Scottish Nous

Breaking Headlines: Scottish Nous Mentioned On Front Page of National Newspaper

The title is a bit of hyperbole, but I'm nevertheless linked to by the Washington Post!  Wowsers!  Granted, it's an automated link feed from Technorati rather than intentional inclusion by an intelligent agent, but it's still damn cool.

Be Part Of The Cause Of My Suffering

This is a self-referring link, which refers to its self-referringness, to my donation page.  I am still accepting donations for the 2005 Race for the Cure.  If you click that link, you can see that I'm 83% of the way towards my soft "goal".  It's a "soft" goal because, if it's met, I'll just up it.  In fact, I've already tripled it thanks to generous philosophers.  Now let me give you three good reasons to spare five bucks.

First, your $5 could make breasts everywhere happy!  That's a great reason in itself.  But in addition, you would be partly responsible for me having to wake up at 5 am Sunday morning.  This is not the only way in which I will suffer.  I will likely be experiencing much pain during, and after, the 5K run.  My joints don't take this sort of abuse anymore.  You know you want to be part of the cause of my suffering.  Lastly, if you don't like to be part of the cause of other people's pain,  let me appeal to your good character in an attempt to coerce (or persuade) you to donate.  That is, let me use your goodness as a weapon against you.  Since you're a good and virtuous person, you wouldn't mind parting with just one beer this weekend for a good cause now, would you?

Piscean Spongiform Encephalopathy

Here's some more anecdotal evidence for vegetarianism.  I'm currently something like a 75% vegetarian.  I will never give up fish, and I'll not sure I'll ever be able to give up milk either.  The linked article mentions milk, so I'll send you to this interesting article on the "wholesomeness" of milk if you want to follow up.  Within the year, I expect to transition to a 100% lacto-ovo-piscean pseudo-vegetarian.  This switch will not suffice to relieve all my moral distress, but part of being human may involve learning to cope with one's immorality.  I'm speculating wildly here, but this could be a major function of the the Christ-belief.  If you're a religious studies student, that would make a good paper topic.  [Hat tip to fellow graduate student Julie for the first linked article.]

Dread Pirate Roberts

As I argued here, Roberts' confirmation is unacceptable.  The decision came the day after the first black, female federal judge, Constance Baker Motley, died.  Only twenty-two Democrats opposed the decision to confirm - a clear indication that both the Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are morally depraved and intellectualy incompetent.  The Cliffs of Insanity have been scaled and we can only hope that we will not, in the next several decades, be plunged into the Pit of Despair by a Rodent of Unusual Size.  Right now, it's anybody's guess.

Efficacious Raw Feels

I would please like to kill the next epiphenomenalist who tells me I haven't spent the past two hours writhing in pain and unable to sleep because my mental states, in particular my sensations of pain due to a terribly upset stomach, have been causing me to writhe about in misery.  That is all for now.

The Lord Helps Those Who Help Themselves

.. by helping speed freaks get their tweak on.  Newsday reports on Ashley Smith's confession to supplying Brian Nichols, the alleged rapist who took her hostage after going on a shooting spree, with crystal meth:

Ashley Smith, the woman who says she persuaded suspected courthouse gunman Brian Nichols to release her by talking about her faith [in God], discloses in a new book that she gave him methamphetamine during the hostage ordeal.

Another excerpt from the article:

She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying, "Let go and let God."

Ashley Smith now claims to be drug free.  For her daughter's sake, one hopes that's the case.  For her sake, too, since it appears that divine intervention is bad for Smith's health. [Via Majikthise]

Full Triple Rainbow

This is a terrible picture, but it was taken in the rain with my cell phone.  This picture does not confirm that the there was a triple rainbow, nor that it was full, but it's the best I could do on short notice.  Just as the department team lost our soccer game (in which I scored a goal for the opposing side) a freak storm came up with 50+ MPH wind gusts.  The sun was beginning to set over the Flatirons, so all the conditions save my location conspired perfectly to yield at least three pots of gold.  See?  I told you I had a sensitive side.  One can appreciate the probability calculus as well as nature.  And the same Bob Pasnau mentioned here scored our one goal on a flawless assist by David Barnett.  We graduate students, however, managed to prove quite worthless.

Presupposing One's Conclusion II

I have modified my anti-Alston argument posted here.  I would prefer it if you didn't read the previous argument, since one or more of my points were wildly false.  But the argument has survived perusal in a slightly different form.  I present the revised version below the fold.  If this new argument is mistaken, it is not nearly so mistaken as the previous version, and I'm just as happy with the conclusion.  While I take full credit for any errors in the argument, I also take full credit for fixing the argument, since absolutely nobody has commented (either in person on or my blog) on it to date.

O'Callaghan on Pasnau on The Evil Angelic Doctor

In his JHP (vol. 42:(1) 2004) book review [.pdf .html] of Bob Pasnau's Thomas Aquinas On Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae Ia 75-89, John O'Callaghan has nothing nice to say.  It is convienent for O'Callaghan to be publishing his quite literally snide comments (I mean to emphasize that this is no exaggeration) in a forum that fails to admit of the possibility for response, since I suspect that Pasnau would be quite capable of making several devastaing rebuttals to what amounts almost wholly to a ridiculous critique of Pasnau's methodology.  It is perhaps unbecoming for young philosophers, myself included, to dwell upon methodological considerations, but insult is added to self-injury when a professor makes bizarre methodological statements.  At the risk of speaking out of place, I will offer my opinon on matters methodological.  Consider the conclusion of O'Callaghan's review:

Unless one is going to take seriously the actual writings of historical figures as real interlocutors, it is difficult to see what the philosophical point of studying them is.

The obvious implication which, upon pain of equivocation, O'Callaghan is committed to, is that Pasnau does not take Aquinas seriously as a "real interloctur".   Whatever that means.  You might think that writing a book on Aquinas, and of the sort Pasnaus has written (more on this later), is evidence that one considers Aquinas to be a "real interloctur".  After all, the purpose of Pasnau's book was not to refute Aquinas, but rather to extract his arguments, consider their merits, refine them when he felt it necessary, and so on and so forth.  If completing a careful study of famous historical philosopher, however infused with criticism the study may be, is not evidence that one considers that philosopher to be a "real interlocutor", I don't know what is. 

This raises the question of just what it means to consider someone a "real interlocutor". Unfortunately, O'Callaghan doesn't tell us with respect to what (or who) we are obliged to consider Aquinas a "real interlocutor".  Now I think it may be inferred that O'Callaghan's undefended and indefensible assertion presupposes that religious philosophers like Aquinas are to be interpeted in a purely theological context.  That is, O'Callaghan assumes that one does not consider them as "real interlocturs" if one seperates their purely philosophical arguments from their theological perspective.  Not only does this run the risk of making Aquinas somewhat irrelevant, but it is,  obviously, only one method of interpreting and making use of Aquinas.  There are contemporary philosophers who read and love the history of philosophy, myself included, for the ideas and philosophical arguments propounded by these geniuses, and these arguments qua philosophical arguments can be interpreted and evaluated for the merits they possess - theological baggage and metaphysical excess set aside.  In so far as one is interested only in their philosophical arguments, what could be wrong with this?

No doubt the previous methodology may, when applied to a historical philosopher, yield an interpretation of that philosopher's views which he would renounce, but this hardly means that there is no philosophical point to studying the philosopher in question.  It matters not why Aquinas would reject Pasnau's interpretation or the conclusions Pasnau takes Aquinas to be committed to through entailment or whether Aquinas would agree with what Pasnau argues he should have concluded, etc...   All that matters is that the philosopher is being taken seriously as a philosophical interlocutor.  That he is perhaps not taken seriously as a religio-philosophical interlocutor is hardly a slight against Pasnau, if that is indeed the case.  Given Pasnau's interaction with Aquinas and his arguments, it is patently absurd to imply that Pasnau has not taking Aquinas seriously as a philosophical interlocutor, and therefore, as a "real interlocutor".  Whatever the vehemently Catholic O'Callaghan wishes Pasnau had written or how he put Aquinas to use is clearly not germane to a review of Pasnau's book.

The genesis of all the most central philosophical considerations can be found in philosophical history.  Unless one is deeply involved in the study of logic, there is perhaps not a single central topic of philosophy an insightful though incomplete elucidation of which cannot be found by reading Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, et. al.  Some philosophers spend their careers wading through controversy in an attempt to draw out the views the philosophers actually held.  Others work in historical isolation on the views they should have held.  And still more work at the intersection.   If one is not an O'Callaghan, all of these pursuits are worthwhile.  If O'Callaghan wants to consider Aquinas solely in his theological context, he's welcome to do so, and one may hope that O'Callaghan will be succesful enough to write a book which receives the APA Book Prize, as Pasnau's did this year, but the attempt to force a methodology on Pasnau which it appears he didn't even intend to employ only betrays O'Callaghan's prejudice. 

It would have been appropriate for O'Callaghan to try and find something nice to say about Pasnau's recent book, but for those who have drawn their lines and long since donned the religious battle dress, even a mere token expression of respect may be psychologically beyond one's ability to muster up.  I would perhaps be prudent to note these prejudices before farming out book reviews.  It is no wonder that Pasnau was able to rile O'Callaghan.  From Mirror of Justice:

One may not do evil, but one may tolerate it to avoid a greater evil. Support for a candidate in favor of the death penalty does not as such involve the toleration of evil. Support for a candidate in favor of abortion does. The burden of proof is upon the one who urges us to tolerate evil. -John O'Callaghan

After all, Pasnau might even be guilty of blasphemy when he proposed that The Angelic Doctor was committed to approving of evil.

Entailment?: Libertarianism --> Backwards Causation

I find this principle, a close variant of William Hasker's, to be exceedingly plausible:

If S can cause it to be the case that p, and p entails q, but q is contingently false, then S can cause it to be the case that q (is true).

But if you accept a libertarian account of free agency and this principle, then you look to be committed to some sort of backwards causation.  Now a libertarian account of free agency is very commensensical, and this principle appears to be intuitively obvious, but backwards causation is (I think) not intuitively plausible.  (My intuitions may be corrupted.)  So we have something of a dilemma.

I think there may be a way out of this problem, however.  I don't intend to flesh this out in detail now, but I'll gesture in the direction of a solution.  (So I felt guilty after my last post and decided to throw up something more serious before returning to my paper.  Sue me.)  There are two ideas I can see that one might have.  First, you could think that there are different kinds of backwards causation, and this kind, which has to do only with the truth values of propositions, is relatively benign.  Or you might think the following.  Let past tense propositions be made true by present tense facts about what was the case.  Similarly, let future tense propositions be made true by present tense facts about what will be the case.  If you're a presentist - another commensensical position - this appears reasonable.   (Commonsense also commits you to endurantism, the view that everything is wholly present at any time it exists.  Commonsense is scary, but hopefully not indefensible.)

Now consider a contingent proposition p about time t2 which is expressed at time t1.  At time t1, p is a future tense proposition.  Now at time t2 p is either made true or false, but since we've made the truth-conditions for p at t1 dependent upon what will be the case at t2, it is reasonable to suppose that p is either true or false at t1 (though we do not know at t1 whether it is true or false).  By the way, if you accept classical logic, all propositions are either true or false.  I mean to suggest that p is in fact, at time t1, one or the other of true or false, where whichever truth value p has at t1 is dependent upon what happens at time t2.  Is this backwards causation? 

Maybe, and it might be very robust.  But it's possible that this intuition is due to a confusing gloss of the above position as the claim that a fact about the world at t2 makes a proposition at t1 true.  That's precisely what one might wish to deny.  It's a present tense fact at t1 about the future that makes p true at t1.  What does it mean to say that there is, at t1, a present tense fact about what will be the case at t2?  This isn't entirely clear to me, but it seems like there might well be such facts.  A case for this, although perhaps not the most persuasive one, can be made on the basis of a lack of retraction behavior when we make predictions about the future that come true.  We seem to think that the prediction we made at time t1 was true at the time we said it, when it becomes true at time t2.  If this is legitimate, then there should be a fact at t1 that makes the proposition true.  What think ye?  Is this backwards causation?  Or have I managed to avoid it?  Or have I avoided it at a very high cost.  (I'm betting on the latter.)

I'm now going to have to write a paper on this.  Weeee!  Major hat tip to philosophical bad-ass Alfred J. Freddoso for bringing this to my attention.  For a fuller discussion of this issue, see his introduction to his translation of Luis De Molina's "On Divine Foreknowledge", which I rip-off here.  Now back to Descartes...