Not to bury the lede, I must briefly preempt The Philosopher to report my good news: I'm here today. There was a searing moment during my commute Tuesday night when that seemed, for an instant, improbable.
On my way home from Murfreesboro to Nashville at around 9 pm I was involved in a 3-vehicle collision on I-24. One was a FedEx truck that slammed into my passenger side while swerving to avoid the other car. I spun completely around a couple of times before coming to a dead stop straddling two lanes in the middle of the interstate as traffic continued to whiz by in the inner and outer lanes, time enough to think "this is how it ends"... but I'm still here, I'm not quite sure how, but nobody was injured. The other car ended up alongside facing the other direction, full and with small children crying in terror. If the truck hadn't come to a stop just behind us, diverting oncoming traffic, I doubt I'd be here today.
On my way home from Murfreesboro to Nashville at around 9 pm I was involved in a 3-vehicle collision on I-24. One was a FedEx truck that slammed into my passenger side while swerving to avoid the other car. I spun completely around a couple of times before coming to a dead stop straddling two lanes in the middle of the interstate as traffic continued to whiz by in the inner and outer lanes, time enough to think "this is how it ends"... but I'm still here, I'm not quite sure how, but nobody was injured. The other car ended up alongside facing the other direction, full and with small children crying in terror. If the truck hadn't come to a stop just behind us, diverting oncoming traffic, I doubt I'd be here today.
So, I just want to register a profound sense of gratitude that we're all still here drawing breath, and urge you all to be careful out there. I've been running up and down that highway all these years, and maybe had become a bit complacent. It's useful to be reminded that we're always potentially a swerve away from our last commute.
The Corolla I've been pedaling for almost ten years is not looking good, but on the lighter side: Younger Daughter's very jealous of my rental, which (after seeing a photo) she describes as "beautiful and big and safe"-it's a Jeep Wrangler. My sister urges me to consider a truck or a Volvo, something sturdy. I'm honestly not convinced it would have made any difference last night, and I note that Volvo's going all electric soon. I've had my heart set on a Leaf or a Bolt. But I'm thinking about it.
The French philosopher Montaigne fell off his horse and nearly died one day, 500 years ago. But the next day he felt like he had a new lease on life. That's me, today and (I must not ever again forget) every day: lucky. "Don't worry about death," just get on with living... and loving life.
And drive defensively.
Now, more Aristotle today in CoPhi. The "research institute" and peripatetic academy he called the Lyceum was into everything from anatomy to zoology, so I'm sure he and his followers would have had said something to say about my Near Death Experience.
Wonder what he'd say about America's epidemic of gun violence, and the latest horrific atrocity. He'd be appalled, of course, by the violence itself and by the immediate swirl of fake news about it on social media. And he'd want to know what, at long last, how many children have to get shot before we finally try to do something about it.
Our Philosopher is the star, by the way, of a new musical tour de force based on his Poetics and Rhetoric, "addressing language’s power to influence others, for good or evil" and wondering “How can we persuade if the subject is complex and, as is so often the case, our listeners incapable of following a long chain of reasoning?” And, if they don't really value the truth as much as he does?
Aristotle, dubbed by Dante "master of those who know," loved Plato but he loved truth more. "All men by nature desire to know." I don't know about that. In our time we're seeing strong confirmation for the proposition that all desire to assert what they believe as if they knew it, or as if knowledge just meant firm conviction and not justified true belief. If we all had a natural instinct for truth we'd have a lot less talk about alt-facts. The reality-based community would feel a lot more secure and facts would change our minds. Summarizing the latest literature on confirmation ("myside") bias and irrationality Elizabeth Kolbert writes:
“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding”... And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Drumpf Administration.
...Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science...
“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.
Aristotle may have been naive about all this, but knowing that we're prone to "knowing" things that just ain't so should reassure us that real knowledge is still a reasonable aspiration worth fighting for.
"Aristotle was much too down to earth" to go in for eternal Forms or absolute Anythings. "The Cave was not so bad once you turned the lights on" - did Dumbledore say that? Look in all the dark corners, "for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful."
Aristotle's latter-day critics point to his un-Darwinian emphasis on teleology in nature, but in fact he was "stumbling along the right track." Lions have sharp teeth because sharp teeth help lions survive and multiply, not because a cosmic design ruled out toothless lions.* It's important to distinguish "how come" questions from "what for" questions, as Professor Dennett said at the Googleplex, and to admit the possibility of design without a designer.
He's also concerned about our current rash of unreason, telling an interviewer "the real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages." Ironic. The middle ages distorted and perverted Aristotle's respect for truth and facts. Is the postmodern age about to sin against his philosophy again?
He's also concerned about our current rash of unreason, telling an interviewer "the real danger that’s facing us is we’ve lost respect for truth and facts. People have discovered that it’s much easier to destroy reputations for credibility than it is to maintain them. It doesn’t matter how good your facts are, somebody else can spread the rumour that you’re fake news. We’re entering a period of epistemological murk and uncertainty that we’ve not experienced since the middle ages." Ironic. The middle ages distorted and perverted Aristotle's respect for truth and facts. Is the postmodern age about to sin against his philosophy again?
Aristotle is generally very good at distinguishing different kinds of question, with respect to causes. They are material, formal, final, and efficient, respectively concerning what things are made of, how they're formed, what purposes they serve, and what precipitated and changed them). Change is a big reality for Aristotle, always involving somthing that changes in both its before- and after-modalities, revealing potentiality and actuality. "No logical mystery there."
God might be a mystery, though it mystifies some that Aristotle's God thinks so much about Himself. "The idea that there was a being who one morning conjured up the universe out of nothing and then busied himself handing out rewards and punishments to its measly inhabitants" did not mystify The Philosopher, it annoyed him.
The fundamental type of existence for Aristotle is not to be found in Plato's self-subsisting world of eternal Ideas or Forms, it's just ordinary things - trees, rocks, plants, animals. The former "puts the cart before the horse" and tempts me to trot out that bad old Descartes pun too soon. Instead I'll just put a few questions in the spirit of the great founding empiricist. Would you rather attend Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum? Have you ever sharply disagreed with a teacher whom you nonetheless deeply admired? Is art really a "cave within a cave", or a source of light and truth?
Speaking of "language's power to influence others"...
In Fantasyland today, we go to the movies. (Last night Older Daughter and I went to see "The Darkest Hour," wherein Winston Churchill deployed the English language and sent it successfully into battle.) Cinema narrows the gap between fantasy and reality, magically transporting us into other worlds. Good literature does that too, but there's something peculiarly magical about the silver screen. William James said it produces "hallucinations and illusions [as] vivid as realities." What would he say about VR? What would Aristotle? Plato, we know, would not approve of its un-reality. But sometimes nothing tells the truth like fiction.
And then there's the world of advertizing. It also spins fantasies, for a profit. Don Draper didn't really want to teach the world to sing, he wanted the world to sing his jingle and buy his client's product. But as fantasies go, it's pretty alluring. Ommm...
Orson Welles' Martians seem pretty benign, in retrospect, compared to Nazis then and now.
Celebrity culture may seem benign, but hasn't it really distracted us dangerously from the proper focus of democratic life?
In A&P, John thinks it's possible to talk about our opinions openly without getting into a big fight if we just keep it "personal, accurate, but not universal." He finds atheist humor "a good icebreaker." That's why I keep recommending Julia Sweeney. "Not believing in God is one thing... but an ATHEIST?!" That was her Mom, as I recall. And her Dad: "Don't come to my funeral." To which Julia wished she'd replied: "Just try and stop me!"
Are more than half of millennials disenchanted with religion? That sounds like a movement, if it finds someplace to take that disenchantment.
Are theists and atheists "similarly skilled at finding meaning in life and self-actualization"? It depends on what you mean by "similarly"... and "skilled"... and "meaning"...
Ulla may be my favorite Atheists in America testifier. "I went to services a few times at a local Unitarian church... I look at pictures sent back by the Hubble space telescope [...&] find it inconceivable that people believe that this force we are witnessing is God's creation." But she meets other opinions with an indulgent smile.
And, on this day after the passing of Rev. Graham: "I watched an interview with Billy Graham's daughter, who stated that you couldn't be wise unless you believe in God. In view of that, I'm doubly glad that her father's teachings had but a fleeting influence on me." Me too.
Betty cowered between hymns by her Presbyterian choir, convinced "they were the Lord's spies checking on my behavior." He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake...
Like Ulla, Betty accepts others' prayers graciously.-more graciously, certainly, than Daniel Dennett when he asked his divine solicitors if they also intended to sacrifice a goat on his behalf. (In his defense, he was trying to "break the spell" of magical thinking over the prayer-based community.) But Betty also reads and thinks, and shows you can break your own spell without depriving others' of theirs. Live and let live, to the limits of mutual tolerance.
Margaret's Congregationalist-Universalist father believed in anyone gets to go the an afterlife, pretty much everyone should. Good for him.
I often reference Dr. House, in Bioethics. He's one of the few atheists portrayed in American pop culture, and he perpetrates a stereotype of atheists as bitter, misanthropic cynics. Even so, he usually saves his patients.
Margaret gets the last word in this book, which nicely punctuates my highway escapade. "I'm not afraid of death since I don't believe in an afterlife; I'm just not ready to go yet." That's it, exactly.
What do you think, Susan Jacoby?
And what do you think about euthanasia, Bioethics?
==
Happy birthday George Washington (1732), who lost his first political campaign for refusing to bribe the electorate with booze. (He won his second when his campaign manager did not refuse.)
And, happy birthday Dolly the Sheep (1997).
It's also the anniversary of the Olympic "miracle on ice" in Lake Placid (1980)-a hockey game. Really. It was nice to see the U.S. women's team take the Russians yesterday, but that wasn't a miracle either.
==
10.2.17. It's the birthday of Groucho Marx, Nat Turner, Wallace Stevens, and Mohandas Gandhi... who said, respectively: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members”.... “I should arise and … slay my enemies with their own weapons”... “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job”... “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” WA
==
2.21.17. Speaking of *lions... "Most of the ideas that went into The Communist Manifesto [published on this date in 1848] were brainstormed over the course of a week and a half in a room above an English pub — a pub called the Red Lion, located in the Soho district of London." And it's the birthday of the brilliant but troubled David Foster Wallace, who diagnosed part of our problem when he said “postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving." WA ("This Is Water")
5:30/6:28, 56/68, 5:32
God might be a mystery, though it mystifies some that Aristotle's God thinks so much about Himself. "The idea that there was a being who one morning conjured up the universe out of nothing and then busied himself handing out rewards and punishments to its measly inhabitants" did not mystify The Philosopher, it annoyed him.
The fundamental type of existence for Aristotle is not to be found in Plato's self-subsisting world of eternal Ideas or Forms, it's just ordinary things - trees, rocks, plants, animals. The former "puts the cart before the horse" and tempts me to trot out that bad old Descartes pun too soon. Instead I'll just put a few questions in the spirit of the great founding empiricist. Would you rather attend Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum? Have you ever sharply disagreed with a teacher whom you nonetheless deeply admired? Is art really a "cave within a cave", or a source of light and truth?
Speaking of "language's power to influence others"...
In Fantasyland today, we go to the movies. (Last night Older Daughter and I went to see "The Darkest Hour," wherein Winston Churchill deployed the English language and sent it successfully into battle.) Cinema narrows the gap between fantasy and reality, magically transporting us into other worlds. Good literature does that too, but there's something peculiarly magical about the silver screen. William James said it produces "hallucinations and illusions [as] vivid as realities." What would he say about VR? What would Aristotle? Plato, we know, would not approve of its un-reality. But sometimes nothing tells the truth like fiction.
And then there's the world of advertizing. It also spins fantasies, for a profit. Don Draper didn't really want to teach the world to sing, he wanted the world to sing his jingle and buy his client's product. But as fantasies go, it's pretty alluring. Ommm...
Orson Welles' Martians seem pretty benign, in retrospect, compared to Nazis then and now.
Celebrity culture may seem benign, but hasn't it really distracted us dangerously from the proper focus of democratic life?
In A&P, John thinks it's possible to talk about our opinions openly without getting into a big fight if we just keep it "personal, accurate, but not universal." He finds atheist humor "a good icebreaker." That's why I keep recommending Julia Sweeney. "Not believing in God is one thing... but an ATHEIST?!" That was her Mom, as I recall. And her Dad: "Don't come to my funeral." To which Julia wished she'd replied: "Just try and stop me!"
Are more than half of millennials disenchanted with religion? That sounds like a movement, if it finds someplace to take that disenchantment.
Are theists and atheists "similarly skilled at finding meaning in life and self-actualization"? It depends on what you mean by "similarly"... and "skilled"... and "meaning"...
Ulla may be my favorite Atheists in America testifier. "I went to services a few times at a local Unitarian church... I look at pictures sent back by the Hubble space telescope [...&] find it inconceivable that people believe that this force we are witnessing is God's creation." But she meets other opinions with an indulgent smile.
And, on this day after the passing of Rev. Graham: "I watched an interview with Billy Graham's daughter, who stated that you couldn't be wise unless you believe in God. In view of that, I'm doubly glad that her father's teachings had but a fleeting influence on me." Me too.
Betty cowered between hymns by her Presbyterian choir, convinced "they were the Lord's spies checking on my behavior." He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake...
Like Ulla, Betty accepts others' prayers graciously.-more graciously, certainly, than Daniel Dennett when he asked his divine solicitors if they also intended to sacrifice a goat on his behalf. (In his defense, he was trying to "break the spell" of magical thinking over the prayer-based community.) But Betty also reads and thinks, and shows you can break your own spell without depriving others' of theirs. Live and let live, to the limits of mutual tolerance.
Margaret's Congregationalist-Universalist father believed in anyone gets to go the an afterlife, pretty much everyone should. Good for him.
I often reference Dr. House, in Bioethics. He's one of the few atheists portrayed in American pop culture, and he perpetrates a stereotype of atheists as bitter, misanthropic cynics. Even so, he usually saves his patients.
Margaret gets the last word in this book, which nicely punctuates my highway escapade. "I'm not afraid of death since I don't believe in an afterlife; I'm just not ready to go yet." That's it, exactly.
What do you think, Susan Jacoby?
And what do you think about euthanasia, Bioethics?
==
Happy birthday George Washington (1732), who lost his first political campaign for refusing to bribe the electorate with booze. (He won his second when his campaign manager did not refuse.)
And, happy birthday Dolly the Sheep (1997).
It's also the anniversary of the Olympic "miracle on ice" in Lake Placid (1980)-a hockey game. Really. It was nice to see the U.S. women's team take the Russians yesterday, but that wasn't a miracle either.
==
10.2.17. It's the birthday of Groucho Marx, Nat Turner, Wallace Stevens, and Mohandas Gandhi... who said, respectively: “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members”.... “I should arise and … slay my enemies with their own weapons”... “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job”... “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” WA
==
2.21.17. Speaking of *lions... "Most of the ideas that went into The Communist Manifesto [published on this date in 1848] were brainstormed over the course of a week and a half in a room above an English pub — a pub called the Red Lion, located in the Soho district of London." And it's the birthday of the brilliant but troubled David Foster Wallace, who diagnosed part of our problem when he said “postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving." WA ("This Is Water")
5:30/6:28, 56/68, 5:32
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