Servile Conformist

The Cult Of Individuality

Just another symptom of a very sick American culture:

 

The Most Influential Books That Have Impacted Me: # 1 & 2

One of meat-space friends posted a question on a social media site that asked everyone what are some of the most influential books you’ve ever read. He wanted people to understand “influential” as having the most impact on your worldview. Asking this type of question always invokes a bit of story telling because important books are often embedded into the context of our lives. I’ve decided to list 5 books that have made a major impact on me.

1. Marcus Aurelius’ 'Meditations'

This is the first philosophy book I read from front to back and actually felt I had a decent understanding of. I picked up a Penguin edition of the Meditations at Bagram Air Force Base for free (from some box of library books donated “4 TEH TROOPS”)  late 2004 on my way to some hovel called Asadabad. It was lost on me then I was just a stones throw away from the ancient site of Kapisa founded by Alexander the Great. It also would have been meaningless to me that the hovel I was traveling to was the birthplace of Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, the great 19^th century Islamic thinker.

 

Final Thoughts on Chris Bolt.

So Chris Bolt and I have been having an exchange and I think it has ultimately run its course. I’m a little disappointed by Chris, I don’t think he returned the level of charity or care in reading that I gave him. This is not to say he was uncivil, but I didn’t care for passive aggressive comments like this:

Pat includes the Greek text in his post. Whether he is showing off or genuinely thinks it adds to the discussion I do not know.

There is a lot I could say about this, but I won’t. I’m really not interested in rhetoric and performance, but I’m getting the feeling that Chris is interested in it. I started getting that suspicion in his first post when he made comments like this:

Frankly, if that is the best one can do, then I feel pretty good about my apologetic.

and

I feel as though presuppositionalists are in good shape.

I wondered, “Why include such things? Who needs reassurance?” but over the course of the discussion he went from reaffirming that he feels good about his apologetic to adding in little observations like this:

Perhaps Pat is showing off in switching to x and y

Even his parting remark was a shot at me:

Only time will tell if our atheist friend is stubborn enough to defend claims like “Liars always lie” or “Hyperbole does not exist” or “The Apostle Paul self-consciously affirmed non-classical logics.” Concession is the alternative. Pat needs to put down his shiny new logics and find a new line of argument.

Now compared to the typical discourse that takes place on the internet between atheists and Christian apologists, this is below mild. Still, it bothers me because I think I failed in my personal assessment in Chris, I may have ended up projecting something on to him that he simply wasn’t. I set myself up for that disappointment, if it is the case.

I wonder about two things; how closely Chris read anything I wrote and how closely he studied the issues at hand.  For just one example of the former, he made this remark in his latest post:

What Pat should do is forthrightly address the view that the Apostle Paul, following the poet he quotes, is using hyperbole to communicate the truth that Cretans are generally liars. There is nothing in Pat’s post that takes away from this traditional apologetic response to the charge of contradiction in Titus 1.12-13a.

And what did I post on the 16^th of December on this very topic?

Now I can respect that Paul was making a rhetorical point in citing Epimenides, he was as Greek as they come. To most Christians (and to most apologists) this isn’t much of an issue, but it is for the Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist. Here we have a proposition embedded in scripture that is both thought of by unregenerate and regenerate minds, both Jew and Gentile, that simultaneously affirms and denies its own truth value.

This proposition exists. It is a contradiction. How does it stand in relation to the Triune God? How is this proposition grounded in Almighty God? How does Chris account for it?

The purpose of me using Titus was merely an example of showing the proposition exists for both of us and if it exists for both of us then both our worldviews must account for it. It isn’t some argument against scripture itself. What Paul cites is a liar paradox, how and why Paul does so isn’t relevant to the minor point I was making and I thought I explicitly made that clear. Perhaps I didn't.

As I said above, I’m beginning to doubt Chris is paying much attention to the issue I’ve raised. He has been promoting responses to me by another blogger that leave a bit to be desired, but I’ve ignored them since I considered it a rabbit trail. I don’t think Chris would have promoted the blog posts unless he considered them substantial, so I’ll show an example:

Tarski’s proposal is that we can save consistency in the face of the Liar Paradox, not for natural languages, but for restricted and regimented artificial languages, wherein no language contains its own truth predicate. At the bottom level, we have the “object language,” which does not contain words like “true” or “false” at all.

This does not accurately describe what I laid out:

Let us say that the following the following takes place in language lⁿ. In this case lⁿ is an object language and a  meta-language;  l^n-1 is an  object language from lⁿ and  lⁿ⁺¹ is the meta language for lⁿ.  Each language lⁿ contains every wff from l^n-1 and has a predict that  belongs to every true wff and only true wffs of l^n-1, let us call this  Tⁿ. Tⁿ cannot apply to any wff of lⁿ unless that wff also belongs to l^n-1.

There is no bottom level object language that does not contains words like ‘true’ or ‘false’. This is made explicit. It goes on to read (wikipedia link removed):

However, if we want to contend with the truth-value of an assertion made in the meta-language, we would need further recourse to a meta-meta-language to consider whether or not the truth predication of the meta-language (regarding the object-language) is correct. What if there’s a question regarding the truth ascribed in the meta-meta-language? Well, we need a meta-meta-meta-language. See the pattern? It’s turtles all the way down.

An infinite regress isn’t a mistake or a problem. Infinite regression is fine n dandy in mathematics, such as the creation of an infinite set of natural numbers through successive application of the successor relation to zero. Same concept here and asking me where the hierarchy stops is to assume to the collection is finite instead of infinite. It doesn’t stop, it runs to completion in the same manner that Bertrand Russell shows that Tristram Shandy can finish his biography in 'Principles of Mathematics'.

Now I’m not disappointed that Chris made an oversight or didn’t read me carefully. We all do that. But I’m disappointed that I feel that I’ve fallen prey to something I’ve warned about to numerous other atheists in real life, don’t become the object an apologist uses to showboat. I may have just become that object.

I blame myself, I tricked myself into thinking I could have a good discussion with a fellow philosopher over complex topics in a spirit that didn’t frame the conversation like some kind of zero-sum duel where only one person comes out the victor. I didn’t get that, instead I got backhanded remarks and condescension, probably for a crowd.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to close the matter and wish Chris a happy new year and move on to other topics.

 

Atheism + Outdated thinking.

So I’ve gotten a few requests to share my thoughts on a so called “New Wave” of atheism called Atheism+. I’ve hesitated because I really don’t want to add to the dog pile of criticism that seems to be a war of conflicting personalities. I’ve finally relented and I’ve decided to post my thoughts because I wasn’t seeing anything that really reflected my thoughts being put out by anyone else (sure as shit ain't this or that).

The best place to start is with my friend Dan Finke, in a post describing his visit to my school he made mention of a lively discussion he and I had at lunch:

 

Why Study Camus?

“Why would you study Camus? He’s not a real philosopher” the reasoning usually goes, “He never made an argument, just poetic assertions.”

It is true that Camus was not an academic, he didn’t publish in scholarly journals, and he didn’t have graduate level training in the discipline of philosophy. But the same thing can be said of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche too, both of them were outsiders who nevertheless made a sizeable impact on the course of Western thought. Camus did make arguments and he made poetic assertions, which can’t be said of most philosophers living today.

The most important reason why philosophers should study Camus is because non-philosophers do read Camus, and his influence on people is going to be far more reaching than anything written by Quine or Kripke. This is not to insinuate that the works of brilliant philosophers shouldn’t be studied closely, they should, but one shouldn’t completely focus their intellectual energies in consuming technical material. To do so is going to leave one remote from the uninitiated in the discipline, a condition that is dangerous (and all too common) for the philosopher. 

The bulk of Camus’ project could be described as searching for the answer to the problem of death. This is not to say that Camus sought immortality, but how does one live a meaningful life in the face of inevitable death? The question is an ancient one and has been asked many times in many scriptures and epics.

Thoughts from class: Cultural Anthropology

    I was sitting in my Cultural Anthropology class the other day, and the professor asked the class how many of us are feminist, and only two people raised their hands. The Professor was shocked, and openly wondered why so many of her students (the majority female no less) were not feminists.  I had suggested that perhaps the term had become too saturated and no one in here felt comfortable enough to profess a belief in something they didn’t properly understand. The Professor gave me an incredulous look that signaled her assessment of my explanation, and had a student look feminist up in the dictionary, which yielded the following, “the doctrine advocating social, political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men” . She asked again, “Why aren’t you all feminists?”

    I thought she made my point rather well, but I didn’t pursue it further. There is a tendency for activists of any cause to distill their ideals down to its barest simplicity, and reframe the position in terms that just about any person can identify with. A classic example is the position of Pro Life in the abortion debate, that position is described in a such a way that the negation of it is to be Pro Death or in the very least, against life itself. Those are not the kind of terms people wish to associate themselves with, while just about anyone, despite their views on abortion would identify as Pro Life.

    As the class progressed, the Professor began unpacking what exactly it means to be a feminist, and how this commitment to feminism begins to color how one begins to critically assess their own culture in terms of gender and sex equality. She could not have explained a hermeneutic of suspicion more clearly, with even a discussion of how one might perceive male hegemony in even women wearing high heels.

    I thought her examples were great and that they reaffirmed my own sneaking suspicion that feminism isn’t so simple, and that the concept requires much more unpacking than what a dictionary provides. A person might consider themselves feminist with their own notions of what kind of equality they’d like to see, but I don’t doubt that same person might outright reject a feminist understanding of social criticism or literary theory.

    For me, all this raises meta-questions about the discipline of cultural anthropology. Are there meta-discussions about the methods one is supposed to use in studying one’s own culture? It’s one thing to study gender issues in small populations that exist on the edges of dominant cultures, but surely those same methods fall short when applying them to our own culture. Durkheim thought one could study religion without judging it, but I think the enlightenment project of reaching objectivity in the social sciences is long since dead, and it is much more fruitful to take a careful inventory of the baggage one brings to a study, instead of leaving it at home. How much more does that apply to the study of the culture you exist in and identify with? 

 

Argument as a sign of respect

In his little book entitled, “A Rabbi talks with Jesus: an intermillennial, interfaith exchange” Jacob Neusner made some compelling comments about arguments and their place within religion:

“A good solid argument also is represented by the Torah as the right way to address God, that is, as an act of enormous devotion. The founder of eternal Israel, Abraham, argued with God to save Sodom. Moses time and again argued with God. Many of the prophets took up the argument as well, Jeremiah for example. So ours--The Torah’s--is a God that expects to be argued with; and the most profound affirmation of God’s rule and will that the Torah contains--the book of Job--forms also a sustained and systematic argument with God…In my religion, argument forms a mode of divine service, as much as prayer: reasoned debate on substantive issues, debate founded on respect for the other and made possible by shared premises. That kind of contention is not only a gesture of honor and respect for the other, but in the context of the Torah, it forms the gift of intellect on the altar of the Torah (pages 7-8).”

Reflecting on my own academic interests, I can see how I can apply Neusner’s thoughts about ‘argument as a sign of respect’ to my own situation. My passionate interest in Philosophy gives me the analytical tools needed to form a solid argument, and Religious Studies gives me a community to participate and engage with my argument.

The principle of charity becomes a vital aspect, quality scholarship cannot be done in isolation, and if you are not charitable and respectful to your opponents views, then you will quickly find yourself in isolation.

To my own Reb, I look forward to honoring him with many more arguments.