Initial Impasses In Aristotle's Metaphysics

This is the first of a series of articles by Thomas Cothran on Aristotle's Metaphysics. There are traditionally considered to be three branches of philosophy: First, logic is the branch of philosophy the provides the method by which the other two branches proceed. It is the study of reason as an instrument of truth. Second, practical philosophy is the branch of philosophy concerned with the knowledge of the first principles of the practical order, and includes the philosophy of art, the study of man's ability to create, and moral philosophy or ethics, the study of the absolute good of man. Finally, there is theoretical philosophy, the study of the being of things. This branch encompasses the philosophy of mathematics, the study of things according to quantity; the philosophy of nature, the study of things according to their sensible properties; and, finally, metaphysics or ontology, the study of being itself. The Metaphysics is obviously the last of these. It is "first philosophy," a study of being itself and the causes and principles of individual beings. --MC

In order to orient the inquiry of the Metaphysics, Aristotle begins with the traditional opinions about the causes of things as a whole, and draws out their inherent difficulties. This, in part, follows from his general dialectical method: he does not begin with first principles and deduce from them a universal philosophy, but begins with the traditional beliefs that he has inherited. In one sense, this method takes into account the "thrownness" of the philosopher; that is, the fact that the philosopher is always historically situated and does not have immediate access to objective truths from which he can begin his philosophy. To start in any other way covertly imports one's inescapable intellectual inheritance into the inquiry, and allows this inheritance to be acknowledged and addressed up front. This gives Aristotle's dialectic an advantage over any deductive metaphysics, in that his starting points need not be incontrovertible.

Aristotle examines the philosophy of those that went before him by drawing out their inherent tensions and contradictions. From these tensions, he establishes the problematic from which the Metaphysics will work. Aristotle must get some idea of what sort of thing metaphysics reveals; that is, of the nature of the metaphysical question. The immediate difficulty lies in the fact that one cannot know what metaphysics asks about without knowing the object of the metaphysical question. One must know the end before the beginning.

As an initial matter, the metaphysical question concerns the source of things. But is this source one or many? If there are irreducibly many sources of things (e.g., the four elements, or the four causes), then there is no metaphysical knowledge, but different kinds of knowledge for each kind of source. The sources can be irreducibly many either in kind or in number. If the sources are irreducibly many in kind, then thinghood is impossible, for thinghood implies a kind of unity which is grasped in thought when one grasps its cause. However, if the causes of the thing are multiple in kind, then no unity exists by which one might grasp the thing. Yet things present themselves to us in a kind of unity which we immediately and pre-reflectively grasp without trouble. Positing a multiplicity of sources different in kind is simply insufficient to explain everyday experience.

On the other hand, if the source of things are irreducibly many and differ in number, but not in kind (Aristotle calls these elements), then there will be nothing other than the elements. The sources would differ by virtue of their particularity alone (being this atom and not that one, for example), and if there were no causes higher than these elements, nothing could exist other than these elements. Syllabic sounds, for example, in order to come together and form words, have to take on the reality of a whole above and beyond the parts. This whole necessarily takes the form of an unified cause incompatible with an ontology that posits irreducibly many sources.

A multiplicity of causes precludes the unity that things possess, and fails as an explanation of ordinary experience. If, however, the cause of things is one (this would be called "oneness" or "being", and applies univocally to all things, the Parmenidean problem arises. To understand being in this way would be to understand being as a universal genus or category. "But", Aristotle says, "it is not possible for either oneness or being to be a single genus of things," for then there would be only one Being. Being, understood as a universal category, would rule out individual beings as illusions, because a species is differentiated within a genus by differentia outside the genus. "[I]t is not possible either to predicate the species within a genus of their own differentia, or to predicate the genus without its species of the differentia."

In the footnote to his translation, Joe Sachs explains it this way:

If we define doves as wild pigeons, the species is doves, the genus pigeons, and the differentia is being wild. If this is a sound definition, it cannot be true that (all) wild things are doves, or, the more important point here, that (all) wild things are pigeons. The reason is that all characteristics by which a genus is differentiated into the species are outside the genus.

The characteristics that differentiate genus into species must be outside the genus, for if the differentia were within the genus, then those characteristics would belong solely to the species or to the genus as a whole. In the first case, if only pigeons were wild things, then the terms "wild things" would have no meaning or extension other than "pigeon", and differentiating doves by the characteristic of wildness is simply to differentiate doves by the character of being doves. If the differentia existed only within the species, the only way the species could be differentiated from the genus would be by tautology (essentially saying a dove is different from other pigeons because it is a dove). In the second case, no differentia would separate doves from other pigeons, collapsing the species into the genus.

The basic problem: being, it seems, cannot be one because it abolishes all difference, and it cannot be manifold because it abolishes all unity. It is from this problematic, the apparent tension in being between the one and the many, that Aristotle's metaphysics takes its direction.

More revelations on the Scientific Ministry of Fear

More revelations on the inner workings over at the Scientific Ministry of Fear, from the London Times:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

Read the rest here.

HT: Michelle Malkin

The Banning of Academic Rigor: Anti-censorship groups now calling enforcement of curriculum standards "censorship"

The civil liberties crowd is always looking for new things on which to slap the "censorship" label, but this time it has really outdone itself. It is now apparently considered censorship to push for higher educational content in schools.

In Montgomery County, Kentucky, several parents whose children are in an accelerated college preparatory class questioned several books a teacher had planned on using in the class because they don't adequately contribute to accelerated college preparation. The parents apparently had the crazy idea that putting their kids in an advanced college prep course meant that they would be reading academically challenging books instead of literary fluff.

This of course sent "anti-censorship" groups into paroxysms of indignation, all the more so because, in addition to the books being light on the intellectual side, they also contained some racy content, making them all the more worthy of inclusion in school curricula.

After the dust up, the Kid's Right to Read Project, a place where indignation sometimes gets in the way of common sense, fired off a letter to Montgomery County Superintendent Daniel Freeman:

But they picked a bad time to do it: right before "Banned Books Week."

The view of the parent who objects to the books is not shared by all, and she has no right to demand removal of the book. Public schools have the obligation to “administer school curricula responsive to the overall educational needs of the community and its children.” Leebaert v. Harrington, 332 F.3d 134, 141 (2d Cir. 2003).

Maybe in its next manifesto, the Kid's Right to Read Project could explain how the "overall education needs of the community and its children" are served by spending valuable time on literary cotton candy in a class that's supposed to be preparing students for the greater rigors of higher education.

You have to be careful what you do around the time of Banned Books Week because you might be unwillingly enrolled in the narrative that groups like the American Library Association propagate about conservatives running around the country censoring school books, a narrative that somehow always leaves out any coverage of the most banned book of all: the Bible.

The books in question in the Montgomery County case were these:

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles
The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones

Now I haven't read these books, and, being an English instructor and a fairly well-read person, I've never, with one exception, even heard of them either. If they're on a list of great books somewhere, I've never encountered it. Maybe they're appropriate for a course on Early 21st Century Lightweight Pop Fiction for Bored Teenagers, but a college prep course? C'mon.

The only book that has any reputation at all is The Rapture of Canaan, a story with the not-very-original politically correct plot line about an evil fundamentalist church called "The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind." There's realism for you. And it is a measure of its literary quality that it impressed Oprah, who made it a selection for her Book Club in 1997.

According to "teenreads.com," undoubtedly a bastion of discriminating literary taste, Knowles Lessons from a Dead Girl "does a credible job of exploring friendships, particularly those of girls, in all their complexity and depth." I bet.

These are books about self-obsessed teenagers with names like "Chip," "Lainey," "Rudy," and "Chaz" who are depressed because they didn't make the football team or are upset because they can't figure out what dress to wear for homecoming. Including books like these in a serious college prep course is a little like screening Beach Blanket Bingo at a classic film festival.

Minus the bad language, sexual themes, and the drug abuse, they might pass for some of the cheap fiction my friends and I used to read in school. If you would have told us at the time that books like this would be brought into a college prep class by teachers and taken seriously, we would have had a big laugh and thought that that would be pretty cool. But that's because we were ignorant teenagers who hadn't yet developed anything remotely resembling judgment.

As it turns out, some people never did--and many of them are apparently teachers.

The teacher in whose class such literary specimens were to be held up as examples of quality literature was Risha Mullins. While students in a serious class might be reading Shakespeare's Hamlet proclaiming "To be or not to be," Miss Mullins students are treated to characters soliloquys include lines like "I was a zit on the butt of the student body."

Impressive stuff, you'll have to admit.

Mullins apparently travels the country giving lectures to other teachers on promoting student reading. This, in and of itself, is a scary thought.

If merely trying to maintain some reasonable level of quality in the literature students read at school is now to be labeled censorship, then the odds of improving schools may have just become prohibitive.

In the Montgomery County case, all you had was parents challenging whether books deserved a place in the curriculum of a college prep course. They weren't removed from the school library or eliminated from the readings for the reading club there. They were adjudged unfit for a place alongside Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.

Oh, and then there's Kentucky's state teachers union, which, with admirable consistency, almost always gets it wrong, rushing to the aid of the teacher, whose job they claim is in jeopardy despite the fact that it's not. Action against the teacher hasn't even been considered. It's simply a question of deciding what gets taught in a class, a judgment that is made every day and gets that much more difficult when national groups whose only interest is making a few cheap headlines stick their bothersome noses in places they don't belong.

UPDATE: I have begun responding to some of the arguments made in the comments section of this post here. My first response addresses the question whether a person is justified in making certain assertions about books they have not themselves read. Other responses will be noted here as they are posted.

Where is the Scientific Integrity Patrol on Climategate?

The Scientific Integrity Patrol, which blew up over the appointment of Francis Collins as the head of the National Institutes of Health because he was a Christian, has been noticeably silent about Climategate. The silence of the Jerry Coynes and P. Z. Myers of the world doesn't even ascend to the level of a double standard, as pointed out nicely by Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute:

Compare the pro-science blogosphere’s silence about fraud and scientific misconduct in climate science to another recent controversy in science: the appointment of Francis Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins is a scientist of the highest professional and personal reputation. His scandal, according to the science blogsphere, is this:

He’s a Christian who publicly talks about his belief in God.

Read the rest here.

A bad argument against bad arguments is a bad argument

On the basis of having assigned numerous papers to his college students on the issue of gay marriage and, not having encountering good arguments against it, James Hanley at Positive Liberty has concluded that there are no good policy arguments against it.

First, the evidence:

Over the last several years, I have assigned the question of same-sex marriage to my American Government students three times. I never ask them to write directly about whether they support SSM, but phrase it as a question of federalism–should the issue of SSM be left to the states or nationalized via a constitutional amendment? Note that the latter option allows for either constitutionalizing a right to SSM or constitutionalizing a ban on it. Students need not allow their personal views to slip into their paper (indeed the ideal paper answers the question solely on the basis of federal vs. national powers, without recourse to the rightness or wrongness of SSM), yet unsurprisingly, nearly every student makes their views on the issue clear. Having now read over 100 student papers on SSM, I can state with certainty that I’ve yet to hear a good justification for banning it.

Then the conclusion:

It’s an intriguing thing to discover that there are no good arguments for a particular public policy. I’m accustomed to thinking there are reasonable and reasoned arguments on each side of nearly every policy issue ... Should we treat gays differently than straights? Sorry, all the best efforts at justifying treating unfavored groups differently have already been tried out and discredited.

The argument seems to go like this: College students are uniformly bad reasoners, and on the basis of the uniformly bad reasoning I have experienced, there has been uniformly bad reasoning in support of the position that gay marriage is a bad idea. Therefore gay marriage is not a bad idea. Quod Est Demonstrandum.

We're wondering what other bad positions we will have to accept because today's college students cannot articulate good arguments against them. But perhaps there is more to his argument:

To those who would cling to discrimination, I say, you’ve lost intellectually. Indisputably lost. You’ve had plenty of time to come up with good arguments in support of the status quo, so if any actually were available I would have heard them by now. But in the last five years, the time during which I’ve been actively thinking and reading about this issue, I’ve yet to hear one argument that has given me pause, even for a moment. And so my patience with the other side in this argument has run out, which means, of course, that I cannot ever assign this topic again. But it was a good exercise while it lasted.

Does this mean he's basing his argument on more than just the papers of his students? If so, then why so much emphasis in his post on his student's bad reasoning--and why only a vague reference to any arguments outside this context? Never mind that he has not proven that laws that don't accommodate same-sex marriage constitute "discrimination": how does citing bad arguments for an opponent's position bolster your own? Don't we routinely question the strength of a team with a weak schedule?

If you're going to be serious about trying to establish that the case against same-sex marriage is weak, don't you have some obligation to cite something better than the papers of your rationally incompetent college students? In fact, I'm wondering what he would think about a student paper written with reasoning as bad as that contained in his post.

I have never encountered a convincing argument in favor of same-sex marriage. And Hanley's post certainly does nothing to improve the situation.

Washington Times: Denialists responsible for Global Warming researchers bad behavior

Maybe we should just be glad the Washington Post is acknowledging it at all, but in their editorial today, the paper makes the case that the real problem with overstating the Global Warming threat and trying to suppress dissenting opinions in scientific journals is that it makes the alarmists in the journalistic community look bad. And besides, it's all the fault of Global Warming denialists anyway:

Whatever else comes out about the stolen documents, they have become examples of how not to react to climate-change deniers. You need not dig very far into the stolen documents to discover why climate researchers shouldn't overstate an already strong case. One discusses how scientists can't account for a recent, measured lack of warming -- a fact that climate-change deniers use to ignore the massive body of evidence that global warming could be a dire threat. Really, it demonstrates that the Earth's systems are extremely difficult to predict in detail.

...The case that governments should hedge against that outcome is formidable enough. Climate scientists should not let themselves be goaded by the irresponsibility of the deniers into overstating the certainties of complex science or, worse, censoring discussion of them.

That's called accepting the responsibility for your enemies behavior. This is how it works at the Washington Post.

Environmentalists dealing with denial on Global Warming

The glacial response of the mainstream alarmist media is beginning to break up. Fissures are beginning to show in the wall of cold silence that has greeted the recent revelations that Global Warming researchers at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia overstated the implications of the data and tried to suppress dissent.

Here is one of their own, George Monbiot of the Guardian, calling for a house-cleaning at the CRU:

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

Ouch. You can hear the ice cracking. Obviously Monbiot's Global Warming alarmist fervor is undaunted by the revelations. In fact, he is outraged precisely because the revelations threaten cherished Global Warming dogma. Still it's a stunning condemnation:

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that "We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day." In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged". When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called "WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999". Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

And then the coup de grace:

No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

One wonders if the trickle of melting denialism will turn into a torrent. I wouldn't bet on it.

Stupid athiest tricks

According to the London Times, the children featured in an atheist advertisement calling on families to bring up their children without religion were children brought up with religion. Not only that, but the children in the atheist ad were, in fact, from an evangelical Christian family.

The ad features the smiling faces of two happy children with the slogan, "“Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.” Only trouble is that Charlotte and Olly, according to the Times, "are from one of the country’s most devout Christian families."

Looks like these atheists grew up, but it might still be a good idea to let someone else choose the photos the next time.

HT: Uncommon Descent.

Seeking self-starter with no business experience to run the economy

If you ever wondered why the government seems to be taking over everything under the Obama administration, consider the percentage of members of the cabinet who have private sector experience in the Obama administration compared to previous administrations.

From Nick Shulz at the American Enterprise Institute.

HT: Carpe Diem

Smoking ban study never happened

As we recently reported, a study of the effect of smoking bans on heart disease was uncritically passed on by enthusiastic media-types, including one of my local papers, the Lexington Herald-Leader, despite the fact that is was typical junk science. Well, now the story gets even more interesting.

Turns out, not only was the study badly done, but it wasn't even a study. So points out Michael Siegel at The Rest of the Story, a watchdog group on tobacco policy:

As it turns out, it appears that there was no study. These were simply preliminary data on hospital admissions in one community. There is a study ongoing in which acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) rates will be compared between communities with and without smoking bans, but those data have not yet been collected.

What was reported turns out to be "preliminary results from a larger study," a study which has not even been conducted yet:

Well, if the study has not yet been conducted, then how can the "authors" issue a press release with the study's conclusion?

If ever there was an example of researchers coming to a pre-determined conclusion about their research hypothesis, this is it.

Anti-smoking researchers are apparently so eager to communicate favorable findings to the public that they can't even wait to conduct their studies any more. In this case, data from the intervention group was obtained and immediately released, before the data from the control communities could be examined for comparison purposes.

As Grier correctly points out, the 27% decline in heart attacks in Starkville doesn't mean anything in the absence of knowledge of what happened in communities without smoking bans. If there were also large declines in heart attacks in those localities, then the observed decline in Starkville was not attributable to the smoking ban.

When it comes to furthering political agendas--on this and other issues, like Global Warming--not even scientific integrity stands in the way. So far no word from the usual crowd who are always ready and willing to talk about junk science as long as it doesn't gore their own politically correct ox.

Health Care Reform bill would enforce unpopular new mammogram guidelines

As it turns out, the new guidelines on mammograms, which are as unpopular with Democrats as they are with Republicans, would be mandated under the current version of the health care reform bill:

The Democrats downplaying the gravity of new recommendations for breast cancer screening have left out an inconvenient fact: their health care bills would automatically adopt them.

Both the House and Senate health reform proposals would force insurance plans to follow the new mammogram guidelines for women ages 50 to 74 as part of a minimum swath of services deemed by the legislation to be medically essential.

Read the rest here.

Is Jake at Page One a Climategate denier?

Jake over at Page One takes another in a series of potshots at the Rand Paul campaign, this time for not genuflecting to the Global Warming alarmists. He quotes Paul campaign manager David Adams for calling Global Warming a "hoax."

Now why would Adams say this, particularly in light of new revelations about "Climategate": e-mails that have become public from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (the source of much Global Warming hysteria) showing how climate researchers have spun the data on warming--data much which they cannot now produce, and commiserated in stifling opposing scholarly opinions on the issue, among other very naughty things for supposedly reputable scholars to do?

Come to think of it, we haven't seen anything on Jake's blog about Climategate. Looks like a Climategate denier to me.