This is a slice of my philosophical, lay scientific, musical, religious skepticism, and poetic musings. (All poems are my own.)
The science and philosophy side meet in my study of cognitive philosophy; Dan Dennett was the first serious influence on me, but I've moved beyond him.
The poems are somewhat related, as many are on philosophical or psychological themes. That includes existentialism and questions of selfhood, death, and more. Nature and other poems will also show up here on occasion.
No. 8 goes way back to 2007, "Contra Buddhism 1," one of my earliest pieces deconstructing Buddhism, and even more, deconstructing Westerners (and perhaps some heimat Buddhists) who claim Buddhism is not a religion. Hold on to that.
No. 7, from June, a blogger also on Substack tried to claim they had refudiated (sic) Kurt Gödel's logical proof for the existence of god. In reality, they partially failed. (They then, after this post, argued with me about it, and I moved on, sensing the possibility of a Gish Gallop.)
No. 6 is also from 2007 and related to No. 8. I had the easy "win" of noting that, if enlightenment is ineffable, how can you talk about it?
No. 5 is one of my top all-time posts, about "The great ahistoricity of Acts." In it, while I talk about all of Acts; I move toward the approximate last one quarter, from Paul's arrest in the Temple after allegedly bringing a goy into the inner court, and on from that, as being even more ahistorical than what comes before it, then note that this certainly means Paul didn't get to Rome.
No. 3 was also from June, about a new round of issues at the r/AcademicBiblical subreddit. This time, it wasn't so much stupid posters or Nazi mods still being Nazis; rather, it was actual academics full of wrongness, namely, John Meier and Dale Allison.
No. 2? Back in 2012, a geologist claimed he had geological proof Jesus was crucified April 3, 33 CE. And, on it, I picked up a fundagelical commenter who eventually went away.
Almost immediately after the death of Pope Francis, Bishop Michael Olson, bishop of the Diocese of Fort Worth, issued an official statement of mourning on the diocese's email mass-blast list.
I don't know if Olson was hoping for the proverbial skinny pope to follow a fat one or what, but whatever, there's nothing on the diocesan website beyond "Habemus Papam."
Elsewhere in his work, Olson has shown himself to be a control-freak jackass. I'm not sure exactly where he falls on "traditionalist-modernizer" gradients, but probably tilts traditionalist. I am in part going off the Padre Pio enshrinement.
Nathan J. Robinson, via Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla, channels his inner Peter Singer, as in the Australian utilitarian philosopher known for his sometimes strident, occasionally off-putting, takes on animal rights — for the intelligence, and the suffering potential, of shrimp. The intelligence of squid and octopus is generally overrated and also largely anecdotal. Therefore, extrapolating from them to shrimp is a fail.
Robinson's an interesting person. A Brit expat who launched A Current Affair here in the US (his home base is New Orleans), he's best seen as a DSA Rosey, even if he's not an official member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
In other words, a squishy pseudo-leftist who will chide Democratic Party leaders every 2 or 4 years, but then, presumably, vote for them in the voting booth. He certainly has never talked up third parties, and for that I've called him out at my primary blog and at Shitter.
Anyway, per the second link, even if Nicholas Humphrey is not all right, I certainly don't think he's close to being all wet. Warm-bloodedness is where to start with animal intelligence.
Linked inside that piece, but getting separately posted now, is the piece on how octopus intelligence is both overrated and often anecdotally assessed.
Per Daniel Engber's piece, first, there's been cases of fraud on octopus escape abilities. Second, that doesn't mean conscience-type intelligence anyway, as shown by exactly how they, squid, and presumably other cephalopods control their tentacles.
Beyond that, shrimp aren't cephalopods, which are a class within the phylum of molluscs. They're crustaceans, a subphylum within the phylum of arthropods. And, yes, you'll get people talking up spider intelligence.
They're wrong, too.
One can still protest what does look like animal cruelty, cutting off
one eye of female shrimp to get them to breed better. And? I'd protest
cutting out one compound eye of a drone honeybee to get them to
pollinate better. Bees aren't intelligent, either, and surely have even
less of a sensation of pain than shrimp.
So, shrimp alfredo? Dine away, unless you're vegetarian, period. Or worried about the environmental issues of farmed shrimp.
Oh, speaking of that? You'll find NOTHING about it in Robinson's article, nor on Zorrilla's website, the Shrimp Welfare Project.
I wrote in detail about the basics about 18 months ago. The crackup itself was ultimately not so totally much about theology — ie, gay marriage and clergy — as it was about other issues. One was financial independence, and, related to that, property issues. The other? Methodists require congregation clergy to rotate every three years; conservatives didn't want that. The reasons are largely the same reasons Catholics have similar — to prevent a local clergy power based.
Now? Things have hit a new level of seriousness.
The Texas Supreme Court said recently that the United Methodist Church can officially fight
Southern Methodist's plans to set itself apart from the body on
governance. SMU is the site of Perkins School of Theology, an official
UMC seminary, among other things.
Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.
Jesus is a Jew. One who's there to fulfill the law.
Setting aside the surely allegorical synoptic miracle story of the demon called Legion going into swine (set in the Decapolis and hold on to that)
He theoretically wouldn't have been around swine at all in the first place.
So, what is he getting at?
Is this an affirmation of a gentiles-only mission?
(2 Peter does talk about a sow returning to wallowing in the mud, but there's a good chance that book was written in the second century CE, after proto-Christianity and proto-Judaism had started separating.)
Big Think has a pretty good short piece on three philosophers as standard-bearers for approaches to grief.
After an initial hat tip to memento mori, it looks at each of the three: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Camus.
It's not bad as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.
It needs a philosopher of pessimism, say Schopenhauer from the 19th century or Cioran from the 20th. Or maybe, if you strip off the religious veneer, an Unamuno.
This is an issue where I part with Camus. "The Myth of Sisyphus," and above all its central message that "we must imagine Sisyphus happy," cited in the piece just before linking to the end of "Life of Brian" about looking on the bright side of life, has always struck me as a wrong move.
Let us quote the whole ending, in translation:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
OK, let's unpack.
I have no "necessity" (as in psychological, not logical) to imagine Sisyphus, or myself in similar circumstances, as happy. That might be a way of mocking god or the gods, but I'm pretty sure Camus is a good secularist, so, to me, not only should it be true that "You don't tug on Superman's cape," but "you don't spit into the wind [of fate]" and then laugh, or smile.
What in detail does that mean, beyond my riff on Croce, though? (Jim, not Benedetto!)
First, was Camus as a womanizer in part talking about "the thrill of the chase," per an old Deep Purple song? If so, I think he was wrong on that, too, and I think it's a variation or subset of the above.
There's also a false dichotomy. I can see the universe as not sterile, and not futile, but at the same time, per Genesis 1, תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ or tohu wәvohu in English transliteration — formless and void. Rejecting futility doesn't mean embracing happiness. Also, per Camus' words, he could be seen here, or accused here, of riffing on Nietzsche and postulating Sisyphus as beyond good and evil.
Next, what is the "higher fidelity"? Camus doesn't totally get into this.
The big issue is that we must look critically at Camus' framing. I've hinted at this with the Nietzsche comment, but we need to go further.
In the original myth, Sisyphus was an automaton. He was condemned to push this rock.
So, to riff on Camus, "We must first imagine Sisyphus with volition." An automaton can't really have emotion.
Or do we have to imagine that? For Camus, we do, I think, but do we have to for other interpretations? Can Sisyphus still have a consciousness, even if Zeus in some way controls all his motor neurons?
Anyway, I think Big Think gets it wrong. Sisyphus is certainly not fighting grief, or even generalized loss.
And, I think absurdist Camus is the wrong incarnation of Camus to be riffing on Sisyphus.
Rather, even if he can't physically revolt, Sisyphus imagining himself happy is man in revolt.
I was thinking of a long-ago read that I called "the best three-star book I've ever read," and that might still be true.
A so-so to decent book that could have been so much better
Occasionally I'll penalize a book for having a good, even a great, concept and just not doing it full justice, and this is one of those occasions.
This book rates at least five stars for its rehabilitation of pessimism and for its excellence at connecting the dots between different philosophers without an established "school of pessimism."
It ranks less than five stars for not fulfilling its potential and overlooking three major areas.
Dienstag's project of rehabilitation for philosophical pessimism is done well. He begins by stating two core tenets of philosophical pessimism, that it is anti-systemic and anti-optimistic. He also, in his preface, indicates he will most focus on where pessimism plays out in the arena of political philosophy.
From this, he tackles specific philosophers who can be seen as having a pessimistic core, and groups them into cultural, metaphysical and existential pessimists
First, he shows that many philosophers in each of these three categories did not take pessimism to a world-denying, resigned conclusion. Here he contrasts the culturally engaged Leopardi to the withdrawing Rousseau, the metaphysically engaged Freud to the withdrawing Schopenhauer and the existentially engaged Camus to the withdrawn Cioran.
Dienstag then devoted a separate chapter to Nietzsche, followed by a second devoted to the central role of aphorism as a writing style within philosophical pessimism. He finishes with offering up some of his own aphoristic observations, which make several good points.
I found his outline of pessimism to be hugely thought-provoking. I would find myself connecting the dots on one particular line of thought, turn the page, and see him doing similar dot-connecting in print.
...
Now, the book's shortcomings:
The first is early philosophers. It's bad enough that Dienstag just gives a passing glance to the pre-Socratics, especially since he talks about Nietzsche's analysis of them. It's worse by far that he overlooks post-Socratic Cynicism.
Other than it possibly (though Diogenes himself has little to say on the matter) still having a cyclical, not linear view of history, Cynicism meets all the benchmarks Dienstag establishes to define philosophical pessimism. Skepticism, beyond his brief mention of Pyrrhonic Skepticism, also deserves more mention and coverage.
The second big oversight was not to include 20th century discoveries in the natural science. Quantum theory, if not antioptimistic, at least puts definite limits on human knowledge. So does general relativity. And so, they push back against his claim that scientific positivism is used up.
The third oversight comes directly from philosophy. How Dienstag could not even have a word of mention for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which is, at base, a wrecker of systems, totally escapes me.
Dienstag could have added to his three classes of political, metaphysical and existential pessimism a fourth field of logical pessimism. And he could have considered Wittgenstein here in addition to Gödel.
Now, it's true that Dienstag, in his preface, limits his focus to "pessimism (as) a philosophical sensibility from which political practice can be derived." That would rule out Gödel and Wittgenstein, to be sure, but not the Cynics.
Couple of other nitpicking points.
Here and in interviews, Dienstag calls cynicism (lowercase) a negative philosophy. First, cynicism as lowercased is a psychology, not a philosophy. Greek Cynicism is by no means a negative philosophy. For that matter, the same applies to skepticism the attitudinal state vs. Skepticism the philosophical school.
For someone new to the field of philosophy, let alone political philosophy, this book might be five-star worthy. But, to me, Dienstag falls short of that mark. And, the last observations were just about enough to three-star it for me.
I finally did so in the end precisely because this book could have been so much more.
Or, beyond this book, the Big Think authors (and Camus) needed to read some Edward Arlington Robinson.
Also, I just read Wikipedia's article about Camus' play "Caligula." Really? Trying to make Caligula himself, even if we discount the worst of the slurs against him, into Sisyphus 2.0? Ye gads.
The first is from a mod, not a question-poster or a regular commenter. Well, actually it's from John Meier. I've not read all three volumes of "A Marginal Jew," but I read the first eons ago and I've read enough otherwise about Meier to be kind of dumbfounded that he thinks there actually were 12 disciples. I'm neutral at best on the idea of Israel-symbolism attesting to vs. detracting from, the idea of authenticity. I can see where Meier would think that this is part of Jesus proclaiming himself as the new Israel.
That said, the mod notes that — duh — it's clear that more than 12 followed Jesus.
So, other than symbolic value by gospelers, why would he believe that Jesus picked out 12?
Dale, in reality, that's Corinth 2,000 years ago. Like some Corinthian Jesus-fearer is trekking off to Jerusalem, Judea and Galilee with a checklist asking people within the Jesus-fearer communities there "did you witness the resurrection"?
As for another post from a few years ago, the idea that 1 Corinthians 15:3b-5 was an earlier creedal statement but 6-7 may be Pauline? Per the chapter, verse 3a has Paul's "what I have received." While this does not have the added "from the Lord," the language which he uses to introduce the Eucharist, which many scholars believe he invented, it at least leaves open the possibility he's claiming divine revelation.
Beyond that, since Paul was an irregular visitor to Jerusalem and Caesarea after starting his missionizing, and as far as we know, never went to Galilee, how would he know a certain number of these 500 were still alive anyway?
Add this all up and Allison doesn't have much credibility. It should be added that, per a long-ago piece by me, Allison is at the conservative end of critical scholarship.
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Side note: I recently left the similar (and also blocking) subreddit r/AskBibleScholars, after seeing the creator saying he was going to migrate it elsewhere or something. (His reasoning made it look self-serving, and besides, even if he moves, he can't kill the subreddit. They live forever, even if it will be a shell.) I also blocked him.
