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 readingApocalypse Now
This 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
Fr. David B. Burrell, CSC (1933-2023), RIP
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
genuinely non-comparative goodness
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.
Conclusion: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 5
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 readingStructural Realism and Newman’s Objection: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 4
It’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“It’s OK to Be Gay”: Hamtramck and the Jihad for Gay Pride
This Washington Post article tells the story of a betrayal–a double betrayal, really. The first betrayal is the one mentioned in the article itself. The Muslims of Hamtramck, Michigan accepted the generosity and hospitality of pro-immigrant activists, including Pride activists, then stabbed them in the back.
In June, after divisive debate, the six-member council blocked the display of Pride flags on city property — action that has angered allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, who feel that the support they provided the immigrant groups has been reciprocated with betrayal.
“We welcomed you,” former council member Catrina Stackpoole, a retired social worker who identifies as gay, recalls telling the council this summer. “We created nonprofits to help feed, clothe, find housing. We did everything we could to make your transition here easier, and this is how you repay us, by stabbing us in the back?”
That betrayal is obvious. The other one is harder to see, but just as real. The Muslims of Hamtramck have not only betrayed their neighbors but their co-religionists: Muslims abroad fighting for gay rights and pride. Continue reading
The Status of the Model-Theoretic Argument: Three Arguments against Reference, Part 3
The previous post in this series presented Hilary Putnam’s “model-theoretic argument” to the effect that no representational system whatsoever, including natural language and mental states such as thoughts and percepts, can refer to anything definite unless the assignment is made externally by an agent outside the representational system or “Platonically” by means of some non-natural access to the domain of reference. For example, the little airplane icons on an air traffic controller’s screen can be assigned to specific planes because one can see both the icons and the planes—sometimes just by looking out of the control tower window—to map the icons to the planes. But when it comes to thought and perception, we have no such independent access to the intended referents. How in that case is any determinate mapping possible? Putnam’s claim, which the model-theoretic argument is intended to establish, is that, barring some “Platonic” cognitive channel to external reality that cannot be explained by natural science, no determinate mapping is possible. Therefore, our thoughts and percepts have no truth conditions that depend on the mind-independent world being any one way rather than any other. This is what Putnam calls “internal realism.”
In the present post, we critically examine the model-theoretic argument. (The whole paper on which these posts are based is available here. To advance to the next post in the series, click here.)
Continue readingThe Lessons of 9/11: Twenty-Two Years Later
I post this every year around 9/11 (have done so since 2014), so here it is again with some revisions. I seem to have neglected to post it last year, and have not yet had the chance to add anything specific to the Ukraine War or proxy war more generally. But some of the implications should be obvious enough.
Today is the twenty-second anniversary of 9/11. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned from two decades of perpetual warfare. I offer them somewhat dogmatically, as a mere laundry list (mostly) minus examples, but I have a feeling that the lessons will ring true enough for many people, and that most readers can supply appropriate examples of their own.
Continue reading“Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: Philippa Foot and Ayn Rand”
The latest issue of Reason Papers is out, vol. 43:2/Fall 2023, featuring a symposium on “Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: Philippa Foot and Ayn Rand.” Participants include Aeon Skoble (Bridgewater State University). Douglas Rasmussen (Emeritus, St. John’s University), Douglas Den Uyl (Liberty Fund), Tristan de Liège, and Timothy Sandefur (Goldwater Institute). The issue also includes the latest installment of Gary Jason’s series on political films, discussing D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
The symposium topic is particularly timely, given the recent publication of three books on closely related themes: Benjamin Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something (discussing Foot alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgely), Claire Mac Cumhail and Rachael Wiseman’s Metaphysical Animals (discussing the same four philosophers), and Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries (discussing Rand alongside Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil). No Foot-Rand comparisons there, however. As it happens, the Foot-Rand parallel hit me during my first week of graduate school about three decades ago; I wrote my first paper in grad school on Foot and Rand on morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. Mercifully, the paper has long since been lost. I’m glad that competent philosophers are now pursuing the topic.
Hats off to editor Shawn Klein (Arizona State) for his hard work on the issue.
