‘Gaza must become a place where no human being can exist…’ —Major General Giora Eiland, Israel Defense Forces
He neglected to add that it’s a place that few human beings can escape, either. The obvious answer to the question, “Was there anywhere safe to go?” was always “no.” The real question is why people who knew that, and planned for it, ordered people into danger anyway. But they did.
No one to play soldier now, no one to pretend
–Metallica, “Disposable Heroes”
Having read maybe scores of articles on the ongoing disaster in Israel and Palestine, I want to hold off indefinitely on offering up any commentary, and restrict any posts I write to news items with distinctive informational value, particularly items describing events that are not being reported in the mainstream media. These two are from +972 Magazine, “an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.” Continue reading
I posted this on my Facebook page this past Tuesday (slightly reworded here). It’ll be my last post on October 7 here at PoT as well, at least for awhile. I’d prefer to take some time and process the event before I say very much more.
I’m getting off of Facebook for awhile. It’s a cesspool at the moment, and I’m sick of it.
Just to clarify my own views before anyone decides to put any in my mouth while I’m gone: I do not accept the legitimacy of the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel. I believe in a right of self-defense and of resistance, but I don’t regard this attack as an instance of those things. I know enough about suicidal behavior to recognize it when I see it. This is an enactment of murder-suicide. It’s not liberation. There is nothing here to valorize. If you feel differently, feel free. But don’t expect my support. It’s not forthcoming. Continue reading
Pleasure itself is good. In particular, (a) if X has a pleasant or enjoyable experience, this is inherently good for X in that it is part of (not just something that promotes) X’s well-being and (b) X’s pleasant or enjoyable experience is inherently or non-instrumentally good or valuable to X (the experience is non-instrumentally agent-relatively valuable). Though we do not typically make the distinction between [a] and [b] clear, it can be teased out from a competent language-user.
Continue readingThis morning’s Hamas attack on southern Israel is being portrayed, predictably, as an initiatory act of aggression by Hamas, and a total bolt from the blue. It’s no such thing. The situation in Gaza has been decades in the making. Israel conquered Gaza in an act of aggression in 1967, occupied it, settled it, de-developed it, then abandoned its settlements there, falsely to proclaim its occupation of Gaza to have ended. Since then Israel has besieged Gaza, bombed it, raided it, and murdered and maimed its inhabitants at will. No one should venture comment on the situation in Gaza without engaging with the authoritative work of writers like Amira Haas, Sara Roy, and Norman Finkelstein, of human rights organizations like B’Tselem, or before viewing films like “Tears of Gaza,” which depicts ordinary life there. And this is to set aside the treatment of Golan, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Continue reading
I was saddened to read of the passing of Fr. David Burrell, CSC, Hesburgh Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He passed away on Sunday, October 1st. I knew Fr. Burrell when I was a grad student at Notre Dame in the 1990s, but regrettably never took a class with him, and have only recently–decades after the fact–come to understand and appreciate his work. Continue reading
If I say that a state of affairs, S, is good (good simpliciter or agent-neutrally valuable or good), I usually mean something like this: S is better than some implied comparison class of other states of affairs. And so, in this usage, ‘good’ is like ‘tall’: it is a disguised comparative feature, not a non-comparative feature. This kind of value, then, is properly analyzed in terms of better-than. It is for this kind of reason that many theorists take value simpliciter (or other sorts of value or all sorts of value) to be properly analyzed in terms of better-than. Here’s why that seems wrong to me.
If I’ve accomplished nothing else in this series (previous post here), I hope to have somewhat dispersed the intimidating air that surrounds both Putnam’s model-theoretic argument and the current discussion of Newman’s objection. This air has two sources, I think.
First, both arguments make heavy use of formal model theory. Formal logic, model theory, and especially metatheory are imposing bodies of technical knowledge. They are mathematical. Most philosophers are only minimally acquainted with them. Most graduate programs in philosophy today no longer require students to take metatheory, and even in the old days, the requirement was generally limited to a single course. I would imagine that over ninety-five percent of professional philosophers today could not tell you off the top of their heads what the Löwenheim–Skolem theorems even say. The point is that when people like Hilary Putnam and Michael Friedman start talking about Shoenfield absoluteness and ω-models, nearly all their listeners know they can’t talk to them as equals on that subject.
Continue readingIt’s now time for me to make a small confession, which is that I don’t care very much really about Hilary Putnam’s late-career misadventures with “internalism.” When I first went off to philosophy grad school many long years ago, Reason, Truth, and History was still relatively new and much talked about. I obtained a copy, but I could never get past chapter one. His arguments entailed certain claims that seemed to be just too obviously wrong. They still seem so to me now, and I have emphasized them in previous posts in this series. One is that a brain in a vat would not be able to think about whether it was a brain in a vat, even though the phenomenology of its thoughts would be identical to that of a normal, embodied person thinking (apparently) about being a brain in a vat. That entails that the brain in a vat has no idea what it is thinking about outside its own mind—and by the same token that neither do we. Another is that no natural relation, whether causation or anything else, can determine the referents of our thoughts and percepts, so that—assuming we reject “Platonism”—we have to admit that our thoughts and percepts do not have mind-independent referents. As I say, these claims seemed obviously false, even silly. Neither did it seem like the best use of time to delve deeply into Putnam’s reasoning and try to sort out what was wrong.
On the other hand, I do care about structural realism, which I have come to think is true but which has been bedeviled in recent decades by an argument essentially similar to Putnam’s model-theoretic argument. It has been to better understand and reply to the argument against structural realism that I have at long last performed the examination of Putnam’s model-theoretic argument presented in the previous posts in this series.
In the present post, I explain the argument against structural realism—which by now can be seen in fact to present no great difficulty—and comment briefly on the abysmal state of current discussion of structural realism. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To return to the third post in the series, click here. To skip to the fifth and final post, click here.)
Continue reading
Policy of Truth 