful children, for example.






Finally, around it all, I have a box, a metaphysical representation of God as the first principle and the ontological ground of all existence. What I haven't included, however, is the implication of two parallel worlds, such as secular and sacred or worldly and spiritual. I see little justification in such dichotomies. Also, there is no implication of a transcendent supreme force or being that orchestrates our behavior, a varient of fatalism that abdicates our role in intentionally molding ethical behavior.

Irrationality

Here is my contribution to Wikipedia's article on irrationality. It's the last paragraph on the discussion page on the supernatural section.

The section in this article where it says, "belief in the supernatural without evidence" could conflict with religious beliefs, and should either be removed, or reworded. (Not to say that I have any religious views, but others may find it offensive; I don't). Exothermic Reaction (talk) 22:53, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Now you're being irrational. If "belief in the supernatural without evidence" is irrational, then it should be listed, irrespective of whether it offends those who don't want to see anything that disagrees with their views. Would you say that belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a supernatural entity without evidence, is rational? Don't consider "religious" opinions to be any more sacred than philosophical or political opinions. --131.111.8.96 (talk) 13:25, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the phrase "belief in the supernatural without evidence" means. The "evidence" is presumably the believer's culture and traditions. "God" or "gods" is a conceptual bucket that contains those values, and if those values have utility to them as they inevitable do have, than I don't think we can call them-- belief in the supernatural-- irrational. They may seem irrational to us, but it doesn't follow that they are irrational to others. That is the problem with FSM-- it's a god-concept detached from culture, values, and tradition and thusly "evidence". It's for this reason I think discussion on the relationship of evidence to theisms is better suited for the atheism page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mymallandnews (talk • contribs) 04:38, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Understanding Wittgenstein

Asks a reader:

I need some help understanding Ludwig Wittgenstein. What is he trying to say?

Wittgenstein is one of the break-through philosophers of the 20th century. By putting moral issues on a linguistic plane, he seemed to eliminate entire classes of questions as undefinable and thus unsolvable.

He had a Nietsche-like aphoristic style of writing. From his 1914-1916 notebooks.

"Eine der schwersten Aufgaben des Philosophen ist zu finden, wo ihn der Schuh druckt. Man versucht oft, zu grosse Gedankenlufte zu uberspringen und fallt dann mitten hinen.

"One of the most difficult of the philosospher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches. One often tries to jump over too wide chasms of thought and then falls in."

Here are more examples.

Perhaps his most famous aphorism is: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" where "speaking" is the formulation of a moral claim and "silence" is the inability to intelligibly resolve that claim. Wittgenstein forced a precision with the use of language that heretofore didn't exist, for example, in the consideration of these two sentences: "What is time" and "What is the time?" It is an over-simplification that he demolished logical positivism. To the contrary, he complimented Russell's work, for example, in Russell's "Theory of Definitions" and in his application of modal logic.

Videos of discussions of Wittgenstein, his work, and his ideas.

Anthony Quinton on Wittgenstein

John Serle on Wittgenstein

A book review in The New York Times on The House of Wittgenstein

A Uterus is Not A Clown Car

Nadya Suleman, the single mother who gave birth to octuplets last week , said she wants to go back to school to get a degree in counseling. Her couseling will no doubt boil down to the usual pro-life certitudes-- breed like a bunny without regard to consequences-- either to yourself, your finances, the finances of tax payers in the state, and the lives of her children. In the meantime, if she can cash in on her story, so much the better.






Octomom




Her Begging Site


To make some sense out of this pro-life heroine, I turn to the insights of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He acknowledged that love was the great mainspring of human existence: "One ought rather to be surprised that a thing [love] which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw and untreated material." He anticipated the sociobiologists of the modern era by claiming that this force not only had precedence over reason but it was the apoetheosis of reason for all creatures-- to stay alive and reproduce at all costs. "The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation." Perhaps the problem Schopenhauer would see in Miss Suleman's bliss for procreation is that it circumvented the usual process of forming a new person, but I don't think he would be judgmental as the desire to compose that next generation stems from unconscious, unspoken yearnings. In this case, person-formation took place in a laboratory with a doctor, not in a candle-lit restaurant or a church social with a boyfriend. Just as we are unsettled by Victor Frankenstein's laboratory-created monster, so too are we unsettled by this astonishing manifestion of Wille zum Leben, the will to love, trumping prudence and common sense. But that is true with all romance. It is a temporary madness that seizes our mental processes so as to ensure "the composition of the next generation."

While the births appear to be irrational, selfish, and foolish and while it must be true that a uterus is not a clown car, I'm not sure it is right to demonize Miss Suleman, as she may not have had much choice in the matter. Her 14 children might be the inevitable consequence of the conditions that created her essence, the result of forces that neither she nor we can begin to comprehend. I am reminded of Melville's Captain Ahab. "But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand - a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders." Could it be that Miss Suleman is the Fate's lieutenant and that she is acting under orders?

The Falsehood of Emperical Agnosticism

One cannot escape the conclusion that nothing is known with absolute certainty. To whatever extent we may claim that a belief is true, we must also admit, at the same time, that it is contingent upon experience and thus always subject to revision.

I can see that you are enjoying your sophomore year. Seriously, your contention that "nothing is known with absolute certainty" is provably false. Is there any doubt that the earth rotates around the sun, that blood circulates through your body, or that you will die if you ingest cyanide? On metaphysical or linguistic question, your epistomological agnosticism might have some warrent. But when applied to statements of emperical fact, your conclusion that no knowledge can be known with certainty is rubbish.

Just how do you prove what you said unless we use methods of statistics or uncertainty? On what grounds do you demonstrate that in particular- not just assert it is not the case? Sure, we seem to understand on one level that "nothing in itself" has a sort of certainty in the thinking processes. This is a consistent view- despite one can truly argue if the earth is a center of the universe of if blood circulates throughout the body (both major breakthrough discoveries of course) and there is a rumor that some taking cyanide have survived it by their strength of mind- who is to say that in some other matrix this pill could be the truth of things? I mean while we forbid division by zero it should be clear we cannot talk about such realms in a empirical or psychological manner. Or can we?

Argumentum ad matrix? Hmm. It seems to me that we live in a world where there are mirages, dreams, delusions, and madmen. But none of that negates the existence of reality separate from our impressions and emotions. That you are real-- that you are drinking soda rather than bleach-- that you will sleep tonight, perchance to dream, but wake up tomorrow in a world of real things-- is a common-sense given accepted by any creature with consciousness. Some things can be detected by external devices. This book weighs two pounds and not two tons, for example, and that weight has nothing to do with "my truth"-- a construct that doesn't exist in reality. It is what it is-- an absolute truth. And, as other people have mentioned, your theory collapses into incoherence. Is truth relative? Fine, then that statement "truth is relative" must also be relative and therefore not relative. Is truth verifiable? Fine, then verify that asssertion. Is truth falsifiable? Fine, then falsify the claim that truth is falsifiable. As alluring as your theory is, it ultimately is an intellectual dead end that puts into the same category of skepticism flat earth theorists and round earth theoritists. And also in that category is skepticism about even language itself including our ability to use symbols that each other can understand-- a claim that you implicitly reject by responding to these posts!

philip8 wrote: A successful life is one that is inspired by love and is guided by truth.

Wonderful. Didn't Bertrand Russell say something like this?

Correct.

I paraphased Lord Russell in his chapter "Ethics" from his book Philosophy (1927). The actual quote is: "The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

This is more than a Chinese cookie aphorism for Russell. He deduces the principle: Act so as to produce hamonius rather than discordant desires. Given that, Russell says that "it is clear that, if harmonious desires are what we should seek, love is better than hate, since, when two people love each other, both can be satisfied, whereas when they hate each other one at most can achieve the object of his desire. It is obvious also that desire for knowledge is to be encouraged, since the knowledge that a man acuires is not obtained by taking it away from some one else; but a desire for (say) large landed estates can only be satisified in a small minority. Desire for power over other people is a potent source of conflict, and is therefore to be discouraged; a respect for the liberty of others is one of the things that ought to be developed by the right kind of education. The impulse towards personal achievement ought to go into such things as artistic creation or scientific discovery or the promotion of useful intitutions-- in a word, into activities that are creative thather than possessive. Knowledge, which may do positive harm where men's desires coflict (for example, by showing how to make war more deadly), will have only good results where men's desires harmonize, since it tends to show how their comon desires are to be realized.

The conclusion may be summed up in a single phrase: The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."

However, the irony is that Russell's own personal life was a nine-decade long stew of discordant desires and emotions, resulting in multiple marriages and mistresses and madness and suicides of his granddaughters and son. He, like so many philosophers, loved humanity but hated people.

I cannot say that Bertrand Russell lived a good life.

On Perfection

A biography of Walt Disney ended with his death and the ironic remark that finally he (or at least his body) had found perfection. If something is inert, it is devoid of anything more than what it can be, which would have to be an atom. Perhaps the reducability of that atom through fission or fusion in a mushroom cloud is the apotheosis of perfection. It is a grim through that perhaps mankind will only reach perfection by being finally consumed in a sea of nuclear fire.

Spring Time Thoughts

When I was on the beach last week, I gave my son a teaspoon of philosophical reality. I stamped my foot into the wet sand and pointed that footprint to him as the surf washed over it. In a second, the indentation was gone, as if it never existed in the first place. That, I said, is our life on earth. It is but a vapor in the vastness of oblivion, a barely noticed flash on the endless riboon of time. As the preacher (not The Byrds!) in Ecclesiastes said: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die." In the local cemetary, I came across a ninety year old grave marker that had toppled over. As I turned it upright, I wondered if anyone today even knows or cares that person lived or died. And I realized that the day will come that no one will know or care if I or anyone else for that matter lived or died. Man is not the measure of all things as I'm reminded of Shelley's poem Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

Even if our faith takes us to a belief in the afterlife or in reincarnation, it doesn't mean that our life here on earth is much more than a ripple from a pebble tossed into a boundless ocean, a twig swirling into oblivion. That said, our response cannot be cloud-dwelling morbidity as life is to be lived, and it is our awareness of death that gives life poignancy and urgency. We are always hearing time's winged charriot hurrying near, and it is this knowledge that brings us closer to what and whom we cherish. For me, this means spending less time with tele-evangelists and tele-politicans and more time with my family and friends, and less time worrying about stuff I can't do anything about and more time enjoying the stuff that makes up my life.

To life!

The Rhinoceros in the Room

Russell on Wittgenstein.

"My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable - I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't."

Solipsism

"You can search the skeptical literature all you want. You will never find anyone who has ever argued, for any X, "I haven't seen X, thus X cannot exist."

Go ahead and prove me wrong. Find a quotation that says anything like that, and post it here."

I dislike the word "prove" out of context with logic, science, or law almost as much as I dislike verbal absolutisms such as "never". But to answer you question, this view has a pedigree going back to the Greek presocratic sophist Gorgias (c. 483-375 BC) who is quoted as stated:

Nothing exists;
Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and
Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.

Thus, he might say, Churchill doesn't exist, but if he does exist, his existence cannot be communicated. This relates to epistemological solipsism, in which "only the directly accessible mental contents of the solipsistic philosopher can be known." I don't know how deep an answer you want from me. The tone of your post suggests that you don't want me to get into Humean causality or Kantian idealism but were trying to score a late night point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_solipsism

The Morality of Retarded Suicide Bombers

Two mentally retarded women were fitted with bomb vests and sent to a crowded pet market milling with families and children. The bombs were remotely triggered.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22945797/

I wonder if there is a bottom somewhere that we can all agree on, an absolute of sorts. I was totally nauseated by the use of these women, who could not consent. I was nauseated at the place of the attack. After a while, you want the world to scream in outrage and I hear too few of those screams.

I would be happy to agree that one's free consent is foundational to morality. Unfortunately, this is very much a minority view it would seem, with most claiming that consent is objectively a fiction as is morality. Even people of faith use expresssions that subjectivize their moral code-- "it is true to me" or "Jesus is in my heart". The free will presumption clarifies what is moral and immoral. Consider for example your most cherished conviction, perhaps your faith in God. Let us say that someone abducted the person who you most love, say a child or parent, and said that they would murder that person unless you renounced your faith. Would you do so? The Kantian moralist would say: no, you are obligated to always tell the truth irrespective of consequences. As much as I admire the categorical imperative, here Kant is wrong in my view. Why? Kant is wrong because the predicate to morality has been violated, namely one's unconstrained capacity to be immoral or moral. In the absence of freedom of choice or consent, there is a state of amorality. Given that, you are obligated in this case to lie to achieve a higher moral good, namely, the life of your loved one.

The Problem of Pain

A man named Rick Rood wrote this interesting article about "The Problem of Evil". It starts by saying, "John Stott has said that "the fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith." It is unquestionably true that there is no greater obstacle to faith than that of the reality of evil and suffering in the world. Indeed, even for the believing Christian, there is no greater test of faith than this--that the God who loves him permits him to suffer, at times in excruciating ways. And the disillusionment is intensified in our day when unrealistic expectations of health and prosperity are fed by the teachings of a multitude of Christian teachers. Why does a good God allow his creatures, and even his children to suffer?"

www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/evil.html

According to the Bible, God punishes those who hate or ignore him as in Ezekiel 20:24-26:

"Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols. Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the LORD."

It hardly seems God is allowing freedom, but instead demanding obedience. This passage does not suggest that the evil is the natural or inevitable result of disobedience, but the specific act of God in response to it.

Good observation. However, there are many other passages that intimate that God is a god of grace, and that mercy proceeds justice.

I also have a problem with Hume's formulation:

"David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, stated the logical problem of evil when he inquired about God, "Is He willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

Consider a father with a five year old playing next to a busy street. That father would indeed be evil if he did not prevent an immanent evil of that child running into the traffic. But that same father would not be evil if that child was a mature ten year old. The question is no longer a matter of the father's impotence or inability to to prevent evil, but the father now recognizing that the child is developing personhood and commonsense to prevent the evil himself from happening.

I also have a problem with the notion that pain is punishment or that pain is meant to teach us some kind of a lesson. Here is an essay I wrote on this point.

“Tell me about your God of love,” an atheist wrote to me, “for all that I see is 1 Samuel 15:3, 2 Samuel 24:15, 2 Samuel 6:6, and 1 Chronicles 21:14.” Never let it be said that atheists haven’t read the scriptures. Sometimes they have read it only too well. And I must admit that I too I have trouble squaring God’s command to “slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass” with the One who said “Permit little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” That God would inflict pain or even allow pain has challenged man since the days of Job.
Grandma June provided one answer to Natalie Angier. “When I was eight years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died,” she writes. “The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother’s living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father’s Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle’s station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.”

A 16 year old has more questions for an advice columnists: “When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids of the block making fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nights, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I’m a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes. I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people—even myself—so I can’t blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she cries terribly when she looks at me. What did I do to deserve such a terribly bad fate? Even if I did some bad things, I didn’t do any before I was a year old and I was born that way. I asked papa and he says he doesn’t know, but that maybe I did something in the other world before I was born, or that maybe I was being punished for his sins. I don’t believe that because he is a very nice man. Ought I commit suicide?”

The basic formulation for the problem is as follows: If God is good, He is not God. If God is God, He is not good. If God is good, He would wish to make his creatures happy. If God was all-powerful, He would be able to do what He wished. But His creatures are suffering. Thus, God lacks power or goodness or both. Either God doesn’t exist or He is impotent or He is evil.

In The Brothers Karamazov, the greatest novel of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of the atheist Ivan the one irrefutable objection to a personal God, that the only possible religious answer is that human suffering will be justified by the divine harmony and the end of history. It’s a hollow argument made by some theologians to explain the holocaust—that Hitler was God’s punishment of European Jews for their secularization and Biblical prophecy was fulfilled when the state of Israel was born.

“Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It's beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers' crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn't grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.' When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can't accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child's torturer, 'Thou art just, O Lord!' but I don't want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpected tears to 'dear, kind God'! “

The classic counter is that God made man not as robots but with free moral agency. God freely limited his own freedom and put no limit on ours. God thusly could not have created a moral universe without at the same time freeing man’s spirit. If God had programmed all humans to be good, there would be no evil but there would be no virtue as well. Evil exists because free will exists. Blind force, instinct, or the orchestrations of God do not compel us. The classic Christian reply to suffering makes sense only if we assume that God is not in control of all that happens. If God controls plane crashes, terminal cancers, and atom bombs, then God must be responsible. If those actions are bad, then God must be evil and the author of evil. I cannot believe that. Rather, I believe that God created a contingent universe and delegated to humanity the freedom to work through the vicissitudes of life—dealing with war, disease, and poverty. By doing so, humanity develops morally, intellectually, and technologically. So this is another reason why I believe God’s self-limiting sovereignty and that we determine our own destiny in the face of life, death, and God.

This accords with the view of Harold Kushner, whose young son had progeria, the “rapid aging disease. By the time his son had died at 14, the boy looked like an old man. “An aching sense of unfairness” led Kushner to write the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner argues that bad things didn’t happen because God wants to punish us for our sins, test our strength, or teach us lessons. Instead, Kushner sees randomness to the universe. Lottery winners are merely lucky—not blessed. And when bad things happen, we shouldn’t question ourselves or God and be angry because the world is imperfect and unfair. Insurance companies call earthquakes and hurricanes that kills hundred of people “acts of God”, but they use God’s name in vain. These are acts of nature, not acts of God. Nature is morally blind. The act of God is the courage of us to continue in the face of disaster.

But I think this is a sterile argument that doesn’t address the core issue of the suffering of the innocent. I think for example of the two million Jewish babies and children that were swallowed by the maw of the Nazi death camps, including kids of relatives of my wife. It makes me think that if there is a God, it’s a God who is blind. That children must die so that we will be good strikes me as incomprehensible. Following the death of his young boy, Huxley replied to a letter from the Reverend Charles Kingley: “As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read as part of his duty, the words “If the dead rise not, let us eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all the best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because I am face to face with irreparable loss, because I have given back to source from whence it came, the cause of great happiness, still retaining through all my life the blessings which have sprung and will spring from that cause, am I to renounce my manhood, and, howling, grovel in bestiality? Why the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the forge.”

I have great sympathy for this reaction, and should I lose my wife or child, my grief would be as great, but I could not be persuaded that their lives had been at no purpose. I think of the Oxford don C.S. Lewis who aggressively promoted the orthodox Christian answer to evil and suffering in The Problem of Pain. You may remember the movie “Shadowlands”, played by Anthony Hopkins as Lewis, in which he had a crisis of faith when he watched his young bride die of cancer. At the end of the day, there are no satisfactory answers—only the consolation of faith in the One who also suffered-- and our friends. In one of the last scenes in “Shadowlands,” we see the professor hugging his young step-son after his wife had just died-- both in tears. Perhaps that is the only real answer in the face of the silence and distance of God. Faith is not all green pastures and still waters. The comforters in the Book of Job put forth their rational arguments, and at the end Job—without an explanation but with the existential experience of God—turns for questioning to wondering silence: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” In this fragment of time on this island in space, we are in this together and we must help each other out. Evil and suffering is inextricably part of the human condition individually and institutionally, and if there is one thing we must believe in, it is that we can make a difference. To live is to suffer. To suffer is to find meaning. And, if there is purpose in life, there must be purpose in suffering and death. The Psalmist said that “My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.” It did not say, “My tragedy comes from the Lord.” The bad that happens in our life has no meaning. But we can redeem it by giving it meaning.

It's really due to Epicurus, not Hume. Many explanations for evil have been invented. Some, such as the free will defense you cite, do an acceptable prima facie job with moral evils such as war and crime, but do not even touch on contingent evils such as natural disasters and epidemic diseases.

Why reject the free will defense of evil as a method of teaching the ways of God to man? My answer would be that it is obviously random and often misapplied. God allows a child to die a cruel death to teach the parents to serve him better? Not truly credible. God's methods of insruction in this defense seem crude and unfocused —the innocent are often taken with the guilty.

It is true that natural disasters appear random and that is because they are random. Insurance companies call them Acts of God, only because they are outside of the domain of man's control, such as a hurricane. I agree that there is no credibility to the idea that they such disasters are meant to impart a moral lesson (a view that many fundamentalists ascribe to the 9/11 attacks-- Wall Street was attacked because of what the gays were doing in San Francisco.) The rebuttal is a ditty that circulated after the 1907 earthquake in San Francisco, that goes like this:

If, as some say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?

The only answer that makes sense to me is to presuppose a God who is not immanent and who is not omnipotent, at least in the way we perhaps would like to believe. Thus, natural disasters that wipe out the good and the bad, the wise and the dumb, the rich and the poor, are all inseperable from the human condition. And, as such, God gives humans the gift of evil so that we can transcend ourselves through medicine, inventions, discovery, and charity. A world that is free from evil would also be free from morality and love as well as science and reason. Perhaps we cannot do good without experiencing evil anymore than we can have light without also having darkness. In Shadowlands, Lewis proclaims that "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But in the rueful acceptance and grief of the death of his wife, he finds that "We can't have the happiness of yesterday without the pain of today. That's the deal."

Christian Neoplatonism

I'm enjoying your well written posts.

Thanks for your kind words.

Maybe you can clear something up for me. I was at a party some time ago and the guests were evangelical Christians in the most positive sense of the term. I have a problem with evangelicals. I made some small talk with a guest and she said I was a neo-Platonist. It was a thinly disguised insult to a Christian as I learned later.

Use as a prejorative, I think it means that you are a mystic to the exclusion of anything real or rational that might inform that mysticism. Neoplatonism also rejected the afterlife as well as the existence of evil and posited "the Source" or "the Absolute", from whence all things spring and all things return. It might be contrasted to materialism, empericism, and pragmatism. (William James: "Damn the Absolute!") It was popular in the middle to late 1800s, and was influential in the thought of Hegal, Goethe, Emerson, and others.

We should make a distinction between Christian Neoplatonism, which is essentially Christian Theosophy and Christian Platonism, which runs through much of orthodox Christian theology . An example is CS Lewis in which he suggests that the afterlife is more real than this life, and this life is the a mere image-- a copy of a copy-- of what is real, somewhat equivalent to Plato's cave metaphor. We see this rather poignantly in his Narnia Chronicles, the kids in the last chapter are transported to Narnia as they die in a train wreck:

Lucy said, "We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often."

"No fear of that," said Aslan. "Have you not guessed?"

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose withi them.

"There was a real railroad accident" said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are-- as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands-- dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

What is a Fact?

When relationships are simple, the word "fact" is used instead of "law".

I'm not sure I understand your sentence, so I will state what I think a fact is. A fact epistomologically speaking is that which is the case. It is not what I theorize is the case or believe is the case, although it may well be. It is not a construct-- a conceptualization from many facts-- that leads to a theory or a law based on an accumulation of evidence. The reason for this is the distinction between subjectivity-- images in our mind-- and what objectively is.
To make this clearer, I will state some facts and some non-facts. Now, non-facts do not necesserily equate to non-truth or nonsense. They are simply what is objectively real.

1. Every snowflake is unique. This is a non-fact. We have no way of establishing this obejectively. There are after all a lot of snowflakes.

2. Evolution is true. A non-fact. It is too sweeping a statement to reduce it to an objectively verifiable claim.

3. 2 + 2 = 4. A non-fact, as the symbols you see are expressions of deductive logic based on a prioris.

4. "If you died without a will, you would die intestate." Tautologies, essentially A = A, are not facts, as no meaning is added to the proposition. The indicative conditional phrasing however can be factual, i.e. "If X, then Y".

5. The speedometer of my car in the garage shows zero. This is a fact on in so far as we can trust the realities that statement implies, that there is a car, that there is a garage, that the speedometer is not broken, and so on. It is similar to this statement: "Washington is the capital of the United States", a fact so long as there is a objectively verifiable correspondence with the terms in question to the real world. This is really a compound fact as each term relies on whether or not it is the case, i.e. there is such a place as the United States, and so on.

The idea is to separate the "isness" of existence from the apprehension of existence by humans or instruments. This is no small task. Bertrand Russell uses an example where he looks a timetable and finds it is stated that a train leaves King's Cross for Edinburgh at 10 AM. A fact? Russell writes that "I shudder when I think of its complexity. If I were to develop the theme adequately, I should be occupied with nothing else till the end of the present volume, and then i should only touched the fringe of the subject.." He goes on to discuss the social aspect, the physical aspect, the definition of terms, the legal implications, the question of time, and so on. Russell associated datum with fact, and datum, he says, is something that we know without inference. But I'm not sure this is a good definition.

How many Angels Dance on a Pin?

I was struck by the following statement.

"Philosophers may argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but scientists understand that there is no way to disprove any number of angels on a pin. "

http://www.synapses.co.uk/evolve/lec1b.html

Angels dancing on a pin has become kind of an idiom for useless debate. But I'm curious about where this phrase came from. Did the medievalists actually debate this? if so, what were the issues and arguments?

Anyway, while googling, I found two different answers attributed to the 13th century scholastic Thomas Aquinas.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_132.html

"Finally, he inquired whether several angels could be in the same place at once, which of course is the dancing-on-a-pin question less comically stated. (Tom's answer: no.)"

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=523054

"In Aquinas' view, the correct answer was "infinitely many": while angels have no bodies and occupy no space, they do have location."

I can imagine a hundred angels doing the Snoopy dance.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=6-Ei-ZFttsQ

Reminds me of the joke of which I'll give you the paraphased and sanitized version.

It was a hard day. Boss lady screamed at me. I got a flat coming home from work. The kids were crying. In the mail was an invitation to an IRS audit. I settled into my easy chair in front of the TV and then suddenly the doorbell rang. Who should appear at the front door but the sweetest little angel holding a Christmas tree. She asked, "where would you like to put this tree?"

O;^)
^
^ ^ ^
^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^
+

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

The following link has their complete essays to the question posed by the John Templeton Foundation:

Professor Laurence Krauss. Unlikely

Professor David Galernter. Yes

Professor Peter Atkins. No

Senior Fellow John F. Haught. Yes

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not Sure.

Professor Nancy Murphey. Indeed.

Nobelist Christian de Duve. No.

Jane Goodall. Certainly.

Professor Owen Gingerich. Yes.

Astrobiologist Paul Davis. Perhaps.

Astrophysicist Bruno Guiderdoni. Very Likely.

Professor Eli Wiesel. I Hope So.

What do you think?

The implications of the question presupposes that if there is a "purpose" to this universe, something determines the purpose that would not be part of the universe. Some like to call this purpose giver God.

I think you put your finger on the problem. On one hand, the question presupposes that the universe has intentionality apart from the animal intelligences that inhabit it. But, framed as a question of ethics, the questions becomes clearer. The purpose of the universe becomes nothing more or less than the purpose that you find as you walk life's journey. Bertrand Russell's purpose as he saw it was to act so as to produce harmonious rather than discordant desires, and that the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Thus, while there may not be Platonic purpose as such, we can still find for ourselves purpose by aspiring for harmony and the good life.

Dawkins makes some interesting comments about the Templeton Foundation in The God Delusion. Broadly about the way their money can cause some scientists to compromise their principles.

If I gave you a million dollars, would your compromise your principles? If the answer is yes, then I submit they were never your principles in the first place. On the other hand, I do agree that money can corrupt scientists and intellectuals no less effectively as it can politicans and businessmen. I hope Dawkins can cite examples.

The mutability of principles reminds of British playwright George Bernard Shaw's quip who found himself at a dinner party beside an attractive woman. "Madame," he said. "Would you go to bed with me for a fifty thousand pounds?"

She coyly replied: "Perhaps."

"And if I were to offer you five pounds?" Shaw asked.

"Mr. Shaw!" said the woman. "What do you take me for?"

"We have already established what you are," Shaw replied. "Now we are merely haggling over the price."

Regarding the Templeton Foundation....there is considerable disagreement among scientists concerning whether accepting Templeton funding taints a scientific project, considering that the foundation has as its semi-overt objective the reconciliation of science and religion.

Richard Dawkins: "Freeman Dyson, by accepting the Templeton Prize, sent a powerful signal to the world which, whether he likes it or not, will be taken as an endorsement of religion by one of the world's most distinguished physicists."

Of course, money can have a warping effect on principle. The same is true with the awarding of prizes, the granting of professorships or any kind of employment, celebrity or fame, or the proximity to celebrities and the famous. I think it was Walter Lippman who said journalists might as well throw away their pencil the moment they accept an invitation to give the president their advice. I must admit a bias to philosophers who are work outside of institutions such as churches, think tanks, and universities. These institutions compromise people who do their thinking, protestations to the contrary. These institutions are gateways. They let in certain people—the elites-- and keep out other people—the great unwashed. And, when institutions filter people, they also filter ideas, including conflicting ideas. I wonder what would have happened if they had called Jesus rabbi and had welcomed Paul to the academy. The thinking that emerges from that experience seems to me to be more authentic and applicable than scribblings made in the sterility of a university garret. As much as I admire, for example, Saul Kripke’s theories on semantics, I consider his work inferior to, say, Eric Hoffer, the itinerant longshoreman and migratory field laborer. Kripke, who has spent his professional life on college campuses, may generate more theses, but Hoffer has shaped more minds. And, at the end of the day, that is the acid test of an enduring philosophy.

It may be that the Tempelton prize is corrupting, but that is only because they who have received it are corruptable. And Dawkins' contention that the acceptance of the prize should be taken as an endorsement of relgion leaves me less than aghast. Horrors at the thought that religion might be something other than an unqualified evil and surely undeserving of reconcilition with the august discipline of Science.

That's a little disingenuous of you. Surely you are aware that many are trying to pervert science to dignify certain articles of religious dogma with a veneer of scientific support?

I don't think that's Templeton's aim, however. It appears that his goal is to see if there is common ground between two disciplines, given the assumption of good will and rationality. I don't think his goal is to butress creedal claims with science. Perhaps it's a middle child inclination, but I think I can find middle ground between virtually any two centers of thought. Paganism? I also love nature. Mormonism? I also love family. Catholicism? I also love tradition. Atheism? I also love skepticism. Islam? I also love terrorism. (joking)

My view generally is too much hate is engendered from supposed differences of world views when many but not all of those differences are more apparant than real.

Endurance and popular appeal seems to me a rather lousy test of philosophical quality.

What would you regard as a good test of philosophical quality?

Logical consistency, novel perspective, scientific insight, functional integration.

Those are good tests of scientific utility, but unless you assume that science and utility is the ground and end of philosophy, I don't see how they are the basis for discriminating between poor philosophy (mine, say) and great philosophy ( Plato or Kant, say). While argumentum ad popularum is a fallacy, the staying power of an idea isn't, unless you make yet another assumption: that truth and coherence are somehow independent of the judgment of others over space and time. Needless to say, those two sets of assumptions that are the bedrock of scientism in the first instance and solipsism in the second instance fail the tests of logical consistency, novel perspective, scientific insight, and functional integration.

The Golden Rule

What about those who hate themselves? What about those who have no self-esteem? What about masochists? Should they do onto others as they would have others do onto themselves? Is that the proper basis of morality? My answer is no.

First, your question needs to be contextualized with what the Bible says.

(Luke 6:27-36) "But I say to you who listen: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If anyone hits you on the cheek, offer the other also. And if anyone takes away your coat, don't hold back your shirt either. 30 Give to everyone who asks from you, and from one who takes away your things, don't ask for them back. 31 Just as you want others to do for you, do the same for them. 32 If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 If you do [what is] good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do [what is] good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is gracious to the ungrateful and evil. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful. (Also compare to Matthew 5:38ff).

The Bible doesn't state what we call the Golden Rule, but the implication of loving your enemies is unmistakeable. Compare those verses, for example, to Leviticus 24:20: "Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him."

You're not the first person who has criticized the ethic of reciprocity. George Bernard Shaw, for example, said, "Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

My view is that it is a valid but limited moral principle. The Bible makes no claim that this is the only or the most important moral principle that should govern one's actions. The principle of mutual respect certainly doesn't work for people who do not respect themselves. A stronger moral principle that the Bible states by implication is the centrality and signficance of the individual-- that you matter. Those that deny they matter will also deny that others matter, not always by word but by deed. Those who have believe they matter, who have strong but balanced esteem and character, will embrace this ethic. I'm not talking about the esteem of the swaggering bully, which is usually no esteem at all. And so it is no coincidence that this principle is found in most religions.

In my view, a stronger moral ethic is one that disclaims kind of positive tit for tat-- but rather you act because it is simply the right thing to do. It is moral obligation divorced from consequences or even the specificity of whether or not someone is a masochist or lacks self-esteem. As Kant put it: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

What is Truth?

What is truth?

"What is truth" jested Pontius Pilate, and would not stay for answer.

But you can answer your own question by answering whether or not the following statements are true or false.

Careful!

1. Three times three is nine
2. No two snowflakes are the same.
3. Paris is a city in France.
4. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life
5. "Ah! County Guy, the hour is neigh." (from Sir Walter Scott's "Serenande")
6. This pencil is seven inches long.
7. I like rhubard pie.
8. The train leaves for Boston at 8:05.
9. In 1492/Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
10. I drink, therefore I am.

Nothing is Absolute

Some people say that "nothing is absolute except the relative". Others say that "nothing is absolute including the relative". Do you believe either of these two are correct? If not, what would you say is correct?

Neither are correct and both are correct. To resolve this paradox, I think these statements can be approached in terms of fact, values, and morals.

There are absolutes in terms of universal constants and in terms of measurements of time and mass, for example. And of course there are objective, undeniable scientific truths, such as: the earth revolves around the sun. There are also absolute truths within the context of deductive mathematics, that, based on its axioms, may deliver different but valid results. In one such system of mathematics, for example, two plus two must absolutely equal four.

As to questions of values, we enter a twilight zone in which subjectivity and objectivity mesh. Money is useful to most but not all people. There is to most people an objective quantative difference between kindergarten drawings and the drawings of the Old Masters, and also the worst kindergarten and Old Master paintings and the best.

As to morals, we enter further yet into the morass of subjectivity. Personally, I link ethics to the search for and an understanding of truth, but this is by no means a consensus view. However, generally, I believe that morals is a relative expression of each person's conscious and unconscious presuppositions concerning life and his or her own existence.

Your example of money is subjective, meaning its worth is different to each person and its average value on an Exchange, which represents an average of lots of people's values, fluctuates.

But the fluctuation of money, stocks, and commodities is not merely subjective. The spread is like may flies around a dead rabbit, but the dead rabit, i.e. the intrinsic value, is objectively present albeit individually subjectively apprehended. Those that defy this become victims to bubbles and scams or lucky-- real life lessons in epistomology.

Ethics (morality) is the study of how people actually behave (social science) or, how they should behave (philosophy & theology). Here again, as with values, I know of no universal, objective ethics.

Except for our mutual physicality-- surely you would agree that our bodies are objectively real. "Do I not bleed" is the objective basis of most law.

Show me where the intrinsic value resides in money?

Money isn't at all arbitrary. It is absolute but in a fragment of time.

I heard on NPR radio that in Zimbabwe, which is experiencing 11,000% percent inflation, a loaf of bread now costs $22,000. Notwithstanding the social fiction of fiat currency, the bread is still something humans want. Because humans want it, its value still exists because it can be exchanged even for hyper-inflated money.

The same is true in the stock market. A company, let's call it Cat Herding, Inc., is capitalized at 1,000,000 shares. On FNN, you see that each share is worth $10. What is it's value? I would argue that the value is absolutely what the free market auction gives it in that instant of time, i.e. $10,000,000. That we think it is worth $20 dollars or $5 dollars is irrelevant. That $10 reflects or whims and hunches of the ignorant and the insane and also the considered judgment of professional short and long sellers and optioneers, and also databases, computer systems, and neural networks that talk to each other to say nothing of exogenous events such as politics and weather. It could be that Cat Herding is watered stock-- overinflated and hyped-- but even that reflects the prevailing knowledge of the marketplace at that moment in time.

This is true with the market as a whole. There is no shadowy "them" that controls market values, such as the price of gas, as the market is bigger than any billionare, oil oligarchy, or federal reserve system. It is the naked South Seas fisherman who trades two shells for a fish and it is the Deutche Bank wire-transferring a hundred million to the Bank of Hong Kong. The voice of the market is the voice of God, all knowing and all powerful-- the most powerful entityin existence. (I dare say more people pay homage to this God than any other.) The market is both rational-- in that it deals with the metaphysics of what is real-- real people creating real things-- and it is irrational and psychological-- akin to the irrational panic of the wilderbeast on the savannah of Africa reacting to cat growls or perhaps nothing at all.

Again, the values are in the head, not in the art works.

I think your arguments voids the definition of value. Thus, the imputed value of the Mona Lisa, for example, is not even the value of the wood and paints. It is merely the shared belief that the painting is priceless. The question is: is that shared belief enough to create a reality of value?

However, an "objective basis for ... law" does NOT exist.

My quote from "The Merchant of Venice" ("If you prick me, doo I not bleed") wasn't meant to demosntrate that humans are real, but that we share a common physicality, which provides an objective basis for law. There are other objective bases for law, such as humanity's instinct to form families and communities, respond to weather, accumulate possessions, and think about death. But I think our own biology is the key factor.

Ordinary man and woman embrace and recoil the same no matter where they live. That history is made up of cannibals and fascists doesn't negate this idea of the universality of biologically-derived moral values. Of course, there are layers of culture, but underneath, the same mix of nobility and criminaity emerges no matter where you look. Thus, when the facts came to light, humanity was appalled at the genocides inflicted on three separate continents—German Europe in the 1940s, Cambodian Asia in the 1970s, and Rwandan Africa in the 1990s.

Well, what of those who were not appalled? I think the answer lies in an example-- our response as to why we should not torture, present adminsitration policy notwithstanding. We do not torture for ethical reasons-- it violates the categorical imperative of inflicting needless pain-- and for utlitierian reasons-- that for some people it doesn't provide the results the torturer wants. That some people have constitutions impervious to pain or may welcome pain doesn't undermine the proposition that such conduct is unethical. Rather, it recognizes the diversity of humanity that allows people to be wired as they are. It is a recognition of their individuality as well as their humanity that requires that we consider torture unacceptable. In other words, and perhaps paradoxically, the ordinary man and women will reject torture because of their recognition that there are extraordinary men and women who do not reject torture.