Sunday, September 27, 2015

All Scientists Should Beg Lawrence Krauss to Shut the Hell Up Already


In The New Yorker, physicist and professional amateur philosopher Lawrence Krauss calls on all scientists to become “militant atheists.”  First club meeting pictured at left.  I respond at Public Discourse.
 
For earlier trips in the Krauss Klown Kar, go here, here, and here

748 comments:

  1. Santi,

    Let's see how well you know your science history:

    Who was the first scientist to file a patent for a scientific or technological device or instrument which successfully detects mathematical objects?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry, that should read:

    Who was the first scientist to file a patent having to do with a scientific or technological device or instrument which successfully detects the presence of a mathematical object?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris-Kirk (to Santi): On "Demon-haunted" - thanks for bringing that up.

    "Demon-haunted" sounds like it might be (part of) the title of a book, possibly one written by a scientist who was interested in educating lay people on, amongst other things, the scientific method and critical thinking skills.

    Acting on the presumption that Santi has read Mr. Sagan's book, I pose another easy question for Santi to answer.

    Santi,

    Of which elements of the periodic table is the scientific method known to be constituted?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Glenn, thanks for reminding me, I'd forgotten the exact source.

    Chris-Kirk

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Biology has discovered that homosexual orientation has a strong genetic component."

    So they found the gay gene? I'd like to see what methodology someone claiming this used, or even just how they define and quantify homosexual. Please Santi, if you actually know journal articles that make this claim, cite them. I am genuinely curious. (Highly dubious, of course)

    Robert

    ReplyDelete
  6. Santi,

    Or are "biology" and "science' just fancy names for salon articles?

    Robert

    ReplyDelete
  7. Santi is apparently attempting a reductio argument of against a view that endorses a Christian angeology. I believe he's picking and choosing angeological propositions here.
    Strictly speaking, we only know of angels from revelation. The existence of angelic spirits does not follow from the truth of classical theism and I am not aware of ways of demonstrating their existence metaphysically.
    Now, Christian revelation indeed relays the fact that demons exist, but it doesn't stop there, for it also states that there are more righteous spirits than fallen ones (the proportion is 2/1) and that each human has a guardian angel.

    Suppose you're an American scientist engaged in experimental nuclear weapons research during the Cold War. Now, you know that the Red Enemy is very much interested in your failure. Moreover, there are reasons to believe the Enemy will try to thwart your research, and has the necessary means (commie infiltrators are all over the place, etc.). Does this mean that there's no certainty to be had in any of the experiments that you do? Your colleagues lab assistants can all be secret commies, they can forge the readings and otherwise falsify the data you require... Do you give up now, faced with this possibility? No, you let counterintelligence - that you know is at least just as good, if not better, than the enemies' intelligence arm - handle that.
    There's also the possibility that the Enemy's goal is not so much prevention of further research, but rather technological espionage. If that's the case, there's even less reason to worry about "research disinformation" per se.

    We know that the guardianship of angels is due to the consequences of the Fall (see ST I-113). The loss of original justice exposed humans to demonic threats, and thus God ordered the righteous spirits to protect us. God manifestly wills that humans attain to truth, but it is not naturally possible in our case without observation (of which scientific experiments are a specialised domain). Knowing these general facts, I think one can infer that the HQ got us covered.
    One can also reasonably question the assumption that thwarting science is a demonic objective. After all, it is possible to turn science and technological advancement to infernal advantage, and given the purpose of demons - damnation of souls - I don't see why they'd attempt to hinder experimentation, rather than higher-end activities, such as interpretation of the data. Hindering these, on the other hand, doesn't seem to require anything dramatic.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Chris-Kirk:

    You wrote that you believe in demons, but also "A God Who keeps demons from interfering in such a pervasive way."

    Of course, this is a logically possible solution to the dilemma of believing in both science and devils, but it's also ad hoc. What positive evidence--or even just good reasons--can you point to that demons exist at all?

    Haldane's and Krauss's point is that, after four hundred years of science, no spooks interfere with science, and no science finds spooks, or needs to resort to spooks for the explanation of any data point. Minds are always attached to brains. They don't free-float about the world, interacting with it. At least there is no evidence that this happens.

    Neither Feser nor anyone writing in this thread has offered even one good reason for thinking a demon-haunted world plausibly accounts for anything we see anywhere. Nor is there evidence that God or angels ever interfere with any situation, even the most horrific, the Holocaust being an obvious example.

    So I'm using the phrase "demon-haunted world" in echo of Carl Sagan, who had a book by that title. The point is that we often forget just how intensely demon-haunted people assumed the world to be prior to the scientific revolution, and how miracles and devils have now vanished from the global scene--as if they never really existed at all.

    But if you want to make the positive case for the existence of devils, I'll listen. Or if you know of a book that makes an intellectual case for the existence of devils that is convincing to you, please share.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Another issue related to devils, and why science can be rightly described conventionally as "atheistic," has to do with free inquiry. The mind of the scientist cannot function properly if checked by prohibitions against excess curiosity and blasphemy, nor can it be made hostage to fear by threats of torture in hell for believing the wrong things. If devils are real, hell is implicitly real as well, and so the idea that devils exist does not just generate fears that they could function as confounding variables in experiments, but that they could be agents of punishment and torture (!) in the afterlife for the too free-thinking scientist.

    Imagine the difficulties Galileo faced psychologically trying to be an unfettered thinker and scientist within a hell-believing and devil-steeped 17th century culture. Obviously, he had to drop these beliefs (in private) to initiate a revolution that seemed to go against the Bible.

    Thank goodness for Haldane's "atheistic" science. It means no free-floating invisible agents acting as confounding variables in experiments--and reasoning without fear.

    ReplyDelete
  10. *colleagues, lab assistants

    By interpretation I mean the philosophical one. We do know that demons are very intelligent in terms of utility. Now, why would they thwart the success of science if it can be used as means of seducing civilisations into adhering to absurd philosophies such as scientism? Is it not better - given demonic purposes - to facilitate philosophical myopia that allows men to remain relatively comfortable in their denial of God and their religious obligations etc. by satisfying their desire to know (though on a level less fundamental) and excell? By promising apparent means (technology, including social technology) of achieving what resembles the Kingdom of God, semblances of universal charity, justice, peace on earth and immortality (even transcendance, if only in the extreme and absurd case of transhumanism)?

    Is it not more masterful to turn one's adversary's weapons (science and technology) against her?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Robert (Anonymous):

    One that is a most recent and rather large study appeared in Psychological Medicine (affiliated with Cambridge University Press) this year (May 2015). Authors of the study were numerous, including researchers from the universities of Chicago and Columbia (New York). The study included over 800 men (409 pairs of gay brothers, including twins):

    http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9625997&fileId=S0033291714002451

    Here's a quote from the abstract:

    Results. We identified two regions of linkage: the pericentromeric region on chromosome 8 (maximum two-point LOD = 4.08, maximum multipoint LOD = 2.59), which overlaps with the second strongest region from a previous separate linkage scan of 155 brother pairs; and Xq28 (maximum two-point LOD = 2.99, maximum multipoint LOD = 2.76), which was also implicated in prior research.

    Conclusions. Results, especially in the context of past studies, support the existence of genes on pericentromeric chromosome 8 and chromosome Xq28 influencing development of male sexual orientation.

    ReplyDelete
  12. P.S.

    It's no that I think that a response like that of Chris-Kirk is somehow insufficient or, for that matter, that mine is even a different answer, rather than an explanation of the details of God's providential protection of mankind (angels are, after all, of the Lord).
    It's just that I'm particularly enaumored of the principle of subsidiarity.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Santi,

    ...no science finds spooks,...

    But a spook is a spy, and, "A British woman...used her knowledge of simple chemistry to catch German spies during World War I[.]"

    ReplyDelete
  14. Chris-Kirk,

    Glenn, thanks for reminding me, I'd forgotten the exact source

    Velkommen.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Georgy Mancz,

    Now, why would they thwart the success of science if it can be used as means of seducing civilisations into adhering to absurd philosophies such as scientism?

    Good point.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Georgy Mancz:

    In imagining your way into the cunning wiles of devils, you're sounding less like C.S. Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" and more like the Onion's "Screwball Letters," but I'll play.

    Notice your repeated use of the word "know" for things you merely believe without evidence, as in this example: "Strictly speaking, we only know of angels from revelation."

    Which means you don't know at all, for you haven't offered a single good reason for thinking devils actually exist that doesn't beg the question.

    And when you come up with a logically possible scenario for why devils might not interfere with the work of secular scientists, allowing them to walk into traps of hubris, damning their souls, have you forgotten that you've also posited that each human gets a guardian angel?

    Wouldn't it follow that the guardian angels of secular scientists might themselves interfere with experiments and frustrate their progress so as to teach the scientists humility?

    If the stakes are hubris vs. humility, might a guardian angel, to thwart the devils, strategically tip over lab beakers here and there? You know, for the sake of the scientist's soul? And might an astronomer, on the cusp of a big discovery, get a rainy and cloudy day from his guardian angel--and might the devils then try to get the clouds back out of the way?

    No wonder the theologians wouldn't look into Galileo's telescope! No telling what misleading apparitions might be conjured on peering through it!

    I mean, once you start playing the supernatural-logically-possible-game, anything goes, right?

    So let's dial this back, Luther, and try again. What actual evidence or good reasons do you have for thinking devils exist in the first place? Where are they? What are their number? What do they do? How do you know?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Santi Tafarella said... Wouldn't it follow that the guardian angels of secular scientists might themselves interfere with experiments and frustrate their progress so as to teach the scientists humility?

    Are you saying that angels never interfered with an experiment? Ok, prove it. Give us one single piece of evidence. You like evidence so much, give us the actual evidence to back up your claims.

    No wonder the theologians wouldn't look into Galileo's telescope!

    Name one.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Santi,

    One thing which can be said of demons is that they are sources or agents of evil, harm, distress or ruin. This was mentioned previously, but you ignored it. Little wonder. To acknowledge it is to acknowledge that one or more demons are (at least partly) responsible for your existential pain.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Glenn:

    Since I see you’re back, I’ll answer quickly your question earlier about whether I may be wavering on the cosmological argument.

    I'm open to the cosmological argument. I go back and forth between Buddhist style non-dual emptiness (Nagarjuna; arguably Nietzsche) and Being (atman, Vedanta, Spinoza). Both have their poetry.

    But Aquinas comes with too much baggage for my taste (angels, devils, hell, the fall, antifeminism, etc.). For example, women globally have taken over Hindu yoga from men, which I regard as an advance in human equality and cultural power-sharing, but I doubt you'll ever see within the traditional monotheisms women priests in the Catholic Church or women imams, and that's very off-putting to me.

    I also find supersessionism deeply problematic for any notion that Christianity is a divine revelation. In this regard, Feser's post image above I find especially obnoxious and obtuse. Equating a Jewish public figure visually with Nazism and the KKK is tone deaf, not just to the past seventy years, but to the long and fraught history of Jew and Christian going back to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. When I witness a religious traditionalist who identifies as Christian (!) casually fling the opprobrium of Nazi at a Jew--a Jew!--I hear it as a trope for Christ killer. The blatant hostility in the image, directed at a secular Jew, is just too much for me.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Santi,

    Since I see you’re back, I’ll answer quickly your question earlier about whether I may be wavering on the cosmological argument.

    Huh?

    Under what OP did I ask whether you might be wavering on the cosmological argument?

    ReplyDelete
  21. As for the rest of your comment...

    1) At the very least you're being honest. Good.

    2) You say you "go back and forth between Buddhist style non-dual emptiness (Nagarjuna; arguably Nietzsche) and Being (atman, Vedanta, Spinoza)." I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Okay, vacillation is implied. Obviously. But between what and what? If you're genuinely steeped in either one, the things you complain about wouldn't have the power (so to speak) to get you tied up in knots. But you obviously get tied up in knots inside over those things, so you're not genuinely steeped in either 'non-dual emptiness' or 'Being'. At any time.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Cremonini begged off looking into Galileo's telescope with the same excuse one might give for not wanting to have sex (I have a headache).

    And of the Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy, Guilio Libri, Galileo wrote, "never having wanted to see [the moons of Jupiter] on Earth, perhaps he'll see them on the way to heaven?"

    Galileo obviously had a disinterested metaphysician to contend with in Libri.

    ReplyDelete
  23. @Santi

    I have to inform you that I'm not familiar with the second cultural reference.
    To correct an obvious error on your part, Santi, I didn't -imagine- anything, because the subject matter at hand is the activity of immaterial spirits - the 'invisible'. The power of imagination has a different object. I believe you've been told that here many times.

    For the sake of my response in this discussion - of Christian angeology and the supposed consequences - I presupposed the historical truth of the Christian claim of God revealing Himself to mankind (as relayed in both Testaments). I did this because in your exposition of supposed epistemic consequences of accepting angeology (particularly in relation to experience) I found a reductio argument against Christianity (note that I wasn't strictly speaking responding to -you- specifically, so it's immaterial whether it the reductio was in fact there or not). As a logical matter, I believe my response to the reductio works even if Christianity is in fact not true/there's no reason to believe Christian revelation occured.
    Now, I believe that Christian revelation did occur, and we know of this event because of respective historical reports testifying to it (the Gospels). I think that given the truth of A-T philosophy and historical facts (provided, again, one's methodology is free of, say, empricist or materialist biases) there are compelling objective reasons to trust the said reports and no objective reasons not to believe them. Because of God's veracity, there can be no falsity in the revealed data, and therefore Christian angeology is true.

    I'm aware you don't believe that Christian revelation happened. I disagree, and maintain that there are reasons to accept the truth of Christianity and its angeology.
    But the truth of Christian historical claims of revelation is a clearly different topic. Do try not to conflate them, sophist.

    Concerning guardian angels: fortunately, an ethic different from yours governs the faithful rational creatures of God. A defect of means (deceiving one's charge) disqualifies an action morally (the object, the action willed, cannot be evil, ends do not justify means), and the angels of the Lord are analogously perfect moral agents, so this is in fact impossible. The cloud example, on the other hand, is different, as there's no deception here, and I guess it is possible, just as angelic inspiration and advice (recall, say, the daemon of Socrates).

    As to the number of spirits, we only know that it's a big one. Because spirits are immaterial, they do not have location. We also know that they play a role in the governance of the world, and that the faithful ones enjoy the Vision of God, whereas the cosmic rebels are damned. Thomists also say that each spirit is different in virtue of a different essence. These are the brief essentials. If you're interested in Thomist angeology, consult the Summa (it has a whole chapter on it).


    ReplyDelete
  24. Anonymous wrote: "Are you saying that angels never interfered with an experiment? Ok, prove it. Give us one single piece of evidence. You like evidence so much, give us the actual evidence to back up your claims."

    Yes, I like evidence so much. I'll take that as a compliment. But I can't prove a negative. Trope angels for gremlins. I can't prove that gremlins have never interfered with an experiment either. Nor can I prove that aliens from another galaxy with powers of invisibility have never interfered with a scientific experiment. Is that really a fair question?

    There are lots of logically possible ways the world could be, but there's no evidence that what we experience is being influenced by angels, devils, gremlins, or aliens from another galaxy.

    But once you're prepared to posit such things absent evidence, anything goes, right?

    How about instead that you pick any phenomenon--a weather event, a healing at Lourdes, a beaker that fell off a shelf in a chemist's lab, a sore throat, the rise of Hitler to power, etc. You choose. Then let's have this discussion: what's the best thesis for explaining it? It's not enough for either of us to pose a merely logically possible scenario for accounting for it (guardian angels interfering with beakers, etc.). We've also got to do a bit of abduction, reasoning to the best hypothesis among the options. What's the most probable thesis? Which one accounts for the facts most simply and convincingly? Which one has scope (wide-ranging explanatory power)?

    I submit that when you go through that process, the answer never comes back: the devil (or an angel) did it. And that's why, after four hundred years of ongoing empirical practice, science is, for all practical purposes, atheistic.

    The demon-haunted world has been beaten back, not by exorcists, but by scientists.

    ReplyDelete
  25. I do apologise for my deplorable accuracy (and possible Russianisms, the occurence of which I always expect and lament).
    My in-house legal job (that I'm quitting at the moment) left me precious few opportunities to write anything in English.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Angels...demons...? oh my

    by the way this is the most ridiculous comment I've ever seen on here:

    "Are you saying that angels never interfered with an experiment? Ok, prove it. Give us one single piece of evidence. You like evidence so much, give us the actual evidence to back up your claims."

    Ya, cuz requiring evidence is such a bad thing... by the way, where is the evidence that they do exist?

    - Charlie

    ReplyDelete
  27. "and the angels of the Lord are analogously perfect moral agents"

    hahahahha people actually take this shit seriously?

    And yes, I realize I am doing myself a great disservice with these comments, but I really could not care less about the opinions of people who believe in angels, demons, and flying spaghetti monsters (oh wait is that too far-fetched???)

    - Charlie

    ReplyDelete
  28. Cremonini begged off looking into Galileo's telescope with the same excuse one might give for not wanting to have sex (I have a headache).

    And of the Professor of Aristotelian Philosophy, Guilio Libri, Galileo wrote, "never having wanted to see [the moons of Jupiter] on Earth, perhaps he'll see them on the way to heaven?"

    Galileo obviously had a disinterested metaphysician to contend with in Libri.





    http://bedejournal.blogspot.ca/2006/11/who-refused-to-look-through-galileos.html

    ReplyDelete
  29. I'd also like to see a source for this claim:

    Imagine the difficulties Galileo faced psychologically trying to be an unfettered thinker and scientist within a hell-believing and devil-steeped 17th century culture. Obviously, he had to drop these beliefs (in private) to initiate a revolution that seemed to go against the Bible.

    In fact, I would gently suggest that every historical claim Santi makes should be taken as either an outright lie or an expression of historical pig ignorance and bigotry, unless he provides a credible source.

    ReplyDelete
  30. In fact, I would gently suggest that every historical claim Santi makes should be taken as either an outright lie or an expression of historical pig ignorance and bigotry, unless he provides a credible source.

    Given that what he calls 'science' regularly turns out to be garbled bits of pop science strung together by associations in his imagination, it is perhaps unsurprising that his 'history' turns out to be garbled bits of pop history strung together by the same kinds of associations.

    Since the only function of 'demons' in his argument is to make experimental results misleading, you could substitute any factor -- experimenter error or bias, for instance -- that can make experimental results misleading and it won't change the conclusion, showing immediately the problem with the argument; and the progress of science has shown that experimenter error and bias are much more serious problems, not less serious, than they used to be thought. It's a bankrupt philosophy of science that cannot deal with such things.

    ReplyDelete
  31. I really could not care less about the opinions of people who believe in angels, demons, and flying spaghetti monsters (oh wait is that too far-fetched???)

    Apparently you care enough about such opinions that you can't stop yourself from commenting on them.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Brandon, I care about your opinion on these matters, not about your opinion on me as a person.

    Why do you continue to challenge my presence here? Seriously man I'm starting to think you have a bit of a complex or mental disorder...

    - Charlie

    ReplyDelete
  33. Since you don't know anything about my opinion on these matters, and I didn't comment on you as a person but on your pragmatic inconsistency in obsessively commenting on things you claim not to care about, and since this is a public forum so it would be a sign of stupidity to think that every critical response is a "challenge" of someone's presence, you don't really have much to complain about.

    ReplyDelete
  34. dude Brandon what is your deal? I said I don't care about your opinon of me, you say "you clearly care cuz you're still commenting" and then I say well actually I care about your opinions on these matters not on me, and you have to take issue again?

    you are starting to scare me.

    - Charlie

    ReplyDelete
  35. Just my two cents (new commenter):

    I have wasted a good hour reading through all these comments. I find Charlie's way of arguing to be very peculiar, thought not at all unique. We have seen this before, and we'll see it again.

    However, I would like to point out that Brandon's obsession with this Charlie character is bordering on addicted infatuation. Clearly you don't like him, as you're not even reading his comments anymore. But to continue to attack him when he is not only not addressing you, but also saying he has not interest in engaging with you, is simply odd. Furthermore, you imply that you are superior to him, intelectually and however else, yet you're following him around like a dog after a bone. Leave the kid alone, he clearly needs help. I can assure you you're not the one to be giving it.

    - Matthew

    ReplyDelete
  36. I said I don't care about your opinon of me, you say "you clearly care cuz you're still commenting" and then I say well actually I care about your opinions on these matters not on me, and you have to take issue again?

    Do you just compulsively lie? Everyone can literally just look a little bit up the thread and see that this is not what you originally said, the you have completely botched the order of the comments, and that you have elided the inconsistency in the responses. Why do you think nobody is going to notice that?

    ReplyDelete
  37. Clearly you don't like him, as you're not even reading his comments anymore. But to continue to attack him when he is not only not addressing you, but also saying he has not interest in engaging with you, is simply odd. Furthermore, you imply that you are superior to him, intelectually and however else, yet you're following him around like a dog after a bone.

    I've read every single comment in the thread. He is not a child that needs your protection; he is commenting in a public forum in which he himself can choose with whom he will engage and in which he himself is responsible for meeting intellectual standards, and in which he knows quite well that anyone has the right to respond to him. If you have a particular problem with my arguments -- if they are wrong in any precise way, make logical errors, are inconsistent, or show a specific failure to respect evidence -- then feel free to point it out.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Matthew, I can assure you, Brandon is perhaps one of the last persons in this comments section who would have to 'imply' that he is superior than Charlie, especially for his philosophical prowess. If you doubt me, try him yourself.

    ReplyDelete
  39. It should've been "daimonion" in my remark about Socrates (this is important because it's said that the question of what Socrates was referring to and (obviously) the phenomenon's identity with a "daimon" is not obvious).
    Apologies.

    ReplyDelete
  40. Brandon it's one thing to point out his flawed logic, it's a whole other thing to be combing over every single character he types to point out whatever flaw you notice.

    also, if his shortcomings are so plain for everyone to see, why do you need to point them out? Self-validation? I started off agreeing with you, but the more you dragged it out the less respect I have for you as a mature adult. You need to grow up my friend. The kid has 20+ people attacking his views (yes, attacking. He may be the aggressor but we're no better than him at this point. It's like Palestine v Israel. No one's hands are clean) and you feel the need to pick on him even more.

    Were you a bully in school? Or did you just get bullied? You clearly have something missing in your life and you're choosing to take it out on this uneducated, misinformed, and quite frankly annoying, CHILD. Why? What do you get out of pointing out obvious flaws in his arguments? And he is entirely correct to say that you cherry pick quotes and points that suit your arguments. If you're going to hound him so tightly, why not give credit where its due? His ramblings are actually peppered with intelligent points that you refuse to acknowledge.

    Charlie has actually given you incredibly good advice that I will repeat here - why don't you just chill out and light one up? Let Mary calm your anger.

    Anyway, you're probably just going to start attacking me now, either because I've made some rather poignant remarks or simply because I'm challenging your ways. Put yourself in Charlie's shoes and think about how you'd react on a liberal progressive blog full of batshit crazy feminists.

    It's funny how you refer to it as a public forum yet you (like me) have expectations and requirements regarding what kind of comments you will tolerate. Bit odd that, mate. I personally believe this blog requires a certain amount of philosophical knowledge and honesty as well as passion and debate skills. However, you look at Charlie and see he is missing the first, so you immediately disregard him as a competent challenger. I don't think he should be on here spouting his mouth, but you said it's kosher. Then you berate him for doing just that...

    Just some thoughts. Basically chill out man.

    - Matthew

    ReplyDelete
  41. "responsible for meeting intellectual standards"

    I'm sorry but what exactly are the standards for discussing such publicly divisive issues like abortion and gay marriage?

    That is the problem I have with Brandon and people like him. You don't own these topics. Sure it helps if people have a certain philosophical background but to demand it is simply wrong.

    Good day to you sir.

    - Matthew

    ReplyDelete
  42. " Trivializing gay intimate relationships therefore becomes a form of bigotry akin to racism. Science informs this debate. You can't just keep it locked up behind the wall of metaphysics. We've learned empirical things about homosexuality that Aquinas never dreamed of.
    October 8, 2015 at 7:56 PM "


    Silly fellow.

    Trying to shelter behind and manipulate the "race issue".


    More than silly actually: it's contemptible.

    Race, or phenotype, is not equivalent to behavior so scientists have been saying; nor is it believed to be a true indicator of it.

    That has been the intellectual predicate upon which anti-racism is sold.

    If it were the case however that certain parasitic or wanton or cynically manipulative behaviors were gene linked to a certain phenotype, and invariably expressed, then racists, rather than the biologists of the 20th century, would be right in their claim.


    If for example, it could be determined that there was a genetic component to your needy deceitfulness, along the lines say of Thalassemia (which is not behavior)and that all your relatives and offspring inherited this as an expressed trait; then there would be good reason for others not liable to the same defect, and who were interested in the positive quality of their own lives, and the future of their own offspring, to ensure that they had as few as possible, or no social relations at all, with your lineage.


    At the very least you would not expect them to become politically or socially invested in underwriting or granting institutional status to your behaviors.

    Now maybe if you were pleading for treatment ...

    ReplyDelete
  43. DNW,

    "We see the same with Santi, and the same with Jindra: moral principles are defined in terms of the prevalence in some population of elements possessing X number of mirror neurons, or Y kinds of neuroses that require social underwriting."

    I don't recall expressing it quite like that, especially when I never use the vague term "neuroses," but I do wonder how anyone can rationally believe in the 21st century that behavior is controlled by anything other than arrangements of brain cells.

    "You cannot even reason with them about that which they themselves believe to be fundamentally irrational. You end up arguing with an appetite, not a rational being."

    Well, if you presume that supernatural explanations are more than appetites by another name then I'd like to see a compelling, reasoned argument for that.

    ReplyDelete
  44. *the answer to the question
    Argh.
    A tremendous Russianism.


    Bitte verzeihen sie mir!

    ReplyDelete
  45. Anyway, you're probably just going to start attacking me now, either because I've made some rather poignant remarks or simply because I'm challenging your ways.

    Why would I attack you? You took the trouble to give an argument, and you haven't been repeatedly misrepresenting the arguments of other people for several pages of comments while repeatedly attacking them, especially when they respond with substantive criticism.

    I do find the assumption that I would be acting like Charlie on a "progressive blog full of batshit crazy feminists" rather funny, though; I have quite a few colleagues and friends who would qualify under such a label, and the view of argument that the comment presupposes is a very foreign one to me.

    ReplyDelete
  46. @Anon/Matthew: " His [Charlie's] ramblings are actually peppered with intelligent points that you refuse to acknowledge."

    Where are those "intelligent points"? I have yet to see a single one.

    In general, you misdiagnose what is going on. The more logical one is - and Brandon certainly is very logical - the more difficult it is to grasp that there are some people who are truly incapable of reasoning. At first I too thought it might just be youthful arrogant ignorance at work, and he could be made to open his mind a bit. No longer. I've become convinced he is not capable of that. The one point at which I disagree with Brandon and Scott is that I have concluded we have here someone whose mental breakdown is so bad that he is not really capable of dishonesty; he's not sane enough to be a liar. (How he came to be so I do not know.)

    But the last few dozen comments have reminded me more and more of Chesterton's comments on lunacy (and the dwarfs at the end of Narnia). We are dealing with someone locked into a tiny mental box. How to break him out, I cannot say.

    ReplyDelete
  47. Oh good, Don Jindra is here! I wonder who will walk through the door next. Alan Fox?

    ReplyDelete
  48. Oh, yes, I forgot.

    "Were you a bully in school? Or did you just get bullied? You clearly have something missing in your life..." is quite obviously a bullshit comment, and by making it you do yourself no credit.

    ReplyDelete
  49. George LeSauvage:

    The one point at which I disagree with Brandon and Scott is that I have concluded we have here someone whose mental breakdown is so bad that he is not really capable of dishonesty; he's not sane enough to be a liar.

    You may be right, and I hope you are. At the very least, that might mean that although Charlie is, as he says, "doing [him]self a great disservice with these comments," he's not fully responsible for them. And that would be good, for I don't believe he realizes at all how great a disservice, or of how grave a kind, he's doing himself.

    But it says something that yours is the more charitable interpretation.

    ReplyDelete
  50. Haha so now I'm insane? Scott I know you don't believe that. George mate what's your deal? I fundamentally disagree with your views on abortion, marriage, and God. I have tried repeatedly to put those issues first but you guys are more inclined to make an enemy out of me than a debater.

    Why is that the other side always gets accused of being closed-minded? You guys are supporting views suggested in the Bible, and defended by the Church (with the sword) for centuries... Your views, whether they are intrinsically harmful or not, contribute to the oppression of women and homosexuals all across the world. I don't see how challenging that makes me closed-minded? I'm trying to free myself and others from the influential clutches of the Church and that makes me closed-minded?

    I accept that I have been rude and overly aggressive and stupidly confident at times (like none of you have...), yet I have always made sure to get my actual point across, which is evident based on the limited interactions I've had with Chris-Kirk and the like. Whenever you guys set aside the bullshit we are actually able to have a proper conversation. But then Brandon or DNW or someone has to come in and harass me. Real helpful guys.

    You guys tell me that your way is the only way, and I say "Hey what about this?" you are all so convinced in your 'objective' correctness, and yet I'm the arrogant, ignorant adolescent? Absurd.

    Thanks to people like Matthew and Chris-Kirk, for despite our intellectual and spiritual differences, still have the emotional maturity and intelligence to look past my (often) provoked ramblings and see what I'm actually saying. They also respect me and everyone else which is something that I can only be said about a very small number of you.

    Honestly, I don't know why people other than Scott, DNW, Brandon, and the like are still making comments on things regarding my personal debating habits. Y'all got nothing better to do than read through 600 comments just to repeat some insult that's already been said? Congratulations guys

    Oh and also Santi argues very similarly to all of you, just from a different angle. Yet he's dishonest, ignorant, etc? My oh my...

    ReplyDelete
  51. Jindra to the demon-haunted-world thesis crowd: "[I]f you presume that supernatural explanations are more than appetites by another name then I'd like to see a compelling, reasoned argument for that."

    Towel snap. And clean.

    Nice one, Jindra.

    ReplyDelete
  52. Don Jindra said...

    DNW,

    " ... the same with Jindra: moral principles are defined in terms of the prevalence in some population of elements possessing X number of mirror neurons, or Y kinds of neuroses that require social underwriting."

    I don't recall expressing it quite like that, especially when I never use the vague term "neuroses," but I do wonder how anyone can rationally believe in the 21st century that behavior is controlled by anything other than arrangements of brain cells.

    "You cannot even reason with them about that which they themselves believe to be fundamentally irrational. You end up arguing with an appetite, not a rational being."

    Well, if you presume that supernatural explanations are more than appetites by another name then I'd like to see a compelling, reasoned argument for that.
    "


    Hello Don,

    No, I do not recall you saying that moral principles are defined in terms of X number of mirror neurons.

    What I was recalling was your assertion that morals (speaking loosely here as the constellation of intra-specific social behaviors we might call "moral") were a kind of brute (if I may put further wear on this term) fact of physiology, and required no further analysis of the bases, nor talking about further, more abstract justifications.

    Geese, was it? Geese relate to one another because they are geese; the behavior is a species behavior; and that is the end of the road as far as any further evaluation of the status of a supposedly moral impulse.

    As far as supernaturalism goes, I don't think I'm in a position to address that since I've not been paying attention to those arguments and have said little or nothing myself on the matter.

    However, while taking no definite stance on the mind/brain question, or on just how "external" influences on it should be construed, I do think that a phenomenalist - or any careful for that matter - reduction of the usual materialist position, leads on the materialists' own ultimately monist implications to the conclusion that the human-being is not just reduced to a vessel for the propagation of genes, but to very much less than even that: to a mere impulse or urge; or probably more accurately: a tendency of some part of reality to pointlessly manifest in a certain fashion.

    At that point, all the progressivist moral and social platitudes are gutted by their own underlying assumptions. Man the categorical, in any meaningful, non trivial sense, simply fades away; and with him any point in offering categorical consideration.

    You can sidestep this issue, bury the issue, say "this is where we live" and keep selling "just because".

    But you can peddle that line to non-robotic others only until they start asking "Why should I have to ...?" and reply to your 'Because you would want to be treated that way', with a "But I am stronger, and I am not him, and I don't care" reply.

    And the moment anyone tries to deploy a utilitarian argument as a "philosophical" reply, identifying the "good" described as pleasure generally with happiness, then we are led by an almost magical shortcut to the same conclusion. Because it only takes one or two probing questions about the status of pleasure in this ontology of morals, to arrive at the conclusion that the utilitarian is not really arguing in aid of "people" as we have historically known them at all. But that he is essentially pleading on behalf of, and acting in the service of, some other impersonal seeming "activity" for which we have no certain name, but which could be described generally as welling appetite or urge.

    And at that point, aided by the materialist's own lens, we have seen right through any nonsensical talk about "fellow" humans, or the categorical importance of their lives and fates.

    But if that seems too harsh to face, I guess you can always choose to be a goose instead.

    ReplyDelete
  53. Scott, can people be taught to be crazy? I have a friend who argues they can, on somewhat Chestertonian lines. I'm unsure. The best point in his case is that people do seem able to lock themselves into conceptual straitjackets, making themselves unable to grasp how others see the world, and unable to see the world through anything but a single prism. The current front-runner here is, of course, oppressive power structures.

    (But, if every society is oppressive in the same way, and in its essence, rather than in ways it knows itself to fall below that essence, doesn't that make one doubt one's notion of "oppression"? Apparently not. A mad world we live in.)

    ReplyDelete
  54. Blogger Georgy Mancz said...

    I do apologise for my deplorable accuracy (and possible Russianisms, the occurence of which I always expect and lament).
    My in-house legal job (that I'm quitting at the moment) left me precious few opportunities to write anything in English.

    October 9, 2015 at 2:29 AM"


    Quitting you job? Future free time? Now you can write that book in English on Stalinist legal theory. I'll buy it.

    ReplyDelete
  55. I'm starting to wonder: is this the longest stream of comments following a post on this blog?

    I've been lurking for around a year and a half, maybe two years, and I think this is the most I have ever seen.

    ReplyDelete


  56. " Blogger Santi Tafarella said...

    Robert (Anonymous):

    One that is a most recent and rather large study appeared in Psychological Medicine (affiliated with Cambridge University Press) this year (May 2015). Authors of the study were numerous, including researchers from the universities of Chicago and Columbia (New York). The study included over 800 men (409 pairs of gay brothers, including twins):

    http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9625997&fileId=S0033291714002451

    Here's a quote from the abstract:

    Results. We identified two regions of linkage: the pericentromeric region on chromosome 8 (maximum two-point LOD = 4.08, maximum multipoint LOD = 2.59), which overlaps with the second strongest region from a previous separate linkage scan of 155 brother pairs; and Xq28 (maximum two-point LOD = 2.99, maximum multipoint LOD = 2.76), which was also implicated in prior research.

    Conclusions. Results, especially in the context of past studies, support the existence of genes on pericentromeric chromosome 8 and chromosome Xq28 influencing development of male sexual orientation.

    October 8, 2015 at 11:23 PM"


    Maybe there's hope for a cure then. Schizophrenia may follow.

    ReplyDelete
  57. I'm starting to wonder: is this the longest stream of comments following a post on this blog?

    I know it's gotten at least into the 700s before, in a really good discussion about the Trinity and its relation to classical theism. But it usually taps out by 300 or 400 comments.

    ReplyDelete
  58. " 'I'm starting to wonder: is this the longest stream of comments following a post on this blog?'

    I know it's gotten at least into the 700s before, in a really good discussion ..."


    Kind of interesting to look at what was going on. Did a little checking.


    Of the first 200 comments, about 70 were by our little Social Justice Warrior visitor.

    I of course did my part to add ballast: Quoting Krauss once to comment on topic, and then having two exchanges with our French friend regarding that matter, before adding 5 more. The first of the 5, posing a hypothetical response to something Charlie has said to JMHenry.

    By the time the overall count had gone to 400, I had been responsible for a full 25 or more; most of which either responded to Charlie, or commented on some aspect of the problem of communicating with him, given his emotionalism, and radical values subjectivism.

    The comments dealing with the problem of communicating with "the new emotivists" then, seemed to me to be at least relatively germane to philosophical issues in general.

    Of course not everyone sees it that way.

    Nonetheless Scott's encapsulation of the problem remains to be dealt with.

    How does one, in fact, constructively engage someone else on a point of moral judgment, when that person denies that there is any moral issue in play in the first place? And then, further objects to the precising use of inferences immediate and otherwise, reductios, and parallel cases and analogies, as thinly disguised attacks on his intellect and on his expectation of being accepted as a peer in the discussions?

    Like many of the threads which at first glance look derailed and unproductive, there is a meta-theme here that is just as philosophically (or sociopolitically at least) pregnant, if only by implication, as the explicitly mooted topic.

    Or that is how I see it.

    ReplyDelete
  59. Like many of the threads which at first glance look derailed and unproductive, there is a meta-theme here that is just as philosophically (or sociopolitically at least) pregnant, if only by implication, as the explicitly mooted topic.

    I think that's probably true. It's related to what I was getting at with my previous mention of Plato's Gorgias: the alternative to being guided by certain kinds of rational standards is just might-makes-right. We see this in cases in which people simultaneously insists that no rational argument is possible on subject X, or that X is not governed by objective standards, and also that those who disagree with him on X are sexist, racist, homophobic, offensive, exclusionary, ridiculous, divorced from real-world thinking, or what have you -- that pattern of shaming behavior, as Plato pointed out, just is to hold right reasoning to whatever standard the most obnoxious and least ethical person in the discussion wants to hold it. Someone who opposes another on rational or objective standards opposes him on a standard to which he himself is to be held; someone who denies such standards and yet still goes around opposing people is making up the standard as he goes along, according to his own preferences and convenience.

    ReplyDelete
  60. DNW:

    You ask: "How does one, in fact, constructively engage someone else on a point of moral judgment, when that person denies that there is any moral issue in play in the first place?"

    How about starting with simple empathy? If a person acknowledges that both sides have concerns that they regard with passionate interest (on one side there is concern for the fetus, on the other, for women's education and equality), and that these are competing goods, then maybe the parties can work out a deal.

    Greek tragedy is often about people digging-in, behaving rigidly, and not being able to work out their differences. It's great for theatre, and sells tickets, but it's not all that good for public policy in a democratic society. People need to keep talking.

    Another issue is contextualization. Each side contextualizes the issue of abortion (or gay marriage) in such a way that it appears to the other side that their concerns are invisible. It's not that one side has a moral concern, and the other doesn't, but that both sides have ways of contextualizing the issue that emphasizes different moral concerns; different competing goods.

    Then there's civility. It's hard to know why someone might come your way if you show open contempt for them, or insist on your rights while displaying blatant indifference to the rights or dignity of others. There's a reason Feser trolls atheists. He's pissed. How do you bring the temperature down? Maybe start by not equating a secular Jew with Hitler?

    Lastly, be self-critical and vulnerable. There's too much hiding in these threads. There are lots of people prepared to pounce on anyone who fleshes out an actual position, but few who are willing to expose themselves to the shit-storm (the shit-swarm?) by putting forward a positive position themselves.

    I applaud Georgy Mancz for recently putting himself out there in a vulnerable way, thinking about demonology aloud. He got sharply critiqued, but that's not a bad thing. It benefits him; it benefits those critiquing him.

    Whenever I flesh out an idea, I want people to call out my blind spots. And if I don't agree with their critique, I get to ask myself why I don't agree. It's all good. And it's not hard to play through the static.

    So there's lots of constructive engagement in these threads. Lots. And not just between those who, in the main, agree. That sort of engagement is probably among the least constructive. It's better than the snark, ad hominem, straw-manning, and hiding, of course, but a bit too Sleepy Time herbal tea for me.

    Best is when two people disagree fundamentally, and also step out of their comfort zones, talking in a vulnerable and self-critical way about a hard question. It's why I keep bringing up evolution, the Holocaust, and supersessionism--not to troll, but because the hard questions are interesting.

    In this thread, I'm happy to hear from anyone ready to put forward a positive case for the existence of a demon-haunted world (besides just Georgy and Chris-Kirk). Rather than play a conservative game, why not go for the fences? As Lear said to Cordelia, "Speak."

    ReplyDelete
  61. @Matthew: "Brandon it's one thing to point out his flawed logic, it's a whole other thing to be combing over every single character he types to point out whatever flaw you notice."

    Brandon is restraining himself, and with justice could have said much more about Charlie's comments without departing from probity. This is evident from his posts. You can see how he refrains from writing purple prose when he is--how shall I say--in the moment. This is in contrast to others who have slipped into that mode, including myself, and to those without rhetorical skill, who use such makeshifts as extra exclamation points, to bluff at reasonableness. Brandon's posts have been quite collected (I do not except those featuring the occasional mild and well-earned bit of abuse.)

    But more importantly, if you read closely, you can see how very many flaws he passed over without mention. For example, I would class Charlie's egregious misreading of moduspownens' rape comparison as his most inflammatory misreading. To this misreading, Brandon returned the mild rejoinder that nobody said what Charlie accused them of saying. He did not point out--as I would have, but then decided not to--that in the very same post, Charlie also misread Scott's comment that "Marriage has always been legal for everyone," which, had he not misread it, might have been very suggestive of the nature of his disagreement with Scott, and with many others here, about marriage (which was, of course, a discussion Charlie asked to have). Brandon is *not* pointing out whatever flaws he notices--just some signal ones.

    Charlie's flawed logic is of course indissolubly involved with the other flaws evident in his posts. It is not some surface lesion, so to speak, to be excised in an outpatient procedure, and affecting little or nothing else. It is a co-morbid malady presenting itself alongside others, and with mingled and and various symptoms. Brandon has been addressing, now one, now another, as they flare up, since his diagnosis on October 8, 2015 at 7:14 PM.

    "Were you a bully in school? Or did you just get bullied? You clearly have something missing in your life ..."

    This is of course sheerest bulverism.

    ReplyDelete
  62. @ George LeSauvage: "Scott, can people be taught to be crazy? I have a friend who argues they can, on somewhat Chestertonian lines."

    I at least think so. In fact, I think most of us are so taught, and largely must struggle to free ourselves throughout our lives. The affinity of this opinion to the Allegory of the Cave is obvious, but if I may add, what led me to it originally were such books as Ivan Illich's *Deschooling Society,* John Taylor Gatto's *Dumbing Us Down,* and Paolo Lioni's *Leipzig Connection.*

    (I realize that that is a different *flavor* of crazy... :) )

    "The current front-runner here is, of course, oppressive power structures."

    There is a funny joke somewhere to be made in the fact that "What caused God?" is an objection parallel to "Who made the oppressive power structures?"

    ReplyDelete
  63. "Santi Tafarella said...

    DNW:

    You ask: "How does one, in fact, constructively engage someone else on a point of moral judgment, when that person denies that there is any moral issue in play in the first place?"

    How about starting with simple empathy? If a person acknowledges that both sides have concerns that they regard with passionate interest (on one side there is concern for the fetus, on the other, for women's education and equality), and that these are competing goods, then maybe the parties can work out a deal. "


    What deal, that you will only molest my kids on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

    Your passionate interest is in creating a humid fever swamp out of a republic, mine is in making sure you do not.

    Your passionate interest is in politically hanging the albatross of the details of the lives of dysfunctional others around my neck as a legal duty, and making me into (not a therapist but) an enabler and underwriter, not to say thrall. My passionate interest is keeping the political and the social distinct; and making sure that invitations to the moral leper's orgy may be dismissed with prejudice.

    Your passionate interest is shitting in my swimming pool, and my passionate interest is making sure you don't.


    Nice talking to you.

    ReplyDelete
  64. Brandon's posts have been quite collected (I do not except those featuring the occasional mild and well-earned bit of abuse.)

    Well, in fairness, I can be quite harsh, especially with people who like to flop over to play the victim as an argumentative tactic, which was certainly the case here. And while I don't have any problem at all with harsh -- it's why I don't really mind the bully comment, since the only real problem with it is that it's purely speculative -- I forget sometimes that others don't always have the same comfort level with it.

    But it is true that in general nothing ends up posted unless I have reasons with which to argue it. It's not always right, it's not always well advised, it doesn't always cover me with glory, but it's rarely just thrown up on the screen frivolously.

    ReplyDelete
  65. @Santi: "How about starting with simple empathy? If a person acknowledges that both sides have concerns that they regard with passionate interest (on one side there is concern for the fetus, on the other, for women's education and equality), and that these are competing goods, then maybe the parties can work out a deal. "

    I am sympathetic to the claim that there are competing goods--indeed, goods irreducibly competing, in Isaiah Berlin's sense more or less, the pursuit of which means the forsaking of other goods which may be equally attractive. This claim seems to accord with experience. Who has not looked back on his life and been wistful about what he might have had, even though he would not trade for it what he has now? And similarly, it may be, concern for a fetus may be a good competing with women's equality. But I should point out, that there is at least a tension between this claim, and the unifying tendency of what A-T thought I have read, with its discussion of the transcendentals, and the privative nature of evil, and divine simplicity, and so on.

    Also, it is quite one thing to say that parties may work out a deal, and quite another to imply that the deal that they work out may be probative. I will take DNW's summary as an example: "Your passionate interest is shitting in my swimming pool, and my passionate interest is making sure you don't." Now (granting for the sake of argument his summary), it may be that (say) you want to shit in his pool, but cannot because he would stop you; and also that he wants you to go shit in your toilet instead, but cannot make you, because your toilet is on your land; and that the two of you reach a compromise by having you shit along the fence that divides your properties, which makes no one happy, but is the best that can be managed under the circumstances. This all may be, and may even be desirable politically, as the least worst alternative. But would this fact--if fact it were--mean that shitting along the fence is itself desirable, say, morally?

    "Greek tragedy is often about people digging-in, behaving rigidly, and not being able to work out their differences. It's great for theatre, and sells tickets, but it's not all that good for public policy in a democratic society. People need to keep talking."

    I seem to remember a Greek tragedy, in part a fable of origins, in which "great good for public policy in a democratic society" was achieved by the halt of talking, in front of the Goddess of Wisdom, upon the Rock of Ares. This was, I suppose, after a fashion a compromise.

    ReplyDelete
  66. Santi Tafarella said... No wonder the theologians wouldn't look into Galileo's telescope!

    Still waiting for you to name a single one. Go ahead.

    Just like we're still waiting for you to provide any evidence to support your claims about angels. It's your own question, Santi, I'm just asking it of you. You must have evidence for what you say, right? Instead you just said that nobody answered you, even though Gottfried replied, and Scott responded to that, and then Mr. Green. So when are you going to retract your false claim and provide some evidence for what you claimed?

    ReplyDelete
  67. George LeSauvage:

    Scott, can people be taught to be crazy?

    I suspect we can even make ourselves crazy (deliberately or otherwise). Once when I was in high school I nearly drove myself mad by taking seriously Bertrand Russell's claim that when we "see" an object, what we're really seeing is a part of our brain.

    I don't have much to add to laubadetriste's reply, though.

    ReplyDelete
  68. Laubadetriste:

    The swimming pool is the woman's womb, the male anti-contraceptionist, morning-after pill opponent, and anti-abortionist is the shitter in the pool. He is not content to confine himself to verbal protest, but chooses, whenever possible, to shit on her body and in her womb immorally, forcing her, via the law, to carry pregnancies she hasn't chosen, arresting the progress of things like her educational advancement. I get it. The moral issue here is problematic.

    The best we can do is remember who owns what. As you put it, the compromise is to "shit along the fence that divides your properties, which makes no one happy, but is the best that can be managed under the circumstances."

    You ask whether this is a moral position, or merely an unsatisfactory political compromise. I say it is both. It is moral in that the integrity of everyone's body and conscience is being respected, if only grudgingly.

    Human bodily and property rights are defensible philosophically. If someone ends up in your backyard, and she or he can't survive without your active participation (for whatever reason), it may be moral for you to help, but not obligatory. If your neighbor makes it obligatory for you to do maintain the survival of that other person, you essentially erase the integrity of that property owner's choice.

    Women and men need control over their minds, bodies, and property in the same way that a bird needs control over the integrity of its wings and beak. They are the tools for fulfilling the inner call of that variant creature; they are the tools of its survival.

    That variant and deeply individual call may not be your call.

    So we can have carve outs for protest, but not carve outs for force on a woman's body--especially when the third party cannot survive without the active participation of the woman. The semen or unfertilized egg arrested during the use of contraception, the fertilized egg arrested by the morning-after pill, and the fetus arrested in an abortion do not have a blank check claim on a woman's life.

    So "shitting along the fence," as you put it, is the moral position here for the man. Shooting the woman or her doctor is not moral. Using the law against her and her body to force her choices is not moral. Speaking from the vantage of your religion from the sidewalk in front of an abortion clinic is perfectly fine, if not satisfying to those who have a totalist and absolutist vision of what women should do and how society should be arranged.

    Do you support jail time or the death penalty for a woman who "murders" her fetus?

    ReplyDelete
  69. But, laubadetriste, if you posit a Prime Oppressor, who oppressed him?

    ReplyDelete
  70. "So we can have carve outs for protest, but not carve outs for force on a woman's body--especially when the third party cannot survive without the active participation of the woman."

    What? Is this the claim that even if made illegal, women can still do it? Santian verbage is hard to digest. Almost like he uses poetic words to hide his precise meaning.

    If it is that claim, so what? People break all laws all the time, including ones about murder. That doesn't make it right or expedient to forsake such laws.

    Robert

    ReplyDelete
  71. Laubadetriste:

    You notice that Brandon got directed his way what you call, with disapproval, the “sheerest bulverism,” but do you also notice it when your side does it?

    Here’s what Glenn recently directed my way: "[O]ne or more demons are (at least partly) responsible for your existential pain."

    That’s not compartmentalizing my arguments. It’s presuming that the reason I speak as I do must have its origin in a larger context (private pain, not reason). It’s part of the way that Glenn explains me to himself. It’s part of a whole explanation for Glenn.

    And it may indeed be part of the truth. Genetic explanations are often important to full understanding, and may plausibly point to one of the reasons a person gnaws on one bone, and not another.

    But if Glenn expresses such views openly, and does not keep it as part of a private explanation for himself, how does it function in a discussion?

    I say it’s not necessarily a logical fallacy, but more a technique for shaming. It sets up the target for a double bind.

    Am I now supposed to feel shame for having existential pain? Is this something like being gay, where you're supposed to be in the closet about it?

    ReplyDelete
  72. Glenn:

    Yes, I know existential pain. And I don’t think it’s caused by demons (as you claim).

    I do not feel ashamed of my existential pain, for I'm certainly not alone in feeling it. I'm in good company. Jesus himself felt existential pain on the cross ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?").

    Did he have a demon?

    I would be foolish not to incorporate knowledge of my existential pain into a consideration of how rational I'm being in any given moment. It's part of being self critical. Like many other things, existential pain can cloud thought.

    Living with existential pain is the human condition--as are the remedies for dealing with it (consumerism, believing in God and immortality, over-caution in some circumstances, and making desperate leaps in others, etc.).

    Existential pain makes one susceptible to irrationality.

    And don't all human beings have existential pain--and deploy a variety of coping methods for dealing with it?

    Our lives move, early-on, from Blakean innocence to experience. We discover that God is not speaking, and that we're small in a vast cosmos indifferent to us. We discover our variant inner calls, then find them thwarted or frustrated by contingencies beyond our control; by the betrayal and malice of others. We feel a distinct and anxious emptiness inside that we seek to fill. We suffer pain, disappointment, and the loss of love.

    And we live with our mortality. That's a big one. The big one. Nobody gets out alive. You don't need to posit devils for why humans experience existential pain--and "solve" it by joining cults, becoming hyper-nationalist, etc. It's Thoreau's resignation transformed into, not "quiet desperation," but loud desperation.

    Those who say they have transcended the common lot of humanity, and don't experience existential pain because they have discovered the absolute truth (some religious revelation; some metaphysics), are, like those who swear by drugs, most likely in denial, very good at tamping down their own distress, compartmentalizations, and cognitive dissonances.

    I hear this cognitive dissonance when Feser plays the role of confidence man, posturing as sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that God hates gay marriage, or when Scott claims his knowledge of God's existence is 100%.

    What, after all, could be a greater sign of one's terror at mortality and God's silence than to believe, absent evidence, and against all the absurdities and crucifixions of history, that God is nevertheless love, channels books and messages through representatives (!), and confers on Her elect eternal life?

    Better than casually deploying devils as explanation for the behavior of one's opposition is Spinoza's "Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere." (Not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand.)

    ReplyDelete
  73. You ask whether this is a moral position, or merely an unsatisfactory political compromise. I say it is both.

    Then it's not much of a response to someone who doesn't think that there's a moral issue involved at all, and it certainly doesn't meet the demand for an approach that doesn't question that assumption.

    ReplyDelete
  74. (I've long ago given up any hope that Santi can focus on a point long enough to address it cogently or even summarize it accurately, but there's no reason his incapacity should handicap the rest of us.)

    ReplyDelete
  75. Laubadetriste:

    One more quick thing on (so-called) genetic fallacies.

    Part of understanding includes genetic forms of analysis, as when Freud attributes monotheism to father-transference and Marx sums up how religion functions for the poor as an opiate. These are legitimate analyses. And existential pain is also a fair part of analyzing human beliefs and actions as well (as Glenn deployed on me).

    And I'm not just talking about the analysis of others. I'm talking about turning these genetic forms of analysis on ourselves. It's part of being self-critical and remembering that we are embedded in history to attend closely to the contingencies influencing our actions and beliefs. We are sublunary, living beneath the moon.

    But positing one's opponents as having devils, as Glenn did with me, is to cease to understand.

    So there are good forms of genetic analysis (Freud, Marx, Darwin, feminism), and bad--as when someone attributes belief to demon possession or a group's malign otherness ("Muslims worship the devil"; "atheists hate the truth"; "gays want to destroy the family").

    The good forms of genetic analysis should be turned on ourselves in self-criticism, not just deployed as weapons in debate, outward against others. Genetic analysis should always be purchased as a round-trip ticket. It goes out, it comes back. And it should have a basis in evidence and plausibility.

    Of course, it's uncomfortable to zoom out from a myopic focus and notice that one's beliefs and actions might also be about something other than reason. But this is part of being self-critical; of not fooling yourself.

    So what I notice is that both atheists and theists tend to be quite anxious about purchasing that round-trip ticket. They're rarely happy to delve too deeply into their motivations for religious (or anti-religious) belief. Some wish to banish genetic arguments from discussions altogether.

    It's a desire, in my view, to wall off belief from contingency.

    And isn't it curious how often the most passionate debates in these threads are about the dilemmas of multiplicity, sex, and men's control over women's bodies? Is reason all that is in play here?

    ReplyDelete
  76. Part of understanding includes genetic forms of analysis, as when Freud attributes monotheism to father-transference and Marx sums up how religion functions for the poor as an opiate. These are legitimate analyses.

    …in case anybody was still wondering about the soundness of Santi's intellectual foundations.

    ReplyDelete
  77. Scott wrote: "I've long ago given up any hope that Santi can focus on a point long enough to address it cogently or even summarize it accurately, but there's no reason his incapacity should handicap the rest of us."

    Translation: Scott wants the power of contextualization to belong to him, and if someone offers a counter-context for an issue ("Actually, this is about x"), Scott sees this as losing focus (his focus).

    "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Focus up here, up here! Offer no other context but the one I direct you to!"

    Thank you, Wizard of Oz.

    It's akin to a conservative saying, "Saddam Hussein is Hitler. The proper analogy for this moment is WWII," and the liberal replying, "Sadaam Hussein is not about Hitler. The proper analogy is not WWII, but Vietnam. Iraq is a retread of Vietnam. We'll get in there, and can't get out."

    It's at this moment that Scott jumps in and says: "I've long ago given up any hope that liberals can focus on a point long enough to address it cogently or even summarize it accurately, but there's no reason their incapacity should handicap the rest of us from kicking ass in Iraq. Go team! Get with the program, stay with the program, don't doubt the program!"

    ReplyDelete
  78. And isn't it curious how often the most passionate debates in these threads are about the dilemmas of multiplicity, sex, and men's control over women's bodies?

    Actually the most passionate debates in these threads tend to be about the (deliberate? congenital? other?) obtuseness of posters like Santi who can't ever manage to get their heads around what anybody else is saying or frame a "debate" in any terms other than their own (as in "men's control over women's bodies").

    With that in mind I suggest we take this:

    It's a desire, in my view, to wall off belief from contingency.

    …as a confession. After all, on his terms, that's all it can be.

    ReplyDelete
  79. Scott sees this as losing focus (his focus).

    Anybody who wants to review the bidding can easily verify that the original point (which was not mine) was just what I said it was, and confirm that the focus was lost just where I said it was.

    Anyway, that's enough from me; I shouldn't really be replying to this tripe in the first place. I'll stop now.

    ReplyDelete
  80. DNW,

    You're correct that I'm probably going to resist abstract justifications for behavior.

    Your reference to geese may be because I once asked why geese don't need to consult reason or read holy books to mate for life. So why should we? Doesn't behavior normally come first, justification second? Don't all animals have patterns of behavior that come naturally to them? Why should humans be different?

    You say that because of this, a materialist reduces man "to a mere impulse or urge; or probably more accurately: a tendency of some part of reality to pointlessly manifest in a certain fashion."

    I don't think what I do is pointless. Neither do I think I'm forced into behavior by genes and environment. I don't believe I'm at the mercy of my urges. That just doesn't describe my life.

    But what of a dualist or a spiritualist? Can they also be reduced to a mere set of urges and impulses? I think they can if we want to ignore real life and consult mere theory. After all, does a Christian seek God? Does he get pleasure from it? Let's consult the classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Doesn't Edwards use a carrot and stick approach? Isn't this really just pleasure seeking and pain avoidance?

    I don't think the fundamental problems for a dualist differ from a materialist.

    ReplyDelete
  81. " But if Glenn expresses such views openly, and does not keep it as part of a private explanation for himself, how does it function in a discussion?

    I say it’s not necessarily a logical fallacy, but more a technique for shaming. It sets up the target for a double bind.

    Am I now supposed to feel shame for having existential pain? Is this something like being gay, where you're supposed to be in the closet about it?
    October 10, 2015 at 8:30 AM "


    This is again where the "progressive" assumes that the world of associating others should be, and therefore is, a buffet upon which he assumes the unconditional right to dine; while admonishing them that they are being piggish, selfish, and bigoted if they look askance.

    He assumes that for someone to affirm the value of society per se is to somehow affirm, at least prescriptively if not empirically, the value of an association with him. That your club is his club, and that your "job" is to interest yourself in the details of his life, if only in order to spare him the "shame" of facing the consequences of his supposedly genetic inner call, on his own.

    "Am I now supposed to feel shame for having existential pain?", asks Santi.

    No, Santi" comes the reply. "You are supposed to feel shame for narcissistically assuming that I am supposed to take a politically compelled interest in your subjective experiences of existential pain; and to reorder my own associative life and future prospects, around them.

    Reminds me of this in a bad way: "Proust said that you could seduce any woman if you were willing to sit and listen to her complain until four in the morning."

    Yeah, maybe. But at least there, there is something potentially worth valuing - if you are wired in a certain normal way. But even if you are, you have to ask yourself if you really want to pay the price for that categorically sound choice, in particular?

    Imagine that it becomes a political duty; and you have imagined life in Rortyland as administered by Santi.

    ReplyDelete
  82. " Blogger Don Jindra said...

    DNW,

    You're correct that I'm probably going to resist abstract justifications for behavior.

    Your reference to geese may be because I once asked why geese don't need to consult reason or read holy books to mate for life. So why should we? Doesn't behavior normally come first, justification second? Don't all animals have patterns of behavior that come naturally to them? Why should humans be different?
    "


    In a rush, but ...

    Because apparently not all of what we define typologically as humans share the same "pattern". And the live question is whether these sometimes antithetical patterns, are the result of correctable dysfunction or are to be intellectually "privileged" as de novo but self-legitimizing ways of being.

    Perform a reductio on your own behavior related assertion, Don.

    At what point does the definition of the universal term fundamentally change, and diverge from [in the case of humans] any presumptively original shared social interest predicate, and thus lose any claim to expressing a framework of reciprocal fidelity?

    Then consider another question: whether, and if so at what point, a descriptive normativity or categorical trait, (if there is a descriptive relativism as opposed to a normative relativism, there should exist a descriptive "normativity" intellectual category as well) properly begins to function as moral or legal normativity within a system of presumably freely associating members of the category.


    The ethical matter does not arise for geese because of their nature, or attributes. (Nor does it arise for progressives it seems, as their description of the existential condition seems to deride negative or natural liberty in true Marxist fashion, with the mocking phrase, "Peace be upon the ancient German forests!"

    But for the non-Marxist we have the intersection of natural kinds and legal inference; the fallout is natural law and the reasoning that takes place regarding associative predicate conditioned concepts such as justice.


    What then is a self-defining category in aid of, anyway? If the universality of X attributes at the time of the foundation is presumed and assented to as descriptively defining members, then when does the attribute expansion or subversion, render attempts at valid normative inferences otiose, and the now nominal category itself functionally absurd?


    (Compelled by the flurry or discussion relating to homosexuality, I brushed up on a couple of pop-science articles and discovered in a sidebar, discussion relating to the persistence of lesbianism. They asked why it did not die out. The answer was that tomboys who grew up to be lesbians were also promiscuous; and in being sexually promiscuous, they managed to pass on the genetic configuration that perpetuated itself.


    Think about that for a moment. Would parasitism be too strong a word for what that genetic program is doing with regard to the population overall?)

    ReplyDelete
  83. Santi has had quite a lot to say about 'demon', but at no time has he offered a definition of the term.

    1. On October 4, 2015 at 12:02 PM, I wrote: Merriam-Webster offers several definitions of 'demon', one of which "a source or agent of evil, harm, distress or ruin."

    2. On October 9, 2015 at 12:19 AM, I wrote: Santi, One thing which can be said of demons is that they are sources or agents of evil, harm, distress or ruin. This was mentioned previously, but you ignored it. Little wonder. To acknowledge it is to acknowledge that one or more demons are (at least partly) responsible for your existential pain.

    3. On October 10, 2015, Santi summarized these two remarks as follows:

    a) At 8:30 AM: Here’s what Glenn recently directed my way: "[O]ne or more demons are (at least partly) responsible for your existential pain."

    b) At 9:04 AM: Glenn: Yes, I know existential pain. And I don’t think it’s caused by demons (as you claim).

    c) At 9:40 AM: But positing one's opponents as having devils, as Glenn did with me, is to cease to understand.

    Santi still has not offered a definition of the term that has been at the center of much of what he has had to say.

    And a rational person would be justified in wondering why Santi has yet to respond to the above two remarks of mine by saying (something like): “Glenn, the definition you gave of 'demon' is not what I have in mind or am referring to when I use the term. You acknowledged that that definition is but one of several. When I use the term 'demon', I am referring to...”

    ReplyDelete
  84. "You say that because of this, a materialist reduces man 'to a mere impulse or urge; or probably more accurately: a tendency of some part of reality to pointlessly manifest in a certain fashion.'

    I don't think what I do is pointless. Neither do I think I'm forced into behavior by genes and environment. I don't believe I'm at the mercy of my urges. That just doesn't describe my life."

    Ok. If you don't think the phrasing is accurate, try reading it as:

    "materialism logically reduces man 'to a mere impulse or urge; or probably more accurately: a tendency of some part of reality to pointlessly manifest in a certain fashion.'"


    Which is what I meant anyway. I was not discussing your subjective evaluation of the satisfactions you receive from doing X and Y, I was trying to get to their ontological status, you might loosely say, assuming a (non-emergetist) materialist predicate


    "But what of a dualist or a spiritualist? Can they also be reduced to a mere set of urges and impulses? "


    Well, sure, if you take the materials' predicate as granted for the sake of argument as I was doing. If, then: the Dualist would be factually wrong, the materialist factually right, and the bottom would factually drop out beneath both of them whatever their subjective psychological dispositions; though neither might choose to recognize it, or even feel the effects viscerally.



    "I think they can if we want to ignore real life and consult mere theory. After all, does a Christian seek God? Does he get pleasure from it? Let's consult the classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Doesn't Edwards use a carrot and stick approach? Isn't this really just pleasure seeking and pain avoidance?

    I don't think the fundamental problems for a dualist differ from a materialist.

    October 10, 2015 at 10:31 AM"


    Well, the fact situation, if you are not a subjective idealist, remains the same for both of them regardless. I am exploring what I take to be the logical consequences of accepting certain premisses; consequences which cannot be papered over indefinitely, because some people simply will not pause as the conventional and polite, society affirming, community values, limit, but will push to see how far it really goes. And when they do that, the bottom drops out and man disappears.

    Bye bye community values man ... don't forget you notepad and eyeglasses ... have a nice journey ... into nothingness.

    That is my point. That and how satisfyingly funny it is.

    ReplyDelete


  85. "What then is a self-defining category in aid of, anyway?"

    This of course, or maybe no so "of course", refers to the "self" formation of a social or political category which has some basis in a presumably natural kind.

    I did not mean logically self-defining, or self-evident, whatever something like that might mean.

    I meant a conscious decision of self-identification based on the recognition of an ostensibly shared and mutually reinforcing set of attributes, and interests.

    ReplyDelete
  86. Pardon the tangent (related to an earlier Santian diatribe against 'curiosity'):

    - - - - -
    Let's consult the classic "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Doesn't Edwards use a carrot and stick approach?

    Regarding the difficulty he had had when learning Greek, Augustine wrote (in his Confessions),

    "[N]ot one word of it did I understand, and to make me understand I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments. Time was also (as an infant) I knew no Latin; but this I learned without fear or suffering, by mere observation, amid the caresses of my nursery and jests of friends, smiling and sportively encouraging me. This I learned without any pressure of punishment to urge me on, for my heart urged me to give birth to its conceptions, which I could only do by learning words not of those who taught, but of those who talked with me; in whose ears also I gave birth to the thoughts, whatever I conceived. No doubt, then, that a free curiosity has more force in our learning these things, than a frightful enforcement. Only this enforcement restrains the rovings of that freedom, through Thy laws, O my God, Thy laws, from the master's cane to the martyr's trials, being able to temper for us a wholesome bitter, recalling us to Thyself from that deadly pleasure which lures us from Thee."

    It is easily inferred from this passage that Augustine had no truck with curiosity per se. Indeed, it is obvious he saw curiosity as conducive to learning.

    He did, however, have truck with a curiosity which is such as to be inordinate, morbid or perverse. And there are common expressions indicating a general awareness that one's curiosity can be of such as a nature that it would be wise to restrain it: e.g., "don't borrow trouble", "curiosity killed the cat", etc.
    - - - - -

    Carry on.

    ReplyDelete
  87. (Is it okay if I gently point out that the phrase to have no truck with means, not to have no objection to or problem with, but to refuse to have anything to do with? I can't make the font any smaller, so I'll use parentheses to indicate my intention to be unobtrusive and inoffensive.)

    ReplyDelete
  88. DNW speaks of male heterosexual desire as being "wired in a certain normal way." Does irreducible evolutionary variation along a continuum allow for the normative in this sense?

    ReplyDelete
  89. Glenn:

    I thought I was pretty clear that I'm thinking of Aquinas's definition of angels and devils as invisible spiritual substances lacking bodies, and capable of influencing the course of material things, including brains, giving people hallucinations. I quoted Aquinas on this earlier in the thread.

    Aquinas lived in a demon-haunted world. He thought, for example, that demons could directly influence people's health, and that sorcerers could make pacts with devils to act in coalition with them. A sorcerer could, for instance, direct a hateful, evil eye at a person, and the devils would use that energy to manipulate a person's body into a course of illness. Here's Aquinas: "Some people have burning eyes, and by their look alone can harm others, especially children." (Page 33 of Euan Cameron's "Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750", Oxford 2011.)

    Aquinas also thought that demons could delude people that they were pack animals, and the reason they could carry on their back pack animal loads was because the demons hovered over them, bearing the bulk of the weight (page 111 of "Enchanted Europe").

    Aquinas also believed that demons could have sex with people, and that a succubus could draw semen from a man during intercourse, then transform into an incubus, and ejaculate that same semen into a woman! (Again, Cameron.)

    Pretty wild stuff. I really don't know how the idea of disembodied spiritual substances interacting with matter can be taken seriously in the 21st century. Scott dodged the question (as usual, he rarely comes out from behind his Oz curtain), and I don't see anyone else trying to flesh out the coherence of the view. Might you take a shot at telling me why you believe that we live in a demon haunted world? What good reasons and evidence do you have for this? I'll listen.

    If you know of any intellectual book you think gives a plausible defense of the existence of devils, I'd be curious to know of it.

    ReplyDelete
  90. @ Santi: "The swimming pool is the woman's womb..."

    I'm gonna drop the swimming pool thing now, because while I think it was funny and illustrative then, I think it's just confusing now.

    "The best we can do is remember who owns what."

    I have nothing interesting to say about human bodily and property rights as such, so I won't waste your time with my opinion about them. But I point out that this is begging the question: what others have been claiming, in part, is that that is *not* the best we can do--that we can do better.

    "You ask whether this is a moral position, or merely an unsatisfactory political compromise."

    No. I suggested, with a sort of ridiculous reductio, that if it *were* a satisfactory political compromise, that it would clearly not *therefore* be a sensible moral goal. (It might be a sensible moral goal--but not for that reason).

    "If someone ends up in your backyard, and she or he can't survive without your active participation..."

    See, this is the part you should develop. I mean--again, dropping the pool metaphor--if you can establish that your political compromise somehow entails a moral position, or constitutes one, *that* would be meeting head-on the objections of some other people on this thread. *This* part is interesting--or at any rate, is promising.

    "They are the tools for fulfilling the inner call of that variant creature..."

    It seems that when one presses this point--e.g., by wondering who or what is calling, and to what end, and who else is being called, etc.--this talk of an "inner call" implies a greater unity of the called in the aggregate. If in that unity there should obtain any moral properties, then the relation of some varieties to the aggregate looks kinda like the relation of some privations to being (should I capitalize that?).

    What I mean is, I think you're not actually disputing much of what has been asserted by the A-T advocates here, but merely delaying a disputation by talking funny.

    "Do you support jail time or the death penalty for a woman who 'murders' her fetus?"

    Who cares what my position is on this point? I certainly don't.

    Well, that's not strictly true... I mean, my opinion on this point is just not interesting, and certainly not relevant. I don't support *murder* of a fetus--but that's a loaded question, since whether or not a fetus is *murdered* is precisely what is in question. As for when one is "murdered," I don't know, as it depends on what the scare quotes mean.

    "You notice that Brandon got directed his way what you call, with disapproval, the 'sheerest bulverism,' but do you also notice it when your side does it?"

    So far as I know, I don't have a "side." Certainly, I never defined one, or picked one. And if you scroll up, you'll notice that what little I said identifying myself puts me likely in the minority here. But if by "side" you mean something like "the people you defended," say, then yes, I have noticed it. But I have also noticed that those people are the least likely to rely upon any such thing.

    "Part of understanding includes genetic forms of analysis... These are legitimate analyses..."

    Agreed. I think Dr. Feser has something about this on his most recent post.

    "So what I notice is that both atheists and theists tend to be quite anxious about purchasing that round-trip ticket."

    Again agreed, but not really relevant if you focus on the arguments.

    ReplyDelete
  91. Scott,

    Is it okay if I gently point out that...

    Yes, it is. And thanks for doing so.

    (While I've used that idiom only infrequently, I now know I've used it wrongly each time. Oops. So, thanks again.)

    ReplyDelete
  92. Santi,

    I thought I was pretty clear that I'm thinking of Aquinas's definition of angels and devils as invisible spiritual substances lacking bodies...

    That has not been clear to me.

    But if that is what you were thinking, then for the so-called arguments you have advanced to have any meaningful relevance to the matter (no pun intended), it is necessary that you believe science offers the final word, or nearly so, on the existence of non-material things.

    ...and capable of influencing the course of material things, including brains, giving people hallucinations.

    Tropes are not physical things. Yet you clearly believe (or clearly carry on as if you believe) in their existence, as well in the potential of the thinking of others to be influenced by them.

    ReplyDelete
  93. Santi,

    Here's Aquinas: "Some people have burning eyes, and by their look alone can harm others, especially children."

    You have -- on this very blog -- and on multiple occasions -- complained of the harmful effect upon you of Dr. Feser's image above, so I think you may be either shooting yourself in the foot or indirectly objecting to your own delusion by intimating someone else might be deluded.

    ReplyDelete
  94. Laubadetriste:

    You know what your inner call is. I know mine. We all know what those things are that we salivate to, and that are calling to us. Emily Dickinson's inner call was to write poetry, not be a nun. She had a reclusive temperament and gift for writing that came together in a very particular historical moment. All you had to do is ask her what her essence was. She'd tell you. She knew. She didn't need to look her essence up in Aquinas.

    Bruce Jenner's inner call was to become Caitlyn. It's not a collective thing. Indeed, in an evolutionary cosmos, where all things are contingent, no two things can have the exact same inner call. In this sense, all living things are sui generis. It's how evolutionary change works. It selects among variations (with their variant calls and essences).

    So I have two things in mind when I refer to an inner call. First, evolutionary variation: those things that DNA, or exposure to hormones in your mother's womb, have put in you, and those things your contingent environment have impressed on you as desire (or desires). Subsequent people or events might thwart these influences, but when given a chance, you'll tend to reorient to them, much as a bird, when given opportunity, will build a nest in its own eccentric manner. It is the play and artistry of variation.

    What I also have in mind is a very, very powerful and insightful sentence of Spinoza's that tracks beautifully with Darwin: "The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question."

    In other words, if you want to know the essence of an evolutionary variation, all you have to do is observe it, and see what it does. Or you can just ask the variation herself. If somebody is a lesbian (for instance), they'll orient in that direction, and if you ask them who they are, they'll tell you.

    The essence of a thing is not its ancestor's iterations, but its own. Its own. Sui generis.

    ReplyDelete
  95. Santi Tafarella said... Here's Aquinas: "Some people have burning eyes, and by their look alone can harm others, especially children." (Page 33 of Euan Cameron's "Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250-1750", Oxford 2011.)

    You say "here's Aquinas" but then you cite someone called "Euan Cameron". If you want to quote Aquinas, cite a reference to Aquinas' own works, please.

    Also, you must have missed my response to you above, but don't forget to provide some evidence for your claims that this is "Pretty wild stuff." You keep making these claims, but I want to see the evidence, just as you demand from others. If you keep repeating these claims, you must be prepared to back them up, right?

    Don't forget to retract your statement that nobody replied to your earlier claims. As I said, at least three people posted about it, so I'm sure you want to correct your earlier false statement and set the record straight.

    Finally, you claimed that theologians wouldn't look into Galileo's telescope, and I asked you to name any theologian who did so. We're waiting for your response.

    ReplyDelete
  96. @George LeSauvage: "But, laubadetriste, if you posit a Prime Oppressor, who oppressed him?"

    See, that *is* funny! I'm glad some people agree. Still needs more punch, though. I just can't think of a really pithy way to put it...

    ReplyDelete
  97. Glenn:

    You wrote that to NOT believe in devils a person must "believe science offers the final word, or nearly so, on the existence of non-material things."

    Why do I need to put myself out on a limb with the most emphatic formulations of naturalism to reject belief in devils? Newton was religious, but did not believe in devils. I haven't asked a hard question of you and the others here, but nobody seems willing to tackle it head on. What good, positive reasons and evidence do you put forward for thinking that the world is demon-haunted?

    I would ask the same of a Scientologist about Thetans. Thetans are said to be invisible souls roaming the Earth that Scientologists claim were liberated from volcanoes by nuclear bombs seventy million years ago. (Like the biblical fall, it's a complicated and implausible story.)

    So you're not a strict naturalist, but wouldn't you ask the same question of Scientologists that I'm asking you guys? How do they know there are Thetans? How do you know there are devils?

    ReplyDelete
  98. Anonymous:

    I gave two names earlier in this thread of people the evidence suggests waved off telescope time with Galileo, one an Aristotelian professor. Galileo had clear contempt for the professor in his letters. Curiosity definitely didn't kill these cats, but I'm sure you've got your positive spin on why this was so.

    I'm guessing you also think Galileo's treatment by the Inquisition is much ado about nothing.

    As for Euan Cameron's book and scholarship, that can be evaluated at Amazon or in a Google search.

    With regard to devils, just take a shot at the post immediately above addressed to Glenn. I'm not looking for a sentence, but a couple of actual paragraphs fleshing out the good reasons and evidence for thinking devils exist. That shouldn't be hard. I'd ask the same of a Scientologist regarding the existence of Thetans. It's not an unreasonable question.

    As for my "wild stuff" statement regarding Aquinas's beliefs, that's my evaluation. I say this because the ideas seem as fanciful as believing in Gremlins or Thetans. I know, for instance, of no evidence that there are such things as succubi, incubi, or the power to deploy demons by casting on someone an evil eye. I know of no evidence that demons cause men to hallucinate that they are pack animals, and then give them unnatural capacities for carrying weight on their backs. These are things that Aquinas took quite seriously.

    How about you? Do you take the demon-haunted world seriously? If so, what good reasons or evidence do you think support this idea? Is there an intellectual book you can direct me to that you believe offers a pretty good contemporary defense for the existence of demons?

    ReplyDelete
  99. Santi,

    I have seen Scott, with my own eyes, give you direct and serious replies many times. If he no longer thinks it worth his time, who can blame him?
    So on that point, shut your lie hole, liar.

    None of your questions are honest. You ask them not to learn from the answers, but in the hope of getting rhetorical mileage out of them. Regarding your current fixation on your "demon-haunted world," I believe it was Georgy who pointed out, just as your tirades were getting off the ground, that the existence of demons is a revealed truth, i.e., something that could not be known apart from revelation. So far as I know, no philosopher or theologian has ever claimed that their existence could be arrived at through argumentation alone. Perhaps you have a book on your shelf that claims otherwise?

    But here you are loudly demanding arguments for demons, and telling us how oh so willing to listen you are. Even though you haven't done so well with arguments in the past, have you? And if anyone did provide you with an air-tight argument, you would complain that it wasn't open to "reality testing," that we were hiding behind metaphysical smoke screens, etc., etc., etc. And of course, once it begins to dawn on you that the conversation is not going your way, you'll simply change the subject.

    I posted a link above showing that there is no evidence that anyone ever refused to look through Galileo's telescope. But I didn't expect a retraction from you. How many times has the imbecile nature of your comments been exposed in these threads, and how many retractions have you made? Better to let them hang, like a stink in the air, and perhaps return to them once it seems people have forgotten.

    There is no truth in you.

    Please take this not as a reply, but as a reiteration that you are not worth replying to. Unlike you, it seems, I don't like making a public fool of myself.

    ReplyDelete
  100. And a toast to laubadetriste for what may be the best summary of the Santian method so far:

    What I mean is, I think you're not actually disputing much of what has been asserted by the A-T advocates here, but merely delaying a disputation by talking funny.

    ReplyDelete
  101. I join in the toast. That summary is spot on.

    Indeed, some of us "behind the Oz curtain" are still waiting for responses to replies and counterarguments we gave a year ago, when we mistakenly took Santi seriously, not realizing that he was only going to delay disputation by talking funny.

    ReplyDelete
  102. Gottfried:

    You wrote: "[T]he existence of demons is a revealed truth, i.e., something that could not be known apart from revelation. So far as I know, no philosopher or theologian has ever claimed that their existence could be arrived at through argumentation alone."

    But arguments surely there must be, right? If you had dropped the "alone" from your sentence, that would be closer to your actual position, as evidenced by both your evasiveness and Scott's.

    And it's not just argumentation that is needful here. Demons, because they act on the material world, ought to display evidence of their presence (such as giving a human being unusual powers to move things that are too heavy for humans otherwise to move, as in the Aquinas' pack animal example).

    But such claims seem to always evaporate on close scrutiny. Why is that?

    After four hundred years of empiricism, what evidence is there that demons actually interact with the world, and how do they achieve this interaction? Why has the world gone from demon-haunted in the sixteenth century, to apparently demon-free today?

    Isn't it because the simplest answer here is best: there are no demons?

    Physicists, after all, have detected the Higgs boson, though they've never seen one. And they have a model for how this otherwise invisible thing interacts with other things. And Scott pops out from behind his Oz curtain for brief forays before darting quickly back, so we know he's there (to what extent is not clear).

    But devils don't appear to interact with matter at all. And minds never come without brains insofar as science can tell.

    So what is this "revealed truth" that demons exist, but a place-marker for the truth? If it ain't the truth, it will do until the truth gets here?

    Like "Marxist science," "revealed truth" is no truth at all. There is only truth. And you're offering no good reasons or evidence that you ought to believe that we live in a demon-haunted world; that this is the truth. Your belief is not warranted.

    Your responses, therefore, are not really responses at all, but question-begging (reiterations of what you believe, not supports for what you believe). You can make a thousand such "responses" without ever really responding at all.

    And if you're going to start with revelation, what makes you think the revelation is true? You must have reasons. The issue of justification doesn't just go away because you point to revelation. The "responses" you and Scott think you've adequately sent my way have thus far been a shell game. It's the two of you, not me, that are dodging the relevant questions here, evading focus on justification.

    To help you two out, I'm looking for sentences with "because" in them. "I think demons exist because...And I think x is evidence of demons' existence because..."

    ReplyDelete
  103. Santi,

    Lie: a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.

    Example: Glenn: You wrote that to NOT believe in devils a person must "believe science offers the final word, or nearly so, on the existence of non-material things."

    You can prove wrong my (strong) suggestion that you are lying by providing incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Such evidence, if it exists, would be only a copy/paste away. If you can find it. Which you can't. Because it doesn't exist (outside the confines of your mind.)

    ReplyDelete
  104. As for AT metaphysics, I focused directly in on a fault-line between Thomism and evolution in my response to Laubadetriste above. It begins: "You know what your inner call is...." and from there I proceed to posit a resolution to a key tension between Darwinism and Thomistic metaphysics: where the locus of a creature's essence ought to be located conceptually. Should it be in the species qua species or the individual? I suggested the individual as the alternative locus for essence that more reasonably accords with what we know of how evolutionary variation works, and quoted Spinoza: "The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question." That is, a thing's variation and inner call reveals itself empirically in the now, and is irreducible. In the case of humans, all you've got to do is ask ("I'm lesbian," "I'm a poet," "I want kids," etc.). Essence is not conferred upon a thing via a generalization about the species to which it belongs (the penis is for reproduction; a woman is made for being the helpmate to a man), but derives from its actual situatedness as a unique variation occupying a particular time and space.

    If this is dodging a direct confrontation with A-T metaphysics, I'd be curious to know why anyone would say so. (Be sure, please, to include the word "because").

    ReplyDelete
  105. Glenn:

    At 11:14 PM yesterday you wrote: "[F]or the so-called arguments you have advanced to have any meaningful relevance to the matter (no pun intended), it is necessary that you believe science offers the final word, or nearly so, on the existence of non-material things."

    In other words, I took you to mean that I advance arguments against the existence of devils (which is correct), but for me to do this coherently, then you believe that I need to operate under the premise that science is the last word (not revelation) on "the existence of non-material things"--a premise you don't share. That's all I meant to say earlier.

    If that's a misinterpretation, sorry. Can you please share now what you take to be the good reasons and evidence we have for believing that we live in a demon-haunted world? Don't forget the magic word "because" in some of those sentences.

    And is there an intellectual book you think achieves this task of justification? I looked in the index of Feser's scholastic metaphysics book, and don't see any discussion of demonology. Maybe it's in there? But if not, where is a justification for believing in demons today fleshed out by a contemporary intellectual (Thomist or otherwise)?

    In relation to Feser's post, a central claim of Haldane's and Krauss's is that science is "atheistic" in the sense that supernatural forces (demons, angels, gods) don't appear to explain anything that ever happens in physics, biology, or the sciences generally, and so are never resorted to for explanation. But do you know of accounts of demonic activity that you think are plausible? Perhaps you believe they've been overlooked by scientists or skeptical investigators. What are they?

    ReplyDelete
  106. I proceed to posit a resolution to a key tension between Darwinism and Thomistic metaphysics: where the locus of a creature's essence ought to be located conceptually. Should it be in the species qua species or the individual?

    That question doesn't make sense. I'm not sure you understand what an essence is, in Thomistic terms. Do you think you could explain what you think it is in your own words?

    ReplyDelete
  107. DNW,

    "Because apparently not all of what we define typologically as humans share the same 'pattern'."

    True, different cultures have different patterns of behavior. And this is an interesting thing. Humans seem to be more malleable than other creatures. But for me this is not an all or nothing thing. We can be pushed so far, but at some point we push back. What is pushing back? Why is it that humans do not appear to be perfectly malleable? Why doesn't communism work? It looks so good on paper, I'm told.

    I'm convinced we have a primitive nature that transcends culture. It's above written law because it's the sort of nature that may be impossible to accurately describe -- like it may be impossible to accurately describe what makes a beautiful woman. Some things just have to be experienced to be understood.

    OTOH, I think too much is made of our cultural differences. We aren't as different as we may appear. I wonder if we'd feel more at home plunked down in the culture of some primitive tribe in the Amazon or among the crew of an alien spacecraft?


    "And the live question is whether these sometimes antithetical patterns, are the result of correctable dysfunction or are to be intellectually 'privileged' as de novo but self-legitimizing ways of being."

    I'm not sure what it means for a behavior to be intellectually privileged. It might be a better world if we figure that out and if we could convince the rest of the world to follow that lead. But ultimately, no matter how much or how well we use the intellect, every moral question is going to boil down to an emotional judgment call.

    ReplyDelete
  108. DNW,

    "materialism logically reduces man 'to a mere impulse or urge; or probably more accurately: a tendency of some part of reality to pointlessly manifest in a certain fashion.'"

    This doesn't alter my basic response. The "ontological status" of urges has to include real urges as they exit in me and everyone else.


    "If, then: the Dualist would be factually wrong, the materialist factually right, and the bottom would factually drop out beneath both of them whatever their subjective psychological dispositions."

    Maybe I don't understand you. But I'm granting the Dualist position. Even supposing he's right, he's no less of a hedonist than a materialist. No bottom has to drop out. To claim, for example, one loves God and wants to be with God eternally is a desire for eternal pleasure and happiness. It's an urge. Whether we call it a biological or spiritual or mental urge is irrelevant.

    When I watch a Dualist -- subset, charismatic -- with his hands raise toward heaven, tears of joy streaming down, rapture coming out in pointless tongues, there's no question that I'm watching a form of hedonism. If you want to reduce materialism to a collection of random urges, I can reduce dualism to the same, no matter how staid the Dualist might be compared to that charismatic outpouring. In all cases the logical consequence of the premises of both materialism and dualism is that we are a collection of urges. Logically speaking, it's irrelevant where that pleasure and happiness occurs, whether in this world or the next. However, I'm not a big believer in the power of logic to dissect real living.


    "some people simply will not pause as the conventional and polite, society affirming, community values, limit, but will push to see how far it really goes. And when they do that, the bottom drops out and man disappears."

    I doubt I need to tell you we can find those same individuals among Dualists. So I suppose you're asking what a materialist should do about such people? In the worst case, prison. Is this justifiable from a materialist position? Absolutely. The materialist ought to know that individuals are not all alike. This is both a strength and danger. Humans happen to be social creatures by nature, even though there are sociopaths among us. But as social creatures we organize to protect the group against danger. I see nothing random about that. Difficult, yes.

    ReplyDelete
  109. In the Thomistic sense, I take essence to be what something is, not merely that it is. Essence is the particular thing that distinguishes my species from all other species. I exist, yes, and I'm an animal, that's my genus, yes. But I'm also characterized most essentially by the differentia that I share with other humans: rationality.

    Genus-species definition is a useful tool nominally, not essentially. I'm with Aristotle here (who was a nominalist).

    But from such definitions, Thomists think there are very particular consequences for behavior, and I part ways with them here. According to Thomists, it is the differentia of my species to which my variant being is uniquely and most properly directed toward. Contra Sartre and Darwin, for the Thomist, a species supposed essence precedes any particular specimen's existence.

    A penis, for instance, is the male organ (genus) of reproduction (species). That's what it is, and thus reproduction is what it's for. Given what it is, its highest purpose or end is for reproduction, not masturbation.

    Such consequences drawn from a thing's essence (which I take to be merely nominal) is I think too constricting. A penis is an organ for reproduction, but it's not just that. It can be, for instance, an organ for ornamentation.

    In contrast with Thomism, evolution suggests that a thing is a STRUCTURE consisting of a particular form and matter that really has no essence apart from the contingent environment with which it interacts. If you want to know what a clitoris is and is for, notice how female bonobos in the wild use it for rubbing off on other female bonobos. That tells you what its for in that particular environment, and under the recent circumstances of each individual in that species' variation.

    So I see Thomists as having basically misattributed structure for end. In other words, structures have no particular end. It's why scientists don't focus on final causes. Structures display all sort of potencies in different contexts--but not to a single highest end. You can only talk this way if you decontextualizing structure from the ecology it actually exists in.

    By contrast, I say that matter/forms as structures tend toward those effects and "final causes" implicit in the structures when in contact with very particular and contingent environments.

    Thus, given an egg's matter and form, it is in the nature of its structure to crack, not for the purpose of letting out a hatchling, but in response to pecking or tapping of a certain force. The end is in the structure's variant form (it may be harder or easier to crack than the eggs laying around it) interacting with a particular environment, not its definition divorced from context. It's essence is dispersed into the contingencies of its unique variation and ecosystem, not located in itself, decontextualized.

    Thus a penis's structure is as conducive to masturbation as procreation, depending on context. It has a useful nominal definition for certain forms of classification, but no real end. Or rather, it can be seen as having diverse potential ends (and natural selection might emphasize one of these potential ends over others, as with enlarged clitorises in bonobos, used not exclusively for mating, but for female bonding).

    ReplyDelete
  110. Anonymous:

    What I wrote immediately above might be summarized this way: I take each living thing to be a unique variant structure available for natural selection; something ultimately sui generis. Our genus-species definitions are an overlay onto these structures that are useful nominally. If you want to know what a structure really is, ask how it's actually functioning, as a variation, in its ecosystem. Variation is irreducible.

    ReplyDelete
  111. In contrast with Thomism, evolution suggests that a thing is a STRUCTURE consisting of a particular form and matter that really has no essence apart from the contingent environment with which it interacts.

    As has been pointed out before, both sides of this claim are false. Reproduction, for instance, is not part of the essence of a penis; a penis very, very obviously does not reproduce, or even have the potential for reproduction, except as part of a certain kind of whole, and thus gets that function from the nature of the organism of which it is a part. On the other side, evolutionary theory doesn't suggest anything about essences, being a theory of population dynamics, not an account of what things are.

    You don't go to animal ethology to understand what a clitoris is; that would just tell you how animals use it, and get you no further than treating it as a black box. To understand what a part of an animal is, you go to physiology; this will not, however, suffice to tell you what its full function is except insofar as you also have an account of the health and active living of the animal in question, just as you can't tell whether the heart is more properly for pumping blood or making beating noises or stopping without looking at the life of the organism that has it. Note that it is not the environment that determines this; rather, the conditions for the health of an animal determine in what kinds of environments it can live and die. If we are talking evolutionary theory, however, this kind of thing is presupposed by definition: evolution is about the effect on populations of animals being apt to live or die in different environments.

    ReplyDelete
  112. Brandon:

    All your points are well taken, and the distinctions you make matter here, obviously, but as I read your response, it occurs to me that this is exactly the sort of argument that linguists and grammarians have over prescriptive vs. descriptive language use. People with a liberal inclination will tend to be less concerned with prescriptive guidelines for grammar use (these verbs should be regularized, other verbs never; never put a preposition at the end of a sentence, etc.), arguing that such rules are conventions overlaid upon an evolving system.

    Arguments over not touching the penis or clitoris for masturbation is thus akin (in my view) to the prohibition against putting "for" (skin) at the end of a sentence.

    You really can't say that what was right yesterday is wrong today, or what the consequences would be of going back to the "right" way in an ecosystem that is fast evolving.

    I think of the word "vegan-burger." I recall reading a conservative author who lamented the "abuse" of language entailed by such appropriations of well-known words like hamburger. I thought it was laughable, the argument. I even recall the book: "A World without Heroes." Author's name escapes me. Probably readily found at Amazon. Perhaps a well-known Thomist?

    ReplyDelete
  113. Found the author's name: George Roche. William Buckley blurbed for it. I also recall the guy was totally down on gay rights as well, like Feser's anti-atheist book.

    ReplyDelete
  114. @moduspownens
    I posited that marriage is a union of persons naturally and therefore inherently directed to the end of procreation being the the sort of thing it is. So, it accommodates "incestuous," "polygamist" and "Levirate," -- same-sex, collapses into implicit contradiction in terms, so it doesn't qualify -- though there might be moral or other considerations that rule them out for state and or public policy purposes.

    Moral considerations that contradict basic logic and the the infallible Word of God? Heresy.

    As for your snipe about replacing racial with gendered again is another ill conceived, malevolent jab.

    I didn’t claim it was a complete refutation, but there are some places where the arguments against run parallel and when you help make my arguments for me I graciously let you know about it because I’m nice like that.

    Up until about 15 years ago, it was well understood that marriage, as an institution, fundamentally centered around procreation for its being and intelligibility.

    Generally yes, but not always. I don’t even think of it as changing the institution or whatever paranoid nightmare you are predicting. SSM is just expanding upon the already existing exceptions to that general rule (infertile heterosexual couples, women past menopause).

    Now, As marriage = romantic love, broadly speaking, the biological family is no longer recognized by the state, which is a barrier it no longer has to consider when I or my family is the object of its coercion in certain contexts that I expect will now increase. For starters, think about implications for education, divorce, etc. Homosexual and heterosexual, we're all now chained to this husk that ideologues have insisted would be ineffectual on the everyone else.

    This makes no sense of any kind. Obergfell was the day the music died, bye bye Miss American Pie. Children became wards of the state, wives and husbands renounced their wedding vows, all was weeping and gnashing of teeth. Or Plato’s guardian class, either one will work. I’m sorry you don’t feel so special anymore; as the saying goes, it gets better.

    Hence, the difference between miscegenation and keeping the civil understanding of marriage as heterosexual should become clear, as the former was treating like things as unlike things.

    If you think miscegenation isn’t still a “thing” among certain paleo conservatives which pollutes the purity of the white race, the same race which is treated as the backbone of civilized institutions, then you are unable to adequately address the ways they compare.

    ReplyDelete
  115. @Santi: "It's not a collective thing. Indeed, in an evolutionary cosmos, where all things are contingent, no two things can have the exact same inner call. In this sense, all living things are sui generis. It's how evolutionary change works. It selects among variations (with their variant calls and essences)."

    No two things need have the same "inner call" to be unified in some aggregate (as I put it). Things might be very different--like cabbages and kings!--and still be an aggregate.

    "...for the most disparate and unrelated worlds would still be a multitude,
    and so an aggregate, and so, in some sense, a unity."--George Santayana, *Three Philosophical Poets*

    And you keep saying things that imply that, lurking somewhere in the back of your thought, there *is* such a an aggregate, and that it has properties that tend against the--how shall I say--antinomian whimsy of all this variant calling you say is going on. For example: ..."no two things can have the exact same inner call." Really? *Can't?* Whyever not? If these variant callings are really so singular, why *couldn't* two of them happen to be the same, at least as often as those industrious typing monkeys produce works of Shakespeare? Unless there is some law, or explanation, or whatever, governing or applying to both of them... but then they start to resemble monads, or haecceities, or "spiritual individuals," or other elements famously part of larger systems...

    Hell, even in contemporary science, accounts of evolutionary variation are subsumed under broader accounts of chemistry and physics. And you know what monsters Dr. Feser found under the bed of contemporary science...

    I'm sure you were just speaking loosely, and that there is nothing grave riding upon the word "can't" in particular. But you keep on saying things like that ("...cosmos..."), in a way which looks an awful lot like your account is supported mostly by bluster, and preserved mostly by blinders.

    "In other words, if you want to know the essence of an evolutionary variation, all you have to do is observe it, and see what it does."

    So the essence of an evolutionary variation is just "what it does," hmn? Regarding "evolutionary variation," several people have pointed out that its moral implications are equivocal. Let me recall Mill: "When it is asserted, or implied, that Nature, or the laws of Nature, should be conformed to, is the Nature which is meant... the powers and properties of all things? But in this signification there is no need of a recommendation to act according to nature, since it is what nobody can possibly help doing, and equally whether he acts well or ill..."--*On Nature*

    Of course, well and ill generally are what was under dispute. I said earlier that if you could establish (e.g.) that your political compromise constituted a moral position, or entailed one, that *that* would be meeting some objections head-on.

    "What I also have in mind is a very, very powerful and insightful sentence of Spinoza's that tracks beautifully with Darwin: 'The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.'"

    Isn't that just a paraphrase of Aristotle? I'm reminded of the translation of "entelecheia" as "being-at-work-staying-itself." Aristotle! Booga booga booga!

    Sorry, I don't mean to be merely silly. But you keep throwing him out with a pitchfork, and he always comes roaring back again...

    ReplyDelete
  116. All your points are well taken, and the distinctions you make matter here, obviously, but as I read your response, it occurs to me that this is exactly the sort of argument that linguists and grammarians have over prescriptive vs. descriptive language use. People with a liberal inclination will tend to be less concerned with prescriptive guidelines for grammar use (these verbs should be regularized, other verbs never; never put a preposition at the end of a sentence, etc.), arguing that such rules are conventions overlaid upon an evolving system.

    None of this, or any of the rest of your comment appears to be relevant to the point in question, which was specifically what essences are and what evolution does or does not say about them.

    ReplyDelete
  117. I'm a bit surprised no one jumped on the claim that Aristotle was a nominalist. There are some who argue that, but it's very much an eccentric view.

    ReplyDelete
  118. "But such claims seem to always evaporate on close scrutiny. Why is that? / After four hundred years of empiricism, what evidence is there that demons actually interact with the world, and how do they achieve this interaction? Why has the world gone from demon-haunted in the sixteenth century, to apparently demon-free today? / Isn't it because the simplest answer here is best: there are no demons? [...] And you're offering no good reasons or evidence that you ought to believe that we live in a demon-haunted world; that this is the truth. Your belief is not warranted."

    I have no dog in this demon fight, but you know, you're actually poking at a hornet's nest of long-standing controversies between Christian thinkers themselves--about whether the age of miracles has ended, about eschatological verification, about how different forms of faith may be appropriate to different times and places, about the mechanism of supernatural intervention in the physical world (Polkinghorne), about warrant (*cough* Plantinga *cough*)...

    It's a lot to review, you know? I bet the Christians around here are thinking to themselves, "Man, a long day at work and now I gotta go over all this shit too...?"

    Divine revelation is of course a kind of evidence. It is a peculiarly private and non-reproducible form of evidence, so you might argue that it is not scientific. But if you do, I bet you won't shock many people. As to whether evidence must be empirical to be good, well, there have been a few things said here about that.

    If one received a divine revelation, presumably that would be one more datum to fit into one's weltanshauung. One might know some scientific facts {a, b,...z}, and *also* have been told something by God, and have no good way yet to fit the several things together, but think to oneself, "Well, it's all gotta hang together somehow, so I'll just keep plugging away...," just like Socrates having been told that he was the wisest of the Greeks, without yet having figured out that it was because he knows that he knows nothing.

    I suggest instead of of banging away about evidence--which won't get you anywhere with anyone who disagrees with you about the place of what you call evidence--that you may find something more useful, but still congenial to your point of view, in developing your implicit question what difference a belief in demons makes, perhaps along the much-anthologized lines pursued here.

    ReplyDelete
  119. Santi Tafarella said... I gave two names earlier in this thread of people the evidence suggests waved off telescope time with Galileo

    Then it should be really easy for you to give the names here.

    Galileo had clear contempt for the professor in his letters.

    Galileo had contempt for lots of people, who cares? Ok, I guess that is my fault for not being clear when I asked for a name. I didn't mean a name you just made up. Or even a name that Galileo made up. When I said "name a theologian who didn't look through Galileo's telescope" I meant *identify* one. You know, with some actual historical evidence that that person didn't look. And also that that person was a theologian, although now you seem to be changing your original claim to just some professor who didn't look, but I think you'd better make it clear whether you're referring to a theologian or a physicist or whatever.

    I'm guessing you also think ...

    You do a lot of guessing for someone who claims to be so interested in evidence.

    As for Euan Cameron's book and scholarship, that can be evaluated at Amazon or in a Google search.

    You're not saying you just googled for random phrases and pasted in the first hit you found out of context from an Amazon preview page, are you? I mean, I'm sure you cited the book because you actually read it, in which case it will be an easy matter to provide the citation for Aquinas's actual comment. Unless Euan didn't cite any of his alleged quotations, in which case we probably shouldn't be calling it, you know, "scholarship".

    I'm not looking for a sentence, but a couple of actual paragraphs

    Oh, good, I'm glad you're not expecting the argument in a single sentence, that would be silly. I get a whole *paragraph*. Coming from a guy who can't post anything less than 400 words a shot, I'm going to take that as intended as a joke.

    I say this because the ideas seem as fanciful as

    Why would anyone care what "seems" to be "fanciful" to "you"? I asked for evidence, not touchy-feely guesswork. You do have evidence to back up your position, don't you? So why are you keeping it from us?

    I know, for instance, of no evidence [...] I know of no evidence that

    There are lots of things you know no evidence for. In fact, *most* things that are true you don't know evidence for. I'm sure you don't have evidence for lots of things you even believe. Do you believe man landed on the moon? Because you weren't there when they did it. And I'm pretty sure you haven't been to moon any time after that either. So if you didn't see it, why do you believe it, if you do?

    How about you? Do you take the demon-haunted world seriously?

    Beats me, I don't even know what the devil a "demon-haunted world" is supposed to mean. It sounds more like the name of a Halloween movie than a real philosophical position.

    Oh, and I think you accidentally overlooked the part where I pointed out that when you said nobody responded to you about the claim originally, that was false. I'm sure now that I've drawn your mistake to your attention, you'd like to set the record straight.

    ReplyDelete
  120. @Anonymous 7:19 PM: "Beats me, I don't even know what the devil a 'demon-haunted world' is supposed to mean. It sounds more like the name of a Halloween movie than a real philosophical position."

    Carl Sagan wrote a superlative and moving book, which is called *The Demon-Haunted World,* about science as a precious gift, like a "candle in the dark." The world is "demon-haunted" in his telling, because many people are afflicted by superstition and pseudoscience. Since several people above mentioned demons, either in passing or when discussing angelology, Santi has used the phrase from Sagan's book to imply that anyone who believes in them is superstitious or pseudoscientific. The demon-haunted world is not a philosophical position, although you might say it's philosophically interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  121. Santi,

    At 11:14 PM yesterday you wrote: "[F]or the so-called arguments you have advanced to have any meaningful relevance to the matter (no pun intended), it is necessary that you believe science offers the final word, or nearly so, on the existence of non-material things."

    Though your copy/paste is incomplete, it is sufficient to establish that you either continue to lie or have a severe reading comprehension problem. Why you took the time (and when through the trouble) to do that is anybody's guess.

    ReplyDelete
  122. (s/b "...and went through...")

    ReplyDelete
  123. "George LeSauvage said...

    I'm a bit surprised no one jumped on the claim that Aristotle was a nominalist. There are some who argue that, but it's very much an eccentric view.
    October 11, 2015 at 4:35 PM "



    So was I until I began to think that it was so out-there that even Santi must have known it; and therefore that he was trolling it like a piece of controversial bait hoping someone would snap, that there would ensue a minor ruckus, and then he'd have sowed a little more confusion.

    Certainly a quick review of the Stanford article on substance makes numerous references to Aristotle's realism; and I never ran across a professor who suggested that Aristotle's criticism of Plato implied that Aristotle was a nominalist.

    He may be dragging this out of some medieval dispute between the "new" and "old" philosophies, or between primary and secondary substance.

    From this he no doubt hopes to argue that primary substances are invariably (no pun intended) radically variant as to "essence" and use that to inflate the slogan "existence precedes essence" to cover "function precedes form" or whatever his version of it is, into a political doctrine of community based on sentiment, rather than kinds and their potentials understood as possessing real convergent interests.

    Well that's my guess anyway. And that is about all Santi's gambit is worth, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  124. DNW, I've seen some extreme Platonists make the charge; naturally, they would argue at least that Aristotlianism will end up in nominalism. And I've seen professors of other subjects - religion or English - say things like that. And I imagine that some pomo types do, the kind a friend calls "Euro-trash".

    "He may be dragging this out of some medieval dispute between the "new" and "old" philosophies, or between primary and secondary substance." I very much doubt it has any such reasonable a provenance. Pure whimsy is my guess.

    ReplyDelete
  125. Aristotle was a nominalist along a continuum in relation to what?

    Answer: Plato. That's all I meant. No need to turn what I said into a conspiracy theory.

    Aristotle was the first nominalist, in the classical sense, long before medievalists made finer distinctions, in that he tapped the brake on Plato's idealism. There is no cat in an ideal or supernatural realm to which all material cats conform. We know cats from our experience of particular cats, which we then conceptualize into the species "cat."

    That's all I meant in calling Aristotle a nominalist. Aristotle obviously believed our concepts were accurately identifying real essences in the world, but they were in the world only. Aristotle, like Prometheus, stole fire from heaven--the power to name. IT'S ONLY A SMALL STEP FROM NAMING CATS AS EMPIRICAL DISCOVERY TO NAMING CATS AS CONVENTION. Obviously, philosophers would come along and make that next philosophical step. If Aristotle isn't the beginning of name-only philosophizing, who is?

    Aristotle was once the pole to Plato's idealism, and then, as history progressed, people took positions even further to the left of Aristotle, ending in people like Rorty.

    It's like politics. What was once the liberal position on gays forty years ago, eased over time into the moderate and even conservative position on the continuum, leaving room for more radical views to function at the poles.

    Aristotle's soft-nominalism (soft as compared to Rorty, hard as compared with Plato) was the beginning of evils from a supernaturalist's point-of-view.

    And it could be argued that Aquinas, by adopting Aristotle's empiricism, easing Western culture and the Church away from Plato's idealism, set up history for Jerry Coyne and Lawrence Krauss.

    Once you allow too much reason and nominalism into the world, where does it end? Is nothing sacred? Are there no stable verities? It's like that scene in "No Country for Old Men," where two old sheriffs sit over coffee and talk about "the dismal tide" of purple hair and drugs, and Tommy Lee Jones says, "When people stop saying sir and ma'am, it begins there." Aristotle and Aquinas stopped saying sir and ma'am first.

    ReplyDelete
  126. And these categories (idealist, realist, nominalist, etc.) shouldn't be thought of as either-or/all-nothing with stark walls between them, but as functioning along continuums.

    Evolutionary taxonomists, for example, are realists in the sense that they are scientists who think they argue about objective things out in the world, and nominalists in the sense that they recognize their species designations as conventions. Just as there was no first day you were officially an adolescent, there was no first human, no first dog, etc. The species demarcations in your lineage from trilobites to you are conventions of naming and categorizing, not something inherent to the things themselves.

    Even Rorty is a realist in that he thinks the moon is there when nobody's looking, but that the language we put around that fact, and the emphasis we place on its meaning, requires a language born of contingencies and conventions. God and the universe don't speak, we speak.

    ReplyDelete
  127. @Santi: "Aristotle was the first nominalist, in the classical sense, long before medievalists made finer distinctions, in that he tapped the brake on Plato's idealism. There is no cat in an ideal or supernatural realm to which all material cats conform. We know cats from our experience of particular cats, which we then conceptualize into the species 'cat.' / That's all I meant in calling Aristotle a nominalist."

    So Aristotle was a *nominalist* in the *classical* sense (where *classical* is apparently a punning reference to a *medieval* sense, considered as normative); and he is a *nominalist* because of something like abstraction, except that this abstraction seems to operate inductively; and his nominalism involves *conceptualizing*...

    Do we, like Leibniz, *conceptualize* in order to split the difference between aisthesis and noiesis...?

    Wait. What am I doing? Sweet Jesus, I started trying to understand what you're saying as if you're saying something! Again!

    DNW said this was a gambit, and before that Brandon said this was unrelated to your question, and before that Scott said you can't focus on a point long enough to address it cogently... and I just kept on thinking, No, there's a listless thin sediment of sense here, if only we can stir it up...

    Wow, I am a fool. Fucking fucking fuck, I fucking fell for it! Santi, you're good. *Wow* am I a fool...

    ReplyDelete
  128. laubadetriste,

    Some of the rest of us learned the hard way too. It isn't necessarily easy to learn in an instant what others have learned via experience over time, so don't be too hard on yourself. Your heart and mind were in the right place, and there's something to be said for that.

    ReplyDelete
  129. What Glenn said↑. Good attempt, at any rate, and you're not the first to think it was worth a try.

    ReplyDelete
  130. All this guy's comments should end "There's glory for you."

    @Scott: Neither is he the first to realize it wasn't worth the try.

    ReplyDelete
  131. Hey, Santi, I see you replied to other comments but not mine, even though mine is pretty simple and straightforward questions, so I guess you just missed it. Here's a link to help you out. Looking forward to your responses.

    ReplyDelete
  132. Thank you, Glenn. And thank you, Scott. I'm still mostly just confused as to what just happened... :)

    @George LeSauvage: "All this guy's comments should end 'There's glory for you.'"

    I had to look that one up. And then I snorted in my beer, laughing. To be fair, it wasn't my first beer.

    ReplyDelete
  133. Don't like cultic behavior, sorry. The focus lost here is that many people who believe superstitious things won't say so directly or defend those superstitions directly, and so they kick up a lot of dust, bluster, and distraction, trying to get counter-focus going on lesser points. Some in these threads are thus akin to Scientologists. They'll say things to one another in private ("Of course we believe in Thetans and the absolute authority of David Miscavage"), but they won't defend the most ludicrous of their beliefs to outsiders.

    Philosophy in these threads is largely the handmaid of a very particular sectarian theology, though this is generally downplayed and compartmentalized. I bet Feser has rarely (never?) put up a post that isn't consonant with the teachings of the most conservative factions of the Catholic Church--and yet he also poses as an objective reasoner, free of emotion in advance of a question, just following the truth wherever it leads him. Quite the coincidence, then!

    Krauss's and Haldane's claim is that science is atheistic in the sense that there's no evidence that invisible minds (Thetans, demons, angels, gods) separate from bodies are active in the world or exist, and so they are never deployed as explanation for what we actually see. I tried to bring focus to what the two atheists actually said. Naturally, it then became the mission of some of the more "committed" here to change the subject.

    ReplyDelete
  134. Don't like cultic behavior, sorry.

    Another lie.

    ...many people who believe superstitious things won't say so directly or defend those superstitions directly, and so they kick up a lot of dust, bluster, and distraction, trying to get counter-focus going on lesser points.

    Another excellent summary of the Santian method!

    ReplyDelete
  135. I sometimes wish blogger had upvotes, Gottfried.

    ReplyDelete
  136. I tried to bring focus to what the two atheists actually said. Naturally, it then became the mission of some of the more "committed" here to change the subject.

    You claim to have attempted to do something, and complain that you have not succeeded in that attempt.

    Since your attempt, claim, complaint are all subsequent to the OP, we may conclude that the limit of your ineptitude is not yet in sight.

    To wit:

    1. The OP contains a link to the New Yorker opinion piece in which what the physicist Lawrence Krauss and the biologist J. S. Haldane actually said can be found.

    2. The OP also contains a link to the Public Discourse article in which the philosopher Edward Feser quotes what the physicist Lawrence Krauss and the biologist J. S. Haldane actually said.

    - - - - -

    3. On the off chance, i.e., in the unlikely event, you might be interested in other things the biologist J.S. Haldane actually said, you can consult his The Philosophy of a Biologist, in which you are sure to find (and just as sure not to comprehend):

    a) "It is usual to classify British post-Hegelian philosophy as 'idealism', in contrast with what is regarded as the 'realism' of those for whom physical interpretation stands for a final interpretation of external reality. In this sense, but in this sense only, the book may be regarded as idealistic. In a deeper sense it is, as will be seen, wholly realistic, since it treats the universe as depicted by the sciences, not as 'mere appearance', but as the real universe imperfectly depicted." (preface)

    b) "All of these sciences [i.e., psychology, biology, physical science, and mathematics] neglect elements in our experience, mathematical interpretation neglecting most, and psychological interpretation least. On the other hand mathematical or physical interpretations are far more frequently applicable in matters of detail than psychological interpretation, and in this respect are of very great importance. We can count and measure all sorts of aspects of our experience, but even when we can add a physical interpretation this by itself tells us nothing about biological significance or about values, though it may nevertheless be sufficient for many practical purposes where we do not require to see more deeply. From the standpoint of philosophy, however, the important matter is to realize that in whatever way we may approach philosophy the sciences represent reality only partially, so that their results must not be taken for more than this partial representation." (p. 64)

    c) "We have now reached the end of this outline of present-day philosophy as it appears to the writer. The general conclusions reached may be summed up in the statement that the real universe is a universe [with] its scientific aspects being only partial interpretations of it, the imperfect nature of which is revealed by philosophical criticism." (ibid)

    ReplyDelete
  137. holy shit

    I see what you guys meant when you said I was out of my depth

    - Guess who

    ReplyDelete
  138. Santi...does that mean you are not going to answer those pretty simple questions I asked? I thought it would be an easy matter to set the record straight on a few issues. Unless you mean your silence to be taken as saying you don't have answer to them. I just think it's fair to come out and lay our cards on the table either way, don't you?

    ReplyDelete
  139. ...does that mean you are not going to answer those pretty simple questions I asked?

    It's amusing that simple questions are what finally drove Santi off, but it's because they are "simple" that he can't bloviate his way around the matter they way he usually does. Try to explain forms, and he'll go off on some bizarre conspiracy theory about Aristotle being a nominalist, despite the fact that even if that were somehow true, it couldn't possibly apply to the Thomistic spirits he's denouncing at the same time out of the other side of his mouth, with self-contradictory blather about "sui generis" species and meaningless phrases like "irreducible variation" and confusing reality with language (hint: one of them is made up by people, the other isn't). If you point out that calling a view "ludicrous" is simply an expression of his personal bigotry and not an argument, he'll accuse you of evading the question, but ask him a yes or no question, and his bluff is well and truly called.

    ReplyDelete
  140. Anon comments re. Santi's method:

    " ... at the same time out of the other side of his mouth, with self-contradictory blather about "sui generis" species and meaningless phrases like 'irreducible variation' "



    Yeah, irreducible variation of what, exactly, one wishes to ask.

    But if one were to ask him that question, and eventually got a response of some kind, one would only be deluged with a torrent of ill-educated blather about Wittgenstein.

    And if I wanted real instruction on Wittgenstein, I would have taken classes in analytic philosophy and studied The Philosophical Investigations, which I did.

    But if I did instead want another torrent of ignorant blather, this time on Wittgenstein, I would revisit Santi's blog, which I won't.

    So that kind of ends it where you left off, doesn't it.

    ReplyDelete
  141. I'm flattered that some of you think I invented the idea of irreducible variation, but it actually goes back to Alfred Kinsey, the taxonomist of sex research fame (and obviously applicable to sexual variation along a continuum).

    And here's Harvard biologist Stephen Gould deploying the idea: "[A]ll evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence," and, "Species must be defined as ranges of irreducible variation." These quotes come from two separate essays by Gould.

    Creationists like Dembski implicitly oppose irreducible variation with a counter-term: "irreducible complexity."

    So instead of going around like a Thomist saying of things: "This is...", and deriving best use from this definition, evolution ought to inform you to go around saying, "This could be..." That's how natural selection "thinks." "These breasts could be used for sexual signalling, this clitoris could be a pair-bonding device for females of the tribe."

    The world opens up its possibilities when you stop defining a thing in one way, and say, "This could be..." Seeing the world as consisting of irreducible variations means seeing them with fresh eyes; the eyes of poetry, particularity, evolution.

    ReplyDelete
  142. Until a meaning is given to a term, the term is literally meaningless. Saying that others have used the term before you says nothing about what the term is supposed to mean.

    Btw,

    1. Just before the second quote, Gould writes, "Variation is primary; essenses are illusory." So when he wrote, "[A]ll evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence," did he mean to say that variation itself is nature's only irreducible illusion?

    2. You forgot to say, explicitly, "There's glory for you."

    ReplyDelete
  143. That was moi (mistakenly posting under 'Anonymous').

    ReplyDelete
  144. "'When I use a word,' Sampti Tampti said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what Alfred Kinsey chooses it to mean—neither more nor less.'"

    ReplyDelete
  145. "The world opens up its possibilities when you stop defining a thing in one way, and say, "This could be..." Seeing the world as consisting of irreducible variations means seeing them with fresh eyes; the eyes of poetry, particularity, evolution."

    Only problem in this way the only world you open is nonsense and muddle-headed discourse.

    You can always say a knife "could be used as a drink in the morning"... and yes you could if you melt the e metal or plastic and drink it... but obviously doing such thing has nothing to do with the purpose the knife was built in the factory, nor does add any insight, rather it only invites confusion and nonsense.

    Also you completely misunderstand the Thomist point. Just because he Thomist asserts that something has a, for example, a specific purpose, this does not entail that somethinf could be used for very different purposes.

    ---


    "Don't like cultic behavior, sorry. The focus lost here is that many people who believe superstitious things won't say so directly or defend those superstitions directly, and so they kick up a lot of dust, bluster, and distraction, trying to get counter-focus going on lesser points. Some in these threads are thus akin to Scientologists. They'll say things to one another in private ("Of course we believe in Thetans and the absolute authority of David Miscavage"), but they won't defend the most ludicrous of their beliefs to outsiders.

    Philosophy in these threads is largely the handmaid of a very particular sectarian theology, though this is generally downplayed and compartmentalized. I bet Feser has rarely (never?) put up a post that isn't consonant with the teachings of the most conservative factions of the Catholic Church--and yet he also poses as an objective reasoner, free of emotion in advance of a question, just following the truth wherever it leads him. Quite the coincidence, then!

    Krauss's and Haldane's claim is that science is atheistic in the sense that there's no evidence that invisible minds (Thetans, demons, angels, gods) separate from bodies are active in the world or exist, and so they are never deployed as explanation for what we actually see. I tried to bring focus to what the two atheists actually said. Naturally, it then became the mission of some of the more "committed" here to change the subject. "

    Ironic as Krauss is probably more of a superstitious cultist than some pagan new age on drugs.

    His superstition is scientism and that blinds him from reality... and the fanatic behavior of new atheists rivals that of suicide cults, I would say.

    Moreover you are basically being an hypocrite. The "philosophy" (hahah! hard to keep a straight face) posta in blogs like those of Krauss or Carroll or Pigliucci ALSO reflect mostly only THEIR point of view?

    Obviously if you support a point of view, you are going also trying to prove it.

    I mean Sean Carroll even wants to do away with the most fundamental tenet of science, empirical proof, because most his research cannot be falsified and is meaningless. (and more than one physicist called bullshit on that)

    ReplyDelete
  146. Quakers accept also 'that of God in every one', the implication always being that God really exists.

    ReplyDelete
  147. Interesting that mathematics has accepted that it cannot know everything for some time. Theorem: In any self consistent system of mathematics there exist some true theorems that cannot be proven. (this is a slight popularization of the actual theorem). We know this to be true. Science can't accept the same limitation, it seems.

    ReplyDelete