Wow. That's pretty gay.

The other day I read Plato's Symposium for the first time in some fifty years, and was quite taken aback.

I had entirely forgotten how gay and even enthusiastically pro-pederasty that dialogue is.

The dialogue is about love, a topic Plato's Socrates claims in the dialogue is the only thing he actually knows about.

A claim that lends additional weight to the philosophical content of Socrates' speech on the subject, on the whole just as gay as those of the others.

And that comprises the ideas of the philosopher as one who loves and pursues but does not have wisdom, of the philosopher actually achieving intuition of the Form of Beauty itself, and of the philosopher's special claim to political insight.

Alcibiades' speech comes last, right after Socrates', and paints him as having been - with Alcibiades, anyway - an annoyingly chaste homosexual lover of beautiful male youths.

It is interesting that the Catholic clerics of the Middle Ages preserved Plato, the enthusiastic advocate of pederasty, but lost the not so gay (if at all) Aristotle and pretty much stamped out the anti-sex Epicurus.

If I have that history right.

"We must've been married in a previous life."

My wife used to say that, once in a while, as she used to say she wished we'd met sooner so we'd have had more time.

And just now, as I was watching an old episode of The Mentalist, a suspect told Jane that his murdered lover used to say that to him, that they must've been married in a previous life.

And as soon as he said it I thought if I could be married to Judy again I'd want to be reincarnated, that I would love to be, I would look forward to it.

And before that thought struck reincarnation had never seemed to me an attractive picture of human immortality.

But if I could be with her again I would be so happy, so happy all over again.

Sorry. Just working through my grief.

. . . .

Oh, Judy! I love you so much.

And what if not all disjuncts are settled?

Will there be a sea battle tomorrow?

What if future contingents do not all have truth values?

What if the future choices of free agents are not settled until the choices are made?

If the choices of free agents - God included - help settle what world we are in, rather than the other way around?

Things we can never know we can merely believe, unless we can abstain.

And if we cannot abstain are we not committed to faith?

So much more is faith than people realize, especially liberal cheerleaders for physicalism and natural sciences.

But is it true?

The human hope in God, in Providence, in Karma, or in whatever it is, is that it will all be all right in the end.

The unbroken circle. Universalism. Karma leading everyone home.

That we are not abandoned, that nothing is lost, that no one is broken forever beyond salvation or repair.

And who could plausibly deny that such a thing, or such things, could be true, even absent any particularly convincing picture of what it or they might actually be like?

But are they?

Or is any of them?

Somehow?

a contingentia mundi

What need not exist cannot and would not unless made to do so by something that cannot not exist.

Alternatively, only what cannot not exist can exist without being made to do so by something other than itself that cannot not exist.

A crucial premise in any argument for the existence of God a contingentia mundi.

Contemporary atheism supposes it is false, and that to the contrary contingent things, a whole world of contingent things, or a contingent (possible but not necessary) world can exist without being made to do so by anything necessary.

(Some put the point by saying existence is de trop or absurd.)

Or at any rate they refuse to believe otherwise absent proof.

But if you can prove everything you're going in a circle, someone wise once said.

And anyway nobody can prove most of the philosophically interesting - indeed crucial - claims by which we live.

People who go in for that sort of thing might even claim the thing is epistemologically basic.

Another age would have said self-evident.

Plantinga once suggested the existence of God, itself, be regarded as epistemologically basic.

That might be a bridge too far.

Moral bookkeeping without God

The Expanse, season 3.

Asked if a truly good act at the end of life can make up for some or all of the evil done earlier, Ashford, a soi-disant atheist, says he likes to think so.

Make up for without make up to.

Gratitude without providence

Or, "Count your blessings and be glad of them" for atheists.

Epicurus advises that in old age, infirmity, or ill health we take pleasure in the grateful recollection of past times of pleasure and happiness, rather than bemoaning our current miseries or short and awful prospects.

But there is no providence in Epicurus' view, and so this is not a case of being grateful to, but only of being grateful that.

There need not be anyone to thank, you see.

And that is a most interesting observation, from a man who died so painfully.

Sociobiology me this

A man would sacrifice the child to save the mother. You can always get another child.

But the woman would sacrifice the father to save the child. You can always get another man, eh?

At the start, anyway, a man just doesn't have as much skin in the game.

Interpersonal comparisons of utility

Forever denigrated as impossible, such comparisons of intensity of desire, preference, or pleasure must surely be possible if the most abject materialism is true, or reliable correlations between whatever on the side of matter passes for these things and these things as felt or as impinging on the human mind are available, at least in principle.

And materialism is all the less plausible as such correlations are all the more doubtful.

Or, anyway, doubtful in principle.

Myth. Science. Whatever. Wheels in the head.

We human beings have an irresistible need to think we've got it all figured out.

And so we always do.

The faithlessness of the inner party

When the inner party and the outer, and perhaps also the masses, taught by the inner party, believe different things, the regime and the ideological rule of the inner party begin to collapse.

Provided their practical implications are different.

And they always are.

Then it all falls apart.

Russia, in the 1980's and 1990's.

Or the Christian churches, even now.

The fallacy of the Noble Lie.

Meaning is bullshit

Not a word about the meaning of life before the 19th Century.

The whole idea is vacuous bullshit.

The question whether life has meaning, or what it might be, is meaningless.

Man's Search for Meaning?

Poppycock.

And, yes, that makes absurdism rather absurd.

Up to a point.

Fear of death is a phobia

Like fear of heights or enclosed spaces.

And how would that make sense, evolutionarily?

Is the brain the I in I think?

An aggregate cannot be the ego or account for the unity of apperception.

The ego must be a substantial continuant.

But must it be immaterial?

What if the cogito, and much else besides, belongs to the brain, not as aggregate, but as a thinking thing, a substantive ego?

All the functions of the platonic, augustinian, cartesian soul and more, ascribed to the brain, the organ of thought, and other functions, too.

This is not a materialism or physicalism.

But it is not a spiritualism, either.

Update, 8/5.

Nor is it Thomism.

There is no suggestion here of a separable intellectual part of the soul.

The cogito is ascribed to the composite.

And mortality is as built in as it is with materialism.

Update,  8/7.

And yet, l don't believe this for a second.

The brain is no more a substance than the entire living human body.

The brain and body are mere aggregates.

And the thinking think, the Ego, is a substance.

Back to Descartes, Augustine, and Aquinas.

Not so fast, my utilitarian friend

Societies A and B have the same population size at any given time.

In society A, people live for an average of 75 years.

In society B, people live for 35 years and are then killed by the government to make room for more young people.

Because younger people are happier than older people, the average utility of people living in society B is greater than that of people living in society A, though the utility of people in society A is generally positive throughout their lives.

And for the first 35 years of their lives, persons in society A are as happy as persons in society B.

So the total, lifelong happiness of people in society A is greater than the total, lifelong happiness of people in society B.

And no one in society A is deprived of a future they have every expectation would be happy by their government.

Egoists in the Original Position would surely choose A over B.

It is not true, as some utilitarian critics of Rawls claimed from the first, that each of us in such a position could be confident that the greater the average utility of the whole population the greater our own expectations.

Strong and weak fatalism

A Journal of the Plague Years.

Weak fatalism is only the idea that future contingents all have truth values.

Strong fatalism is the idea that, if X is fated, then X will happen no matter what happens between now and then.

Within the first few pages, Defoe attributes strong fatalism to Islam.

In the guise of an idea found in Cicero, that the sick need no doctors because if they are to succumb medicine is useless and if they are to live it is unnecessary.

Note that the co-fatality defense amounts to rejection of strong fatalism in favor of weak.

Faith

I have no faith whatever in the world according to physics.

Nor in the world of experience; if I did I would be a naive realist, a dupe of the natural standpoint.

Against custom or the settled way

Hobbes is far from the only one to assimilate moral wrong to violations of custom like picking your nose in public, or setting the table with the silver uncommonly arranged - though he departs from this incipient naturalistic relarivism in providing his contract theory to found justice in a universalist manner, but not small morals.

Maggie's mother's spontaneous assimilation of morals to custom is not thus qualified.

The Mill on the Floss, The Final Rescue, Chapter 3.

This is quite different from assimilation of moral wrong with getting a calculation, translation, or fact wrong, to which others subscribe.

Self-Renunciation

Maggie discovers and falls in love with Thomas a Kempis' preaching of total rejection of self-love.

As the story continues, we see this is a profound, and profoundly painful and costly, renunciation on her part, of any aspirations to having a life of her own.

The Mill on the Floss.

The Valley of Humiliation, chapter 3.

By the way

Since there are no moral propositions, there are also no moral questions.

Since "wrong" has no meaning (does not denote), "Murder is wrong" has none.

And likewise "Is murder wrong?"

And "Is it true that murder is wrong?"

And "Is there a possible world in which murder is wrong?"

But is there a possible world in which there are moral properties, as Mackie asked?

Properties are necessary, and so the same in every world. 

That is not to say they are each and all necessarily exemplified, however. 

So, given a suitable and convincing description, one could ask are there moral properties?

See Mackie. 

And no, I don't think so. 

Well, is there a world in which normative terms in moral use denote?

Of course.

Just as there is a world in which 'xrtyn' denotes.

So?