Top blogging of 2020

Rankings are as of Sunday, Jan. 3. As I normally post once a week, and never more than twice a week, as this is not my primary blog, and I've already got material lined up for here, I pushed this back a couple of weeks. Not all are from this past year; they're simply the most popular of that time.

No. 1? People like to talk about the Antichrist and his/its "mark of the beast." Problem: Revelation never uses the word "Antichrist." Nor does it talk about "the man of lawlessness." So what's the diff between them, if any? I explored that in December 2019, just in time for Christmas then.

No. 2? Plato, meet Dr. Anthony Fauci. The hero of "The Resistance" in trying to keep federal government discussion of coronavirus control science-based, Fauci told a Platonic noble lie last March about not wearing masks, then doubled down on the alleged necessity of that last summer. I took him to the ethics woodshed and gave him a huge spanking. (He has since admitted engaging in a SECOND noble lie, this one over the percentage of Americans who need either vaccination or previous contraction of the disease to provide "herd immunity.")

No. 3? Sharon Hill in late 2018 said she was no longer a Skeptics™ card carrier. But, she didn't repent of her previous Brian Dunning fangrrlism. I tackled all of that.

No. 4? Speaking of Brian Dunning, this 2010 post, originally untitled, somehow went viral early last year and I eventually titled it as "Libertarian pseudoskeptical pseudoscience." Brian Dunning, the gift that never stops giving.

No. 5? Hobby Lobby-connected Museum of the Bible officially admitted last year it had bought a peck of forged Dead Sea Scrolls. Left to clean up the mess? Old seminary classmate of mine Jeff Kloha; I blogged about the work he faces, the possible pressures to play along with Hobby Lobby on some things, his wrongness on some exegetical and text-critical statements related to the DSS, and more. Read away.

No. 6? What do GIFs have to do with David Hume? More than you might think, as I discussed here last year.

No. 7? Beware the Ides of March and Indo-European cognates! This was a fun one to write, talking about Caesar as would-be rex, the German Reich and more.

No. 8? More problems for reincarnationists. I'm not a Gnu Atheist, but things that catch my eye that slap down either Western or Eastern religions on fundamental issues will start me to blogging. This one had two parts. First, per Thomas Nagel's famous piece, how could a reincarnated human soul, if it moved a ways "downward," map onto a bat? Second, what's with this idea of "progress" in reincarnation in general, and how its devotees define when a new life is progress and when it is regress?

No. 9? Me comparing my path with that of another Lutheran become atheist, Ed Suominen. An old one from 2013, updated last year.

No. 10? Inspired in part by two Jewish philosophers, the well-known Walter Kaufmann and online correspondent Dan Kaufman, I took their thought — and that of many others — of claiming that Christianity is all about orthodoxy while other religions, and above all, Judaism, are all about orthopraxis, to stern task. Just ain't so, I said.

Mossner: Hume the Human

The Life of David Hume by Ernest Campbell Mossner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a great book on Hume the human. But, because Mossner has so little, relatively, on specific philosophical stances and ideas of Hume, that's the primary reason it doesn't get a fifth star. 

NOTE: This is an extended version of my Goodreads view, with some additional comparison's to the Harris "intellectual biography," whose review, also extended, I posted a week ago.

And now, a few thoughts on Mossner.

First, on style, he comes off at times as more British than American!

Second, he perhaps goes too much into Hume’s family history.

Third, he does disagree with James Harris and his 2015 on some elements, notably re the Treatise.

First, per Hume’s writing to Hutcheson re his reaction to the Treatise? Let us quote, via Mossner: “And tho I am much more ambitious of being esteem’d a Friend to Virtue, than a Writer of Taste; yet I must always carry the latter in my Eye, otherwise I must ever despair of being serviceable to Virtue.”

Well, later, Hume, by the time of his essays, had decided that for reasons of money and other things, his bread was better buttered on the side of a writer of taste, and that his rejection of the Treatise was in fact "the manner not the matter."

Specific to this, at the end of the 1730s and beyond, is the issue of "young Hume" vs "old Hume," whether there was a separation, and whether or not "old Hume" rejected "young Hume" of the Treatise. Mossner, contra both Harris and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in what I think reflects a larger shift in interpretation, says there WAS a split. Call me an old fuddy-duddy of Hume studies or whatever, but I think he's right and Hume's own words confirm that.

Mossner misses a follow-up here, and I think it may be deliberate. (In general, contra Harris' claim that Mossner had too much affection for Hume, despite the drier style of the "intellectual biography," if anything, Harris appears blinded by his own over-affection at times.) If indeed the rejection of the Treatise was the matter not the manner, what does that say about Hume's later "spinning" of the issue?

Mossner, re Hume and the Edinburgh professorship, again differs strongly with Harris. He notes that Hume really wanted it, up to the end, that his comments after not getting it amount to sour grapes, and he should have known better.

Mossner also deals better with at least one particular aspect of Hume the historian, vis-à-vis his delay in publishing the essay “On the Protestant Succession,” than does Harris He goes into more detail about the ’45 and how it entwined itself with Scottish friends. He notes that Kames, for example, went radio silence at this time.

Mossner has a lot on the personal side on his time in France as both Lord Hertford’s personal secretary then as official embassy secretary. Lots on his relationship with Mme de Boufflers. Doesn’t indicate whether it was consecrated or not. But, in this area, and from here through to Hume's deathbed, he is humanized.

Also, has lots from letters to or about Hume, even if we have few of Hume’s own.

Re Beattie, he does not discuss Hume’s racism at all, let alone his revision of his footnote in “Of National Characteristics” in apparent direct response to Beattie. Claims Beattie wrote his book with emotion-laden appeal precisely to try to get under Hume’s skin. Shades of “Treatise” level passions! Overall, I think he gives Beattie too thin of treatment here.

On Hume’s dying, has more on his insistence that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion would be published, somehow or another, especially after Adam Smith seemed tentative. (Eventually, the Plan B was what had to be carried out, as Hume’s namesake nephew was the publisher.) And, befitting a biography of Hume the human, he describes Hume’s dying days, and Hume’s equanimity, in full detail.

But, because Mossner doesn't discuss racism (or the boatload of other stereotypes of alleged national and ethnic natures in Of National Characteristics), he doesn't discuss whether or not Hume's equanimity would extend to any non-White he met in person.

Yes, Mossner wrote in 1954. And his 1980 revised, pre-desktop publishing programs, is nothing more than appendixed notes at the end of the original. Nonetheless, racism was front and center in America by then and an appendixed note could have been slipped in.

Boswell comes off a ghoul, not only visiting the dying Hume to suss him out, but the dead Hume’s funeral. (Other writings claim that Hume soften Boswell, but Boswell couldn't soften Johnson.)

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The Intelligent Designer and ... teeth

It's common among skeptics and secularists of various types to point toward the shortcomings in human evolution to refudiate postulators of an Intelligent Desiger — a critter which is, of course, actually the old literalist Christian dual-omni god in a thin shift of philosophical drag.

The most common retorts to the ID from the world of bad human design if designed and evolved have traditionally involved three body parts or areas: bad backs, fallen arches, and stuffy, infected sinuses. (Appendices have fallen off the chart as we realize they actually do something in us and other critters and their continued existence doesn't refute the IDer.)

I'd like to submit a fourth body part, from personal experience: teeth.

The good old dog of Intelligent Design didn't even recognize that H. sapiens would invent crop domestication, and then, after finding a way to sift wheat from chaff would learn how to sift wheat bran from white flour? Or how to squeeze juice out of a certain cain plant, then boil that juice down to white crystals?

The IDer also didn't anticipate, per an old Isaac Asimov story, that we would live 2-3x as many heartbeats as the typical mammal?

But! The IDer let sharks renew their teeth regularly ... as in regularly ... and individual teeth, not a whole set at once.

And, we don't even have to be sharks. Per this site, elephants, kangaroos and manatees continue to grow new teeth from the backs of their mouths, at least for their molars.

Oh, and beyond IDers?

Why hasn't a laser-based system of burning teeth out, at least above the stem of the root, been invented to replace the barbarity of a yanker? 

Editor's note: I plan on at least occasionally doing a second blog post a week on this site this year. A few of these additional posts may be like this one, combining personal experience (at 6-5, born flat-footed, with a tall back that sometimes "goes out," and allegedly "enlarged adenoids" as a kid) of having visited the "yanker" earlier this year.

James Harris awakened me from my Humean dogmatic slumber

 I'm sure that he had no idea he was doing this, though we've had a brief exchange of emails, focused on Hume's racism and related issues.

But, he did.

What follows below is an edited and expanded version of my Goodreads review of his 2015 biography of Hume.

A week from now, I plan to post an edited version of my review of E.C. Mossner's old 1954 bio, including some points of comparison (and definite contrast) with Harris.

This is the second in a series, one that started with last week's post about presentism, as that piece was focused on Hume (as a stand-in for Enlightenment philosophers in general) and racism.

After the Mossner biography post, I plan to post every other week about some specific aspects of Hume as brought to new focus, and awakened from uncritical dogmatic slumber about Hume, by Harris and Harris prodding me into looking at some of Hume's lesser works, or anew at some of his major ones, and his major ideas.

With that, let's dig in!

Hume: An Intellectual Biography by James A. Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a tough, tough book to review. I took a lot of notes. Early on, my appetite whetted by the Introduction, I would have been very ready to five-star it. The framing of Hume as a man of letters, or to go French along with the mot of him as "le bon David," as a "litterateur," seemed a promising new focus. And yet?

Direct vs indirect passions is an interesting matter, one that was but touched on by Harris. It probably could have been studied even more, and by Hume as a philosopher as well as Harris analyzing him as a philosopher. (One of the upcoming posts in the series will be about "young Hume" vs "old Hume," whether or not there were two different Humes, and if so, how much "the passions" was part of that split.

Harris rejects the claim that Hume was a "divided" philosopher. So does the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Other commenters on this book accept that, and accept Hume's own claim he rejected the Treatise because it was "the manner, not the matter" of how it read, rather than what it said. Rather, this is to accept Hume's public self-preservation at face value. Especially on the issue of the passions, Hume DID reject "the matter" of the Treatise and never did accept it — or return to it — again. (Mossner disagrees, and I think he has "the goods" to at least partially support this.)

Then, the biggie. I knew what to look for, as far as how Harris handled it.

By the time I got to Harris' mishandling (that's the best I can call it) about Hume's infamous footnote about "the Negros" in "Of National Characteristics," it lost a star right there, and was slipping a bit before then. Sadly, at the time of this review on Goodreads, no other reviewer had noted this there.

Hume was challenged on his racist views in his own time, above all by the Scottish philosopher James Beattie. Harris treats both the footnote and Hume's editing of it, and why, in only a footnote. He then claims that it was NOT in response to Beattie, though the evidence is pretty clearly against him. Worse, in an email, he said he couldn't remember what he wrote. This area will be covered much more in the specific post.

Also, the sharpness of Hume's reaction to Beattie undercuts le bon David, which is part of Harris' whole focus.

How it handled his "Essays Moral and Political" in general shoved it into three-star territory. That said, Harris later admitted to me that he agreed many of the essays are "shallow" [and they are], along with other things. I'll be offering a few thoughts on "Of National Characteristics" as part of a piece on Hume and race and going beyond my "presentism" piece.

Then, his handling of Hume the historian moved it back into four-star range.

But, next, while this is an intellectual biography, it could have been more personal on the Hume-Rousseau situation. Finally, tying back to "that footnote," Hume's reaction to James Beattie — and Harris' take on that — undercut "le bon David" of legend.

Harris claims Mossner, in his bio of Hume, is too hagiographic. 

And, that leads me to the New York Review of Books, take, which said: "Mossner’s life of Hume is suffused with an affection for its subject that, according to Harris, sometimes obstructs a 'properly dispassionate' examination of the facts.” This is the petard-hoisting area. Again, I think Harris is guilty of some of this himself.

I'll touch on some of this when I do my comparison-contrast of Mossner's bio with Harris'.

Next, whether it's Hume himself stressing the claim, or Harris burnishing it? On "The Natural History of Religion," polytheistic gods weren't, and aren't, always kind and cuddly, and monotheistic ones aren't always harsh father figures. Contra the former, see Shiva, or even more, Kali. Contra the latter, see the deified versions of the Buddha in many "denominations" within Mahayana.

The book was generally good on Hume's skill as a historian. And, I agree that Elizabeth was an absolute monarch and that the Stuarts got bad press. Nonetheless, in his later revisions to his volumes of history, Hume comes off as a "trimmer." If that's part of how one gets to be "le bon David," pass.

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Thoughts against presentism (and an intro to critical study of Hume)

In my calling David Hume a racist or Aristotle sexist, professional philosophers such as Massimo Pigliucci have accused me of "presentism." (That said, I think Massimo seems to be softening, at least on Hume.)

I reject the charge because I reject the concept.

Briefly, here's why.

As I see it, "presentism" is an absolute adjective.

All I have to do is find one non-sexist in Aristotle's Greece, or one non-racist in Hume's Great Britain, and the idea is undermined.

And, while I may not think of particular Britons, some of the French philosophes were certainly anti-racist. And, I point to Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" as anti-sexist.

And, a quick Google let's me go straight to a contemporary of Hume's, per this piece:

Hume was challenged on his racist views in his own time, including by the Scottish philosopher James Beattie, who wrote: "The empires of Peru and Mexico could not have been governed, nor the metropolis of the latter built after so singular a manner, in the middle of a lake, without men eminent both for action and speculation.

"Boom," in a word. (That said, Beattie only challenges his anti-Indian racism directly. Of course, White Europeans knew little about Timbuktu and even less about the Great Zimbabwe at that time.) THAT said, per this philosophical essay, Hume revised his original racism agasint Blacks and American Indians to just an anti-Black racism in specific response to Beattie.

THAT said, the IEP, in its article on Beattie, reports that his magnum opus, "An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth," made Hume mad in general. Wiki, in its piece on the essay, notes Beattie had a habit of slash-and-burn attacks on opponents. And, a note: The essay, in German, was part of what "awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber."

Read the whole IEP article. Beattie offers a good refutation of racism in general.

Of course, Hume wasn't alone among Enlightenment philosophers, and said philosophers, while writing about morals, did little for practical moral advancement in their societies.

A second way of refuting Massimo, Dan Kaufman, Julian Baggini (added, see below) et al would be to hoist Hume by his own petard.

If nobody at the time of Aristotle were anti-sexist, and nobody at the time of Hume were anti-racist, than to use Hume's own phrasing, anti-racism or anti-sexism must have arisen "viz a miracle."

On anti-racism, the third way of refuting Massimo and Dan is to refer to any number of recent insightful books of social history which show the rise of "race" as a social construct in early Enlightenment Europe. 

So, I have three refutations of presentism in the charge of racism against Hume. (And, against Locke, Kant, Voltaire and others of this era.) I have two refutations of presentism in the charge of sexism against Aristotle.

And, bonus? One is directly philosophy-connected, via linguistic philosophy. (Sidebar: I wonder how much the issue of what is an absolute adjective and what is not has been studied in modern linguistics and philosophy of language.)

QED.

Update, Feb. 12: Baggini, per a new post in my series about Hume that I'm adding in response to him, wants to make "presentism" a non-absolute descriptor. I reject that, for the reasons above. Even if I accepted that the idea of presentism, empirically, should be defined in majoritarian terms, per the logical side, specifically, psychological logic, I would reject his claim that the minority side in 1700s Scotland was so small that we can essentially ignore it. This statement applies not just to him, and not just to the issue of presentism vis-a-vis Hume and racism.

Update, Feb. 18: Per a discussion of that Baggini post at MeWe, bringing up vegetarianism to defend charges of presentism while talking about slavery in general, rather than race-based slavery, as "race" is basically a human construct and "race" as understood in the modern West is an Enlightenment-times European intellectual construct, is a way to lose your argument from the start in my book.

As for the the analogy in general? I don't think it flies, for various reasons. One, science can never give us a straight, set-in-stone answer on what animals are sentient or not, if "sentience" is part of what drives vegetarianism. It's a philosophical demarcation problem, but one that philosophers won't agree on. Ditto on what animals suffer pain or not.

That said, vegans score vegetarians for inflicting pain on animals through milking, egg-stealing, etc.

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Schedule of related blogging (now updated and expanded):

1. A more in-depth look at Harris' bio of Hume than my Goodreads review, Jan. 14;
2. A more in-depth look at Mossner's bio of Hume than my Goodreads review, Jan. 21;
3. Hume, racism and general bigotry, and ultimate rank hypocrisy, Feb. 4;
4. Julian Baggini goes in the tank to defend Hume, Feb. 18
   
5. Le bon David: David Hume as litterateur, March 4;
6. Is David Hume just a bundle in my mind? Or just a petard hoisting? March 18;
7. Young Hume vs Old Hume: The passions and more,  March 25;
8. And, an add-on, on the issue of Hume, race and slavery: Exposing what seems to be willing lying on his part in "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," June 12.

The addition of the Baggini piece is the key change from the original number of posts, and in turn affects the full schedule. Given that I've been on an alternate-weeks schedule, the last post may move to April 1. 

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More here on Hume's racism, which also notes that Hume believed in polygenesis.

Luther excommunicated

A little over six months after issuing his Exsurge, Domine bull against Luther, Pope Leo X took the final step 500 years ago today and excommunicated Luther. At least he got the perverse pleasure of Leo issuing a second bull just to announce the excommunication. The photo above is from National Geographic's piece, with a modern re-enactment of Luther's famous, or infamous, burning of Exsurge in December 1520.

That's part of what made Luther's trip to the Diet of Worms a few months later dicey. Charles V (whether "Great" or not) could revoke the imperial safe-conduct at any time, and claim (or even gin up) papal pressure. Luther, having been called a Hussite plenty of times in the past, was aware of just what happened to Jan Hus.

Although Lutherans trail several other Protestant groups in the US, globally, the different wings of Lutheranism are behind only the Anglican Communion, as NG notes.