Linkfest

-- This is amazing. It is the oldest piece of music known, dating from about 1400 BC. Obviously there is a lot of interpretation since it wasn't written in our musical notation, but it's still incredible. I'm linking to it instead of embedding it because you need to read the comments section.

-- I've written before about the book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by philosopher David Benatar. I've always asked, jokingly, "Did he dedicate it to his parents?" Well, a new article in the New Yorker reveals that he actually did. Bill Vallicella comments on Benatar's position, called anti-natalism, and actually points (here and here) to Christian anti-natalism: that is, that the Christian position should be to not bring any more people into existence.

-- "Flows of 'water' on Mars may actually be sand, new study reveals". I thought we already knew this. At least, I remember linking to a study that suggested it, but I can't find the post now, so it may have been on another blog.

-- The inestimable Edward Feser reviews the inestimable Daniel Dennett's most recent book, the inestimable From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Feser's review is entitled One Long Circular Argument. It begins thus:

How do you get blood from a stone? Easy. Start by redefining “blood” to mean “a variety of stone.” Next, maintaining as straight a face as possible, dramatically expound upon some trivial respect in which stone is similar to blood. For example, describe how, when a red stone is pulverized and stirred into water, the resulting mixture looks sort of like blood. Condescendingly roll your eyes at your incredulous listener’s insistence that there are other and more important respects in which stone and blood are dissimilar. Accuse him of obscurantism and bad faith. Finally, wax erudite about the latest research in mineralogy, insinuating that it somehow shows that to reject your thesis is to reject Science Itself. 

Of course, no one would be fooled by so farcical a procedure. But substitute “mind” for “blood” and “matter” for “stone,” and you have the recipe for Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back.

I haven't read the book yet, but that description sums up Dennett's whole oeuvre so well it's a little disturbing.

-- J.R. Lucas, "The Gödelian Argument: Turn Over the Page", Etica e Politica 5/1 (2003).

-- Peter van Inwagen, "The Compatibility of Darwinism and Design", in Neil A. Manson, ed., God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 2003).

-- Ted Chiang, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", Subterranean Press (this last one is science-fiction, if you're wondering).

Nazi philosophy

Martin Heidegger has long been accused of being too cozy with the Nazis. Somewhat understandably, as he was one -- at least he joined the Nazi party in Germany in the lead-up to World War 2. His apologists have argued that this was an act of prudence on his part rather than allegiance. However, some of his previously unpublished notes have just been published, and they apparently paint a very negative picture (via Bill Vallicella). Heidegger seems to have been really committed to the Nazi cause, and he saw his philosophy as an expression of it. This is, at the very least, extremely embarrassing for those who have embraced Heidegger's positions without any awareness of its (apparently, allegedly) deep connections to Nazism.

R.I.P.

Peter Geach has passed away. He was one of the great philosophers of the last 100 years. He almost made it to 100 himself. Bill Vallicella comments here and here.

Nagel commentary

There are a lot of commentaries on Thomas Nagel's latest book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. This has led to the meta-phenomenon of commentaries on the commentaries. I suggest you check out those of Edward Feser and Bill Vallicella. Yes, it's worth it.

Oh joy!

Via Maverick Philosopher, I have just discovered the website of philosopher Andrew M. Bailey. Bailey is collecting all of the articles and book reviews of certain philosophers to make them available to everyone. One of his collections is nearly every publication of Alvin Plantinga. Another is the same of Peter van Inwagen. Another is David Lewis, which is exciting since I've always felt the need to have a more intimate knowledge of his philosophy. I might even put these links on the sidebar. So, much thanks to Bailey.

On learning from our betters

Bill Vallicella has an interesting post that touches on, among other things, the aversion some analytic philosophers have to the history of philosophy. I've never understood this aversion. Doesn't common sense and basic humility suggest that if you want to explore a subject this should involve looking at what other people thought about it -- people who a) were smarter than you and b) did not share your cultural biases and habitual thought patterns? Yet this doesn't seem to occur to some (or persuade them if it does). Gilbert Harman, one of the best philosophers around, allegedly had a sign on his office door that said, "History of philosophy: just say no!" I simply don't understand this attitude. It reminds me of a wonderful Orson Scott Card short story, "Unaccompanied Sonata", where a child is determined to have great musical talent, and so is whisked away to his own private house to compose music in complete isolation from the deep history of music, only ever hearing what he himself composes. That way his music would not be tainted by, for example, Bach or Massenet or whoever. It was more important for his music to be original than for it to be good. Personally, I'd rather produce music that's good and philosophy that's true. And if I have to give up originality to accomplish this, it doesn't strike me as a particularly grave sacrifice.

Do the laws of logic prove that God exists?

Interesting post by Bill Vallicella, which comments on an article, "The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic". You could make a similar argument from mathematics. Vallicella concludes that the argument does not command assent, although it is certainly suggestive.

Critiques of critiques

Regarding Thomas Nagel's recent book Mind and Cosmos, you can read favorable reviews by Alvin Plantinga and Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher). You can also read a negative review by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg. But then the Leiter/Weisberg review received several negative reviews itself.  See the Neuro Times, Ed Feser, and Keith Burgess-Jackson. There is also a short comment by Vallicella.

Meanwhile, Vallicella also critiques the book Soul Dust: The Magic of Conscious by Nicholas Humphrey. Humphrey suggests that consciousness is an illusion, which Vallicella rightly points out is incoherent: who is having the illusion? It reminds me of a passage in A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis as he reflects on the death of his wife:

If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared. 

But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? Bankruptcy declared to whom? To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms. I will never believe -- more strictly I can’t believe -- that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.

Vallicella also points to Peter Strawson's critique of same, but then critiques Strawson's critique.

Update (1 March): KBJ points to another critique of Mind and Cosmos, a negative review that is, unlike the Leiter/Weisberg review, "well-written, thoughtful, respectful".

On libertarianism (not the political one)

The Maverick Philosopher (William Vallicella) has some interesting posts on free will. Start here where he states categorically that he believes in libertarian free will. I strongly agree with this as I don't see how one can deny libertarian free will without falling into self-defeat. He links to another post here where he takes down a pseudo-philosopher who tries to argue against free will, which in turn leads to a companion post on neuroscience and free will here. That then links to an excellent article by Alfred R. Mele, "Free Will: Action Theory Meets Neuroscience". Returning then to his original post, Vallicella links to yet another post where he points out that it's incoherent to say that free will, moral responsibility, and consciousness are illusions. (On the latter, if consciousness is an illusion, who is having the illusion? An illusion is an illusion to a consciousness) And finally he also links in the original post to another take-down of the pseudo-philosopher here.

And just in case that's not enough for you, read Ted Chiang's brilliant short (one page) story "What's Expected of Us".

Fressellian logic and why anything exists

We start our journey here where Bill Vallicella, aka Maverick Philosopher, characterizes seven possible responses to Leibniz's question why does anything exist rather than nothing? A very interesting post in its own right and highly recommended. Then he followed up on that post with another regarding one of the positions, rejectionism, which is the view that the question is nonsensical. The main question of that post is whether Wittgenstein, who "was struck with wonder at the sheer existence of things" was paradoxically a rejectionist. Embedded in that post, however, was a challenge: "translate 'Something exists' into standard logical notion [I think he means notation]. You will discover that it cannot be done." The standard logic Vallicella's talking about is the combination of Frege and Russell which he calls Fressellian logic, standard first-order predicate logic with identity. According to this logic, existence = instantiation. His argument -- his challenge rather -- is to ask, what exactly is the property being instantiated when something exists?

The challenge was then accepted by David Brightly at Tilly and Lola. Here is his reply:

And as a Fressellian I accept the challenge. That property is Individual aka Object, the concept at the root of the Porphyrean tree. We can say 'Something exists' with ∃x.Object(x), ie, there is at least one object. Likewise ∀x.Object(x) (which is always true, even when the box is empty) says 'Everything exists' and its negation (which is always false) says 'Some thing is not an object'. But both these last are unenlightening---because always true and always false, respectively, they convey no information, make no distinction, are powerless to change us.

Then Vallicella responds again in yet another post summarizing his objection wonderfully, and then going over Brightly's response, and his counter-response. He demonstrates, to my (untrained, non-Fressellian) satisfaction that "Something identical with itself is a man" does not mean the same thing as "A man exists", and substituting Brightly's "Individual aka Object" for "Something identical with itself" does not seem to solve the problem. However, this is not my field so I'll just conclude by saying I think something exists.

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Vallicella on Plantinga on Science and Religion

Bill Vallicella has been reading Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism and posting reviews of it chapter by chapter. Here are the links so far; I'll update this post as more are forthcoming.

Notes on the Preface
Notes on Chapter One
Plantinga versus Dawkins: Organized Complexity

Updates:
Can God Break a Law of Nature?

(cross-posted at Quodlibeta)

Eliminating Reductivism

Bill Vallicella has a couple of great posts on the attempt to avoid eliminative materialism while still maintaining a reductive materialist stance. His first post engages Jaegwon Kim's Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, a book I desperately want to read, and his second post clarifies some issues. Good stuff.

Pessimism and Aphorism

Maverick Philosopher analyzes some aphorisms of Emil Cioran. I would offer Cioran more grace with regards to their consistency: to be consistent is to be systematic and to demand that aphorisms be systematic is to demand a standard they are not usually trying to meet. It's hard enough to be systematic when you're writing a systematic work. Plus, if you're trying to point to the absurdity of life, as Cioran is, consistency may not be a high priority. Nevertheless, I agree that you can point to the inconsistencies and recognize them as such, I just don't think it makes him "an unserious literary scribbler".

I'm very glad I encountered God before I encountered Cioran (or Schopenhauer). I'm naturally pessimistic, so philosophical pessimism would have ensnared me. My soul yearns, my heart cries out ... for non-existence. As Cioran puts it, "Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?" An image I've carried with me since I was a teenager is that I want to vomit myself up. I want to vomit until there's nothing and no one left. Of course, this is contradictory (thank God): I have to exist to vomit, so there would always be a core being that remains.

I doubt I would have realized this if I had encountered philosophical pessimism before Christ. But Christianity explains it perfectly. "So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God -- through Jesus Christ our Lord!" A part of me wants to say I don't want to do good, that's the problem -- but then why is it a problem? There's a part of me, however small you want to make it, that recognizes it's a problem, that wants to do good; and it is this part of me that rebels against who I am and what I do and wants to vomit it up, exterminate it. That part of me wants to do good, wants to be holy. Pessimism says that since a part of me -- perhaps a large part of me -- is enmired in sin, evil, absurdity, that all of me must be. But if all of me is so enmired, what's the part of me that recognizes it for what it is and rebels against it? As Maverick Philosopher writes, "Cioran's thought undermines the very possibility of its own expression. That can't be good."

Pessimism is too simple; it views the situation as univocal when it is really a duality. But that shouldn't be too surprising: reality is often more complicated than how we would like it to be.

Time, Eternity, and Meaning

Great post by Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) on meaning and the passage of time in light of Nietzsche and Boethius. This part really got me:

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

This is very similar to the overall idea behind my ongoing attempt at writing a science-fiction novel, Kalypso's Envy. I haven't yet reached the point where I explain the title, but when I do it will make a very similar point to Vallicella's.

Update (April 3): I thought about this issue again recently. My son and I started walking around a restaurant near our apartment, and we did it over and over again. More to the point, my son wanted to do it exactly the same way each time: he held my hand while walking up the stairs at a particular point, would run halfway around the restaurant (which is round), then sat down on a curb. I sat next to him, he'd drape his arm over my leg, then jump up and run down a ramp, then around to where we started. Over and over. It occurred to me that by repeating the experience, he was trying to capture it in a way that experiences cannot be captured in time. He was trying to relive the experience, even though after reliving it, it would be gone once more. Indeed, this may be the motive behind the battle cry of the child: "Again!" I don't want the experience to be over, I want to continue experiencing it, I want to capture it, contain it, and keep it. So perhaps we are aware of the "temporal diaspora" as soon as we are able to think.

Then this got me thinking about rituals. In repeating certain things, we are participating, so we think, in something eternal, something which does not end. But we do not capture the experience, the experience captures us. Thus the temporal is subsumed into the eternal.

But that's not the whole story, since many rituals are repetitions of past events. Jewish Passover or Christian Communion are repeating events that took place at a particular place at a particular time. So how does this involve eternity? Perhaps it does not. But perhaps the original events were expressions of something eternal, and the repetitions are further participations in that eternal event. Passover is not just a meal repeating an earlier meal, it is repeating a meal that symbolizes the ancient Hebrews' emancipation. Communion, or the Lord's Supper , is not just repeating the Last Supper Jesus ate with his apostles. It symbolizes Christ's death, the bread and wine becoming, in some sense, his broken body and spilled blood: in Communion, the Christian participates in Christ's atoning death. Jesus died at a particular place at a particular time. Yet he is also "the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world". So time weaves itself into eternity -- and vice-versa -- in interesting ways.

Linkfest

-- Further steps towards curing cancer.

-- I remember claims in 2003 that Iraq may have sent WMDs and other material to Syria, but there is apparently a new chorus suggesting there is some evidence supporting it. Via Patterico.

-- More on private business in space.

-- This is just heartbreaking. A disturbingly large number of couples who go through incredible difficulties trying to get pregnant and are eventually successful with in-vitro fertilization, end up aborting the babies for "social reasons".

-- I hadn't heard this song in years, but after listening to it again I remembered something I thought about it when it was popular: the guitar solo is one of the clearest expressions of hell I've ever heard. I don't mean that it's a bad solo at all, I mean it expresses in audible form what I think a damned soul would feel.

-- Japan is testing a solar sail to see if a spacecraft can be propelled by the sun's rays. Photos at the link. Also, Japan's spaceship that landed on an asteroid several years ago, took samples, and then had difficulty returning to Earth ... has returned to Earth. Very cool.

-- The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that Afghanistan has immense mineral resources, trillions of dollars worth. I think this is a very good thing: the Afghanistan economy is based on non-perishable crops like opium, because they lack the infrastructure to make farming perishable goods profitable. This discovery would give them the ability to be economically independent, which in turn would give them the ability to be militarily independent. Of course, it will be years before the benefits will be realized, and there will undoubtedly be the danger of corruption.

-- Bill Vallicella has some great posts on Nietzsche of late. Start here, then go here, and then here. The latter post is only incidentally about Nietzsche, as it deals with a silly misconception of the Imago Dei doctrine, and two of the posts deal with the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief. And if you still need some more, read this.