Edward Feser's Blog, page 39

The lesson of the Resurrection

The lesson of the Resurrection is that the significance of our bodily life and its sufferings should be neither overstated nor understated.  It is to see the middle ground between materialism and Platonism.  In our decadent sensualist age, the anti-materialist message is perhaps the more obvious one.  The secularist can see no fate worse than unfulfilled earthly ambitions, unhappy marriages, unpaid bills, poor health, and the deathbed.  And no greater good than the avoidance of such things.  Woody Allen captures the mindset well: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.”  This is pathetic.  Whether your hero is Socrates, St. Polycarp, or that glorious mashup of both, St. Justin Martyr, you know that there is no one so blind as he who cannot see the perpetuity beyond our three score and ten.  Death ends only our time in the waiting room.  Some waiting rooms are excruciatingly boring and uncomfortable.  Some are so filled with entertainments that you’re disappointed when it’s time to leave.  Either way, they’re just waiting rooms, and so is this life.
But that is not because we have immortal souls, and it is not because worldly things don’t matter.  To be sure, we do have immortal souls, and worldly things don’t matter in themselves.  But an immortal soul is not a person, full stop.  It is the remnantof a person, and the loss of its body is a grave injury rather than a liberation.  And the soul’s perpetual port-mortem character is determined by what we did and what we suffered in this life. 
This is where the anti-Platonic message comes in.  We are embodied by naturerather than by accident.  The soul is not whole without the flesh.  Nor is it destined to be purged of all traces of the individual that lived and breathed and suffered and died, like the impersonal atmanof Hinduism.  The lesson of the Resurrection is not that death is not the end of your soul.  It is that death is not the end of you as an embodied individual.  And it tells us, not that the sufferings of this life will be forgotten, but that they will be redeemed.  A perpetualgood will be drawn out of a finite harm, like wine out of water. 
The resurrected Christ carries his wounds perpetually, as trophies, Aquinas tells us.  They are like the scar that an athlete wouldn’t dream of correcting through cosmetic surgery, lest he be deprived of a reminder of what he has earned.  Similarly, the lesson of the Resurrection is that the broken heart you suffer now, the smashing of your worldly hopes, the pain of a loved one’s death or of your own failing body – the memory of all of that will, after death, be like one of Christ’s wounds.  It will take on a radically different character, and indeed be seen for what it always truly was, part of the purging and perfecting of a spiritual athlete. 
For those who love God , anyway.  For there is a frightful flip side of the Resurrection, insofar as the wicked no less than the righteous have their bodies restored to them, and their characters too are perpetually set by what they set their hearts on in this life.  The memory of their illicit pleasures, of their attachment to mammon, of their lust for fame and power, will ache like a perpetual hangover, an unending reminder of their stupidity and shortsightedness.  “Assuredly, they have their reward.” 
That is a reward more to be feared than death.  But death is indeed frightful.  I love and honor Socrates, as any philosopher should.  But his death, noble as it was, was not the death of a man who knew death for what it really is.  To be sure, his partial truth is far closer to the whole truth than the partial truth of the materialist.  Better by far to be a pagan of the Platonist stripe than that sad, contemptible thing Nietzsche called the “Last Man,” the comfort-seeking individualist of liberal secular modernity. 
Still, judging from the Phaedo, you’d think that death is essentially a matter of falling asleep during a philosophical conversation with friends.  But the reality of death is better captured in other images – of St. Ignatius of Antioch in the teeth of the lions, or St. Polycarp in the flames.
And yet, amazingly, they met these ghastly ends in a manner no less sanguine than that of Socrates.  The Last Man tells us: “Death is horrible, so fear it!”  Socrates tells us: “Death is not horrible, so don’t fear it!”  Christianity tells us: “Death is horrible – but don’t fear it!”
Related posts:
The meaning of the Resurrection
The last enemy
What is a soul?

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

I commend to you Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s First Things essay on the COVID-19 situation and the bishops’ response to it.  It exhibits his characteristic good sense and charity.  First Things editor Rusty Reno, with whom Fr. Thomas Joseph disagrees, exhibits his characteristic magnanimity and intellectual honesty in running it.  My sympathies are with Fr. Thomas Joseph’s views rather than Rusty’s, but I have been appalled by the nastiness of others who have responded to Rusty (who is a good man and a serious thinker and writer who deserves to be engaged with seriously).  Our situation calls for patience with one another and the calm exchange of opposing views, for the sake of the common good.  Too many have instead treated the debate over COVID-19 as an extension of hostilities that pre-existed the crisis.  This is gravely contrary to reason and charity. The situation is as complicated as it is dire.  The consequences of either underreacting or overreacting could be catastrophic.  However, in dealing with a pandemic, time is of the essence, and one has to act before it is too late, on the basis of a fallible judgment call.  For this reason, authorities who decided on a lockdown opted to risk erring on the side of possible overreaction, and to me this seems reasonable.  It also seems to me unreasonable to attribute suspect motives (as opposed to an error in judgment) to those who made these decisions, since they hardly benefit from economic catastrophe.
It is also unreasonable to condemn their actions on the grounds that the models they used in making their decisions are fallible, and indeed have since been modified.  Models are all anyone has to go on in situations like this, and the skeptics have to make their own judgments on the basis of their own equally fallible models.  Moreover, if infection and death rates turn out to be lower than was initially feared, then this might, of course, be attributed precisely to the efficacy of the measures taken in light of the models. 
Skeptics will rightly point out that there is a danger here of making claims that are unfalsifiable.  But they need to keep in mind that that is a point that cuts both ways.  In the abstract, “Things would have worked out anyway, without the lockdown!” is no less unfalsifiable than “See, the lockdown worked!”  What you have to do in order to test such claims is to compare cases where lockdowns were used to cases where they were not.  But that is trickier than it seems because there are so many variables.  What works in smaller countries may not work in larger ones.  Some lockdowns might be more draconian than others, and if things work out well in the less draconian cases it will be hard to know whether to attribute that to the fact that the lockdown was less draconian or to the fact that there was a lockdown.  And so on.
That is not to say that there is no right answer here.  It is just to emphasize that the situation is one where complicated issues with momentous implications have to be hashed out under time constraints.  Skeptics need to be heard, because any rational person will want to consider opposing views before deciding to take some drastic action.  However, the skeptics ought to cut a lot of slack to those with responsibility for making those decisions. 
In the short run, then, my sympathies are more with those who defend the lockdown than with those who are skeptical of it.  However, in the long run those who defend the lockdown need to be more open, rather than less, to the considerations raised by the skeptics.  To be sure, no one denies that the lockdown must be ended as soon as is reasonably possible, even if people disagree about what “reasonably” entails.  But as time goes on, harder evidence about the nature of the virus will accumulate and we will have had more time carefully to weigh different options for dealing with it.  The risk of overreaction will be harder to justify on the grounds of having to act under time constraints. 
Moreover, the longer the lockdown goes on, the more the economic damage increases even as the danger posed by the virus decreases.  It would be absurd and irresponsible to attribute concern about this to Wall Street greed.  The potential damage includes mass unemployment, the destruction of ordinary people’s retirement plans, the depletion of their savings, social instability, and indeed the instability of the health care system itself.  Authorities have to keep one eye always locked on this problem even as the other is directed at the virus.
This is why, as I say, both charity and sober debate are necessary.  But there has been too little of either.  Those who warned about the grave danger of COVID-19 were right.  But too many of them – not all, by any means, but a disturbing number – have been prone to self-righteous grandstanding and a naked desire to politicize the crisis.  Too many of the skeptics, meanwhile, have overreacted to this obnoxiousness and succumbed to the temptation to politicize the crisis in the opposite direction.  In short, too many people are reacting to each otherrather than to the situation.  And they too often seem more concerned with petty point-scoring rather than with trying rationally to convince each other or with seeking each other’s well-being.
In the final paragraph of his article, Fr. Thomas Joseph offers some thoughts about what true Christian charity calls for in this situation.  But it is in his penultimate paragraph that he addresses what, in my opinion, is the main lesson of this crisis, as of every crisis.  It is a reminder that everyday pleasures, economic well-being, political order, health, and indeed life itself, are fleeting.  It is a memento mori.  It is a call to get serious about more serious things.  As Fr. Thomas Joseph writes, “if we simply seek to pass through all this in hasty expectation of a return to normal, perhaps we are missing the fundamental point of the exercise.” 

Damnation denialism

Here’s a narrative we’re all by now familiar with.  Call it Narrative A:
Those who initially downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 were guilty of wishful thinking, as are those who think the crisis can be resolved either easily or soon.  This is what the experts tell us, and we should listen to them.  Even though those most at risk of death from the novel coronavirus are the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions, this is a large group.  Moreover, many people who won’t die from the virus will still suffer greatly, and even those with mild symptoms or none at all can still infect others.  Draconian measures are called for, even at the risk of massive unemployment, the undoing of people’s retirement plans, and the depletion of their savings.  Better safe than sorry.  To resist these hard truths is to be guilty of “coronavirus denialism.” This narrative is now widely accepted, and I have nothing to say here in criticism of it.  More to the present point, it seems to be widely accepted by Catholic bishops, who have been moved by it to suspend most public access to churches and to the sacraments.  I have nothing to say here in criticism of that either.
Here’s another narrative that is also familiar, but less widely accepted.  Call it Narrative B:
Those who suppose that few if any people will go to Hell are guilty of wishful thinking.  This is contrary to scripture and 2,000 years of teaching from the popes, the saints, and the Church’s greatest theologians.  They are the experts and we should listen to them.  Even if it turned out that a minority of the human race is damned, this could still be a large number.  Moreover, even those who will end up instead in Purgatory will still suffer greatly, and those who teach errors or live immoral lives out of invincible ignorance might lead others into damnation.  The call for conversion to the Catholic faith and repentance from sin must be urgently pursued, even at the risk of causing grave offence and inviting serious persecution.  To resist these hard truths is to be guilty of “damnation denialism.”
I am well aware that secular readers, universalists, and others will scoff at Narrative B.  But this post is not directed to them.  It is directed to those who claim to accept the teaching of the Catholic Church, such as the bishops.
The question for these Catholics is this: If Narrative A is compelling, how much more compelling should we find Narrative B?  After all, as Christ taught: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).  Since COVID-19 attacks only the body but Hell entails the perpetual suffering of body andsoul, shouldn’t damnation be an even more urgent concern than COVID-19?
Yet most Catholics, including most priests and bishops, have for decades now seemed to regard it as far less urgent.  For example, the topic of Hell rarely comes up in contemporary preaching, and when it does the emphasis is not on warning people about it, but rather on reassuring them that probably few souls if any end up there.  How is this any better than reassuring people that the coronavirus will probably be no worse than a bad flu?
From the Gospels onward, the Catholic tradition has clearly emphasized urgent warning about Hell rather than reassurance.  For example, when asked directly whether “few” would be saved, Christ didn’t give a reassuring answer.  On the contrary, he responded:
Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.  When once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us.’ He will answer you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’… There you will weep and gnash your teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out. (Luke 13: 23-28)
And again:
Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.  (Matthew 7:13-14)
How on earth could any rational person try to square such remarks with the thesis that we have good grounds for “hope” for the salvation of all?  Yet some of the same Catholics who insist on taking with the utmost gravity the medical experts’ most dire predictions about the COVID-19 death toll seem to respond to Christ’s words with a shrug.  Do they take Dr. Anthony Fauci’s expertise more seriously than Christ’s?
This is not even to mention the rest of the testimony of Catholic tradition, from the pessimistic views of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas down to Pope Pius IX’s explicit condemnationof the thesis that “good hope at least is to be entertained of the eternal salvation of all those who are not at all in the true Church of Christ.”
Of course, many will point to purported counterevidence, such as St. Paul’s observation that God “desires all men to be saved” (I Timothy 2:4).  This, they claim, gives us reason to think that maybe Hell will be empty after all.  This is an exceedingly weak argument.  God also desires all men to avoid sin, but of course, they nevertheless sin all the time.  So how does the fact that God desires all men to be saved make it likely that they will all be saved?  Maybe they’ll mostly be damned, for the same reason they mostly sin – because of their free choices, with which God does not interfere despite their being contrary to what he desires.
Note that it is irrelevant that it could nevertheless in theory turn out that few are damned, just as Narrative A tells us that it is irrelevant that COVID-19 might in theory have fizzled out without draconian measures.  What matters is the realistic possibility of mass damnation, just as what matters is the realistic possibility of mass death from coronavirus.  The accent should be on the worst case scenario, not the best.  So how is straining to find reassuring passages in scripture any more rational than cherry-picking expert medical opinion that supports the reassuring idea that the coronavirus isn’t much worse than the flu?  Why do even many conservative Catholics enthusiastically promote Balthasar’s comforting views, rather than lamenting him as the Dr. Drewof damnation denialism?
Similarly, the Church has always insisted on baptism and conversion to the Catholic faith as crucial to the salvation of the human race.  Just twenty years ago, the declaration Dominus Iesus , issued under Pope St. John Paul II, reaffirmed that, despite the possibility that non-Catholics might receive divine grace:
It is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who [are] in the Church…
Thus, the certainty of the universal salvific will of God does not diminish, but rather increases the duty and urgency of the proclamation of salvation and of conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Of course, the theme goes all the way back to the Great Commission, wherein Christ directed:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28: 19-20)
Yet one almost never hears contemporary churchmen calling for conversion.  On the contrary, they seem to be absolutely terrified of being thought “proselytizers,” and emphasize only “dialogue” and common ground.  If a single lockdown policy urgently imposed on the entire world is the only way soberly to address the COVID-19 situation, why is there no urgency about converting non-Catholics to the one true faith so as to save their souls?  How is betting on “invincible ignorance” to save most of them any safer than betting on summer weather to knock out the coronavirus?
No doubt there will be Catholics reading this inclined to dismiss it all as excessively harsh, paranoid, an overreaction, etc.  But how can they consistently do so if they would condemn those who regard the current COVID-19 lockdownas excessively harsh, paranoid, an overreaction, etc.?  How could someone who really believes what the Catholic Church teaches regard damnation denialism as any more respectable than coronavirus denialism?
Related posts:
How to go to hell
Does God damn you?
Why not annihilation?
A Hartless God?
No hell, no heaven
Speaking (what you take to be) hard truths ≠ hatred

Franklin on Aristotelian realism and mathematics

At YouTube, mathematician and philosopher James Franklin, author of An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics , offers a brief introduction to the subject.  Also check out the website he and some others have devoted to Aristotelian realism, as well as Franklin’s personal website.
A public lecture on mathematics and ethics that Franklin is scheduled to give on April 2 will, in light of the COVID-19 situation, be pre-recorded and posted online.

Craig, conventionalism, and voluntarism

At his personal Facebook page and also at the Reasonable Faith Facebook page, William Lane Craig briefly comments on my First Things review of his book God Over All .  Bill says:
For our philosophically inclined readers who are interested in divine aseity and Platonism, here's a great little philosophical exercise: Where does this review by Ed Feser go wrong? (Hint: do I hold that mathematical truth is conventional? Why think I should?) End quote.  Bill evidently thinks I have misunderstood him.  However, it seems he has misunderstood me.  I neither said nor implied in my review that Bill is a conventionalist about mathematics.  What I did say – and I put great emphasis on the point and developed it at some length – is that his position is in danger of collapsing into a kind of divine voluntarism about mathematics.  It isn’t human convention, but divine arbitrary stipulation, that seems in his view to be the foundation of mathematical truth.
Mind you, I also made it clear that I don’t think Bill wantsto end up with such a voluntarist position either.  But I think his view inadvertently opens the door to voluntarism, for reasons I spell out in the review.  I also explain why I think this is a problem.
As near as I can tell, Bill’s misunderstanding is based on a line in the review where I say: “For the Aristotelian, the Platonist is correct to regard mathematics as a description of objective reality rather than as mere linguistic convention.”
But it would be a mistake to infer from that line that I think that Bill takes a conventionalist view about mathematics.  Again, I didn’t think that and I wasn’t saying that.  First, the context in which that remark occurs is a general explanation of what an Aristotelian approach to mathematics involves and how it contrasts with the best-known alternative positions.  The line in question wasn’t meant to contrast the Aristotelian position with Bill’s views, specifically, but rather to contrast it with the best-known versions of anti-realism.
Second, I now see that what I originally wrote had been slightly altered by the copy editor in a way that, unfortunately, I overlooked when I went over the proofs.  In my original draft, the sentence in question ended: “…a description of objective reality rather than mere linguistic convention or the like.”  Those last three words were intended to indicate that convention is not the only thing an anti-realist might regard as the ground of mathematical truth.  (And I had already made it clear earlier in the review that anti-realism comes in many versions.)
Unfortunately, the copy editor apparently thought those three words otiose and removed them, and, again, I failed to notice the change when reviewing the proofs.  (I’m not blaming the copy editor, but myself.  These things happen, and copy editors have saved me from many infelicities over the years!)  
Anyway, as I say, the rest of the review makes it clear that it is the threat of voluntarism that is the problem.  I also point out that there are two serious lacunae in Bill’s discussion: first, too superficial a treatment of the Aristotelian realist approach to mathematics; and, second, a failure to consider how absolutely central the doctrine of divine simplicity is to the way the classical theist tradition understands both divine aseity and divine conceptualism.
These three issues – voluntarism, Aristotelian realism, and divine simplicity – are the ones my critique of Bill’s position hinges on.  It has nothing to do with conventionalism. 
By the way, as I hope my review also made clear, none of this should keep anyone from reading Bill’s book.  On the contrary, anyone interested in these issues ought to read it.  You will always profit from reading and engaging with Bill’s work, even when you end up disagreeing with him.

Aquinas anticipated everything

So notes a friend who sent me this image of the cover of a dissertation from the 1950s.  (No doubt the author was using the phrase in a different sense than has now become familiar.  Any guesses as to the true subject matter?)

UPDATE: Dave Lull sends the following:

From page 1:

“Social distance may be thought of either as an attitude of mind or as those acts flowing from this mental state. An attitude of social distance is an erroneous bias unreasonably held by the individuals of one group against another group. Acts of social distance are unjust differential treatment of individuals considered to belong to a particular group. It will be the task of the following section on the psychology of social distance to explain these definitions according to Thomistic philosophy.
“Prejudice is a broader term than social distance. It is the genus of which social distance is a species. For that reason much of what is said of prejudice or prejudicial attitudes pertains to social distance. Prejudice may be defined as an attitude of mind towards persons or things producing a bias in favor of, or adverse to, such persons or things and a judgment on them before adequate knowledge of the facts has been obtained.”
See also the explanation from Brandon in the comments below.

Craig contra the truthmaker objection to presentism

Presentism holds that, in the temporal realm (that is to say, apart from eternal and aeviternal entities), only present objects and events exist.  Now, if statements about past events and objects are true, then there must be something that makes them true.  But in that case, the “truthmaker objection” to presentism holds, past objects and events must exist.  I’ve argued in previous posts that this objection is greatly overrated.  Indeed, for the reasons I gave there, I can’t myself fathom what all the fuss is about.  William Lane Craig seems to agree.  In his book God Over All (which I reviewed recently in First Things), he has occasion briefly to address the issue.  Craig writes:[I]t seems indisputably true that ‘There have been forty-four US presidents’.  The non-existence of most of them is no impediment to our quantifying over past US presidents.  To infer from the truth of such statements that time is, in fact, tenseless and that past and future individuals are on an ontological par with present individuals would be to draw a breathtaking metaphysical inference on the basis of the slim reed of the neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment.
It is noteworthy that in debates over presentism, tenseless time theorists tend simply to presuppose without argument that quantification is ontologically committing, and so our ability to quantify over past/future individuals in true sentences is taken to commit us to their existence… It never seems to occur to tenseless time theorists that our ability to quantify over purely past/future individuals in true sentences might be a good reason to reject the criterion of ontological commitment which they unquestioningly presuppose… [I]t is far more obvious that, for example, the [past-tensed] statement ‘Some medieval theologians wrote in Latin’ is true than that the neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment is true.  (pp. 117-18)
End quote.  Here Craig frames the issue in terms of “ontological commitment” rather than “truthmaking,” but in this context the basic issue is the same.  The writers he is responding to hold that if we take statements about past objects and events to be true, then we are thereby “ontologically committed” to the existence of past objects and events.  Similarly, the truthmaker objection holds that if we take statements about past objects and events to be true, then we are thereby committed to the existence of past objects and events as “truthmakers” of those statements. 
The last sentence in the passage quoted from Craig is directed at philosophers who suggest that presentists, to be consistent, should give up the assumption that past-tensed statements are true, in favor of a “fictionalist” thesis that we should regard such statements merely as if they were true.  As Craig rightly says, what should be given up instead are the tendentious metaphysical assumptions that inspire such bizarre proposals!  In fact it is perfectly possible consistently to take statements about past objects and events to be true while at the same time denying that past objects and events exist.  As Craig says, it isn’t the truth of these statements that entails otherwise, but rather the neo-Quinean assumptions that are read into the statements that entail otherwise. 
That has been my point in my earlier remarks about the truthmaker objection.  I am happy to agree with the claim that true statements require truthmakers.  Indeed, it’s just common sense, and the truthmaker objection trades on the commonsense appeal of the claim.  But by itself the claim is in fact not terribly informative, because “truthmaking” is a vague notion.  Take the statements “Robert Downey, Jr. is an actor” and “Tony Stark is Iron Man.”  Both statements are true, and both have truthmakers.  But the respective truthmakers are very different.  The first statement is true because Robert Downey, Jr. really exists and really is an actor.  The second statement is true because the Marvel comics and movies were written a certain way, but not because Tony Stark exists, since he doesn’t. 
If you wanted to justify some dramatic metaphysical conclusion to the effect that fictional characters like Tony Stark exist, you aren’t going to get it from the (trivial) fact that true statements require “truthmakers.”  Rather, you’re going to have to come up with some metaphysical theory that restricts what can count as a “truthmaker,” and then justify reading this theory into the commonsense (and indeed by itself pretty banal) thesis that true statements require truthmakers.  Trying to pull the dramatic metaphysical conclusion out of the banal commonsense premise that truths require truthmakers is just sleight of hand.
Craig makes the same point about all the heavy-going talk among analytic philosophers about “ontological commitment.”  Common sense would agree that when we make a true statement, the things that the statement is about in some sense “exist.”  But terms like “exist” are in ordinary usage very elastic, covering not only tables, chairs, and the like, but things as diverse as the way that you smile, a lack of compassion in the world, the chance that something will not happen, the way things might have been, and so on (to cite several examples of the sort Craig gives on pp. 111-12).  And there is nothing in common sense that entails that the way things might have been is an entity in the way that a table is an entity.  You can arguethat it is, on the basis of some metaphysical theory, but it would in that case be the theory – and not common sense – that is doing the work.
Commonsense usage, Craig says, is “metaphysically lightweight” (p. 112).  The neo-Quinean metaphysician reads his heavyweight metaphysics into ordinary usage and pretends that he is simply drawing out the implications of common sense.
I have argued that the truthmaker objection to presentism does exactly the same thing.  “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” is true, and common sense would agree that this truth needs a truthmaker.  And it has one.  Caesar’s really having been assassinated on the Ides of March (rather than this being a fictional story, say) is what makes the statement true.
Now, the proponent of the truthmaker objection comes along and says that this entails that Caesar, his assassination, etc. exist, no less than present objects and events do.  But this doesn’t follow from common sense.  Rather, it follows only from some metaphysical theory about what can count as a “truthmaker.”  Hence for anyone who does not accept that theory – as, of course, presentists would not – the objection amounts to just a question-begging assertion.  It seems more than that only if we read the metaphysical theory into the commonsense and banal “truthmaking” assumption shared by presentist and non-presentist alike.
I noted in an earlier post on this subject that we have ample independent reason to reject the anti-presentist’s assumptions about “truthmaking.”  Consider “negative existentials” like the statement “There are no unicorns.”  This statement is true, and thus needs a truthmaker.  But it can’t be that there is some entitythat makes it true, since the statement is denyingthe reality of some entity rather than affirming it.  So what is it that makes the statement true?  Common sense would say: “The fact that there are no unicorns, the absence of unicorns from reality, is what makes it true.  What’s the big deal?”  Some metaphysicians respond: “But then what is a fact?  What is an absence?  Aren’t these entities of some kind?”
Now, you might think this a major metaphysical conundrum.  Or, stifling a yawn, you might think it much ado about nothing.  Either way, it certainly doesn’t entail that people who deny the existence of unicorns need to go into crisis mode, and to reject or at least remain agnostic about the statement “There are no unicorns” until the metaphysicians have solved the alleged problem.  If anything, it is the metaphysicians who need to conform their theorizing to the truth of the statement “There are no unicorns.”  It isn’t those who affirm this obvious truth who need to conform their opinions to some tendentious metaphysics.
Similarly, if the proponent of the “truthmaker objection” thinks it a real chin-puller to understand how statements about past objects and events can be true if past objects and events don’t exist, he is welcome to pull his chin.  It’s a free country.  But he can’t reasonably expect the rest of us to agree that this a deep metaphysical problem for presentism, any more than there is a deep metaphysical problem for people who affirm that there are no unicorns.  Or at least, he can’t expect us to think that the banal thesis that truths require truthmakers shows that there is any deep metaphysical problem.  He’s first got to justify his tendentious metaphysical assumptions about what can count as truthmaking if he’s going to convince us that we need to pull our chins too.
Craig offers several important further parallel examples.  There is, first of all (pp. 113-17), the case of quantification into intentional contexts, which is standardly taken to involve quantification into intensional contexts.  (Note the difference here between intentionality-with-a-tand intensionality-with-an-s, which are related but distinct technical notions.)  Take the statement “Ponce de Leon was searching for the Fountain of Youth.”  This is an “intentional” context (to use the jargon of philosophy of mind) in the sense that it concerns the contents of a person’s thoughts, which have the feature of intentionality or “aboutness.”  Ponce de Leon’s thought was about the Fountain of Youth.  It is said also to be an “intensional” context (to use the jargon of logic and philosophy of language) insofar as we cannot quantify into it, i.e. affirm the existence of all the things its terms refer to.  Though the statement is true, there is no Fountain of Youth.
Now, as Craig points out, the statement in question nevertheless seems obviously to entail the further statement “There is something that Ponce de Leon was searching for.”  After all, Ponce de Leon was not wandering around aimlessly.  There was a specific thing he was trying to find.  But it might seem problematic to affirm this further statement, insofar as it might seem to entail the existence of the thing (namely the Fountain of Youth) that Ponce de Leon was looking for.  But this would follow, Craig says, only if we assume a neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, on which the use of quantificational phrases like “There is” necessarily commits the user to the existence of something.  The “problem” disappears if we don’t make this assumption.  It arises only given a tendentious metaphysical interpretation of ordinary usage, not from ordinary usage itself.
Another example would be modal contexts, such as statements about possibilities (pp. 119-21).  Consider that there are uncountably many stars that could have existed even if they don’t.  Hence the statement “There are uncountably many possible stars” is true.  Should we conclude that these possible stars must really exist after all?  Some metaphysicians would draw precisely such conclusions.  Now, like me and like Craig, you might think this an utterly ridiculous non-starter.  Or, instead, you might think that the question whether such a result follows is, however bizarre, another real chin-puller that we need to take seriously.  Either way, as Craig notes, the truth of the statement “There are uncountably many possible stars” by itself does not entail any such recherché metaphysics.  You have to read the metaphysics intothe statement before you can read it out again.
Or consider mereological statements, i.e. those concerning parts and wholes (pp. 121-24).  For example, consider a statement like “There is an entity consisting of my left hand and the coffee cup sitting next to it.”  We can come up with innumerably many such statements about all kinds of similarly bizarre objects (or “mereological fusions,” as philosophers like to call them) – the object consisting of your eyeglasses, the moon, and a certain ham sandwich; the object consisting of the center of the earth, the square root of 2, and the temperature in Phoenix; and so on. 
We can talk about these entities and (to go along with the gag for the sake of argument) even make true statements about them.  So should we conclude that the object consisting of my left hand and the coffee cup sitting next to it is a real entity on all fours with you and the table you are sitting at?  Does this follow from the truth of the statement?
You might think this is really serious, cutting-edge metaphysics.  Or you might think it is too stupid for words.  Either way, Craig’s point is that affirming statements like the one in question does not by itself commit you to the existence of such bizarre entities.  It can do so only if conjoined with some tendentious metaphysical theory, such as a neo-Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, or some metaphysically loaded “truthmaker theory.”
Now, I would say that what we have in these various cases is essentially just a set of logico-linguistic puzzles.  They are not without interest, and ultimately they may even have metaphysical implications of some sort or other.  What they do not do is by themselves have any obvious metaphysical implications, and they certainly do not by themselvespose any grave challenge to any commonsense metaphysical assumption. 
The same thing is true of the puzzle raised by the “truthmaker objection” to presentism.  By itself it doesn’t raise a metaphysical problem that is any more grave or pressing or dramatic than these other puzzles.  It’s a logico-linguistic puzzle alongside other logico-linguistic puzzles, that’s all.  To ask:
“How can statements about the past be true if past objects and events don’t exist?”
is like asking:
“How can statements about fictional characters be true if fictional characters don’t exist?”
or:
“How can negative existential statements be true if the things they talk about don’t exist?”
or:
“How can statements about what people believe in, desire, search for, etc. be true when the things they believe in, desire, search for, etc. don’t exist?”
or:
“How can statements about merely possible things be true when those things don’t exist?”
or:
“How can a statement about the object consisting of my left hand and a coffee cup be true if that object doesn’t seem to have the kind of reality that a table does?”
You can puzzle over these things if you like, and it can be worthwhile doing so as long as one keeps in mind the precise nature and scope of the inquiry.  But in my opinion, to suppose that the first of these questions poses a grave threat to presentism is ridiculous.  It is like supposing that these other questions entail that there is grave pressure on us to believe in the existence of fictional characters, non-existent things, every single object of belief or desire, merely possible objects, all mereological fusions, etc.
Craig alludes to the assumption, made by many philosophers who write on these topics, that “exists” is a univocal term, though he does not pursue the issue.  But in my view, that is a major part of the problem, and one that any Scholastic is bound to be sensitive to.  “Exists” and related terms are analogicalrather than either univocal or equivocal, and we are bound to be led into trouble when we ignore this.  There are also the Scholastic distinctions between real being, beings of reason, intentional being, and (for some Scholastics) an intermediate category between real beings and beings of reason.  Too much contemporary discussion of the issues rides roughshod over such distinctions, wrongly treating terms like “exist” as if they have the same force in all contexts.

Coronavirus complications

For reasons most of which have to do directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 coronavirus situation, none of the remaining public lectures for the first half or so of the year that I had announced a couple of months ago will occur.  (There are still events planned for the latter half of the year, which I will announce closer to the time.)
Also, in light of the situation, my college, like many others, has abruptly transitioned to online teaching.  The resulting new workload promises to be as heavy as it was sudden and unexpected. 
I fully intend to keep this blog going to doomsday and beyond, but if things temporarily get a little slower here in the next couple of weeks as I adjust to this new reality, that is why!

Review of Craig’s God Over All

My review of William Lane Craig’s book God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism appears in the April 2020 issue of First Things.  You can read it online here.

On-topic open thread (and a word on trolls)

Folks, please don’t post off-topic comments in the comboxes.  I will delete them, and any responses to them, as soon as I see them, and (since I don’t always see them immediately) sometimes that means that a long thread will develop that is destined to end up in the ether.  Remember, if your comment begins with something like “This is off topic, but…,” then it isn’t a comment you should be posting.  And remember too, there is always that remedy for concupiscence known as the open thread.  Here’s the latest.  This time, everything is on topic, from acid jazz to Thomas Szasz, from Family Guy to Strong AI, from the coronavirus to Miley Cyrus. While I’ve got your attention, a word on trolling.  It’s a continual problem, and sometimes bigger than it needs to be because of people who keep feeding trolls.  Occasionally I have to ban people outright, but as you know, I prefer not to do that.  A handful of trolls over the years have been so insufferable and psychotic that they simply have to be cast forever into that outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.  The marks of such unforgiveable trolls include: a monomania that insists on bringing every discussion around to some irrelevant pet obsession; repeatedly posting the same comment over and over no matter how many times it is deleted; flooding the combox with comments throughout the day or the week; an unwillingness or inability to restrain a penchant for rudeness, obscenity, blasphemy, or personal animus against the host of the blog; and other behavior that normal human beings know to avoid. 
But there are other, less extreme trolls whose sins are more minor or who show a willingness to reform.  Marks of this milder kind of troll would be: monomania, rudeness, logorrhea, etc. that manifest only occasionally; irremediable ignorance or muddleheadedness that makes a commenter tiresome and not worth engaging, but that is not manifested in a rude or otherwise obnoxious way; a predilection for comments that are not quite off-topic but are nevertheless banal, ill-informed, weird, or otherwise not substantive; and so on.  Most of these people I simply tolerate.  There are also some who I have had to ban temporarily, but whose return to the comboxes I have tolerated when they have given signs of a willingness to restrain their more obnoxious tendencies. 
I leave it to you, reasonable reader, to use good judgment in dealing with such people.  If someone seems to be a crank or otherwise not worth engaging with, then don’t engage with him.  He may have nothing better to do, but surely you do.  And you will be doing a great service to me and to your fellow readers.  Sometimes what starts out to be merely a stupid comment or two that can be left to stand in the spirit of tolerance, turns into a long, pointless, acrimonious thread-killing exchange, all because one or two otherwise reasonable readers wouldn’t resist the urge to feed the troll.  Sometimes I delete this garbage in the hope of saving the thread, but other times, by the time I see it, it is too late.  And in any event, I’m too busy with other things to monitor this stuff hour by hour.
Do your part!  Don’t feed trolls!  Now, on with the open thread.  Previous open threads archived here.