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Ratiocination

500,000 BTUs




This is awesome. =)

Are you kidding? A 500,000 BTU heat source to kill weeds? The Red Dragon is not really intended for garden weeding. Because we have a no-pesticide agreement, I use the torch to control weeds on our 600 ft long gravel driveway in the North Georgia mountains. In addition, it would be useful if you just wanted to light something on fire: burning off fields, starting piles of damp wood, etc.

There are cheaper smaller ones (only 100,00 BTUs) also made by Flame Engineering, but I sure like the one I have. Do you really need those extra 400,000 BTUs? A friend of mine has a smaller one that takes *forever* to show an effect. With mine, you can just wave it across a weed and it discolors almost instantly (usually enough to kill it). However, that's not much fun. A few more seconds of flame will incinerate the weed completely. Yeah, the extra heat makes a huge difference. When lit, the torch produces a 2 foot long, 5 inch wide column of blue flame that sounds like a (quiet) jet engine. That said, the flame doesn't spread much, so it's fairly easy to control. Every pyro needs one.

Like Prussia


But not quite as funny. A joke:

What is the capital of Japan?

J.

A Couplet of Quotations


From Closer:

"It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and... all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone... But the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so... the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."

(a self-referential commentary)

"Everyone wants to be happy."
"Depressives don't. They want to be unhappy to confirm they're depressed. If they were happy they couldn't be depressed anymore. They'd have to go out into the world and live. Which can be depressing."

(a commentary)



=)

On Star Wars


Saw the midnight showing of Sith on Wed. night. I love going to these things. There's a sense of bridled excitement and anticipation that runs through the lines and the crowd as the moment we've all been waiting for careens toward us. Lots of laughter, games, and hunching over laptops displaying prior episodes. It's really a quite exhilarating environment.

Several Darth Vaders showed up, one clearly superiour to all the other. The crowd went batty with cheers as he shook his fist (as Darth Vader was known to do) at the faithful Jedi. That's nothing, though, compared to the show put on at this showing: =)

Image hosted by TinyPic.com


Now that the saga is ostensibly complete, here's my take:

Episode I < Episode II < Episode III < Episode IV < Episode V < Episode VI.

The Mountain Ahead


I've got 8000+ words to write this weekend on Plato's Timaeus, Self-Deception, and other sundry topics. Unfortunately, I must exercise far more care and skill in putting together these words than I could in other cases (one of these essays counts for 50% of my course grade). Here's to some caffeine, a little creative inspiration, and a lot of mental toil. =)



(at work.)

A New Desktop Background


The Star Wars Last Supper:



Full size jpg here.

Ten Reductios


Jeremy Pierce offers a series of examples that together amount to a clever challenge the "quiverfull" mindset--the thesis that Christians ought not to use birth control (however the practice is defined or delimited) because doing so betrays a lack of trust in God. I'll watch with curiousity to see how defenders of the view respond to Pierce's point.

Productivity: On the Rise


Reading, writing, and watching movies. This is the way to spend a weekend: =)




Love Actually, is, incidentally, an amazing movie. It is, since Garden State and Return of the King, the most personally touching film I've seen.

On Reynolds and the Religious Right


John Mark Reynolds has suggested that "religious right" can be defined as follows:

A person is a member of the "religious right" in the United States if and only if, he:

a. believes basic human rights are given by the Creator God. These rights include:

1. life (hence strong support for the "culture of life" from conception to natural death)
2. liberty
3. ownership of private property.

b. believes that liberty is found in an absolute freedom to do what is right and not in the freedom to do what is wrong. There is no fundamental right to do harm or evil.

c. believes that "right and wrong" can be broadly known by reason and by divine revelation. Divine revelation is knowledge and can be used in the secular realm. However:

1. the "secular" realm (as opposed to the Church) should allow religious pluralism as much as possible since God allows for freedom of conscience.
2. limitations to religious liberty are so serious that a Christian legislator should pass as few laws as possible (in order to protect life, liberty, and private property) so as to avoid offending the conscience of the minority.
3. limitations on human knowledge, even with divine revelation, are so severe in our fallen state that no human institution should be "sure" of itself. Therefore, such institutions should always remain modest in size and err on the side of letting the guilty go free in order to avoid the false persecution of the innocent.

d. believes that given human nature and a pluralistic society that a small central government is the best means to obtain a good society.

e. believes that the Kingdom of God will not come in this life. There will be no utopia. Humans are so fallible that no one institution can be trusted with too much power. Church and state must always check each other in influence.

f. believes that of late the "secular" sphere has been hi-jacked by "secularists," those who think religion does not provide useful knowledge, and who would exclude religious knowledge from public debates.

This is an interesting string of conditions, I think, mostly because they don't seem do be entirely self-supporting. That is, one could drop one or more of them and remain, not a member of the religious right, but at least internally consistent.

Consider an example of such a creature: me. I believe something like each of the above, with an exception. I deny (b), if "right" is there construed to mean political right (the sort of right Locke, Bastiat, Jefferson, Feinberg, and Nozick have in mind in their respective works). I think humans have natural absolute (political) rights to do things that are morally impermissible. This is to say that it is morally impermissible to use force (political means) to prevent other persons from performing certain morally impermissible acts. This belief is, in my own noetic structure nearly non-negotiable. It rests, in fact, on a firm conviction of the truth of (a) and (c). Thus, I am no member of the religious right on this definition, though this conclusion is far from bothersome to me (it may, perhaps, even be a relief).

If “right,” however, is being used in a different sense in (b) than in (a), the definition is less than helpful for obvious reasons.

What I'm curious about is whether anyone can consistently affirm all of the conditions Reynolds outlines. If anything Nozick has said is close to being correct, (a) and (c) can be reconciled in the following way: a weakened cognate of (a) entails a weakened cognate of (c). Natural rights entail the legitimacy of a highly limited nightwatchman government dedicated all and only to the libertarian idea--protecting property rights and all they entail.

But what about (b)? Does not (a) entail a rejection of (b)? More specifically, it seems to me that the right to property recognized in (a3) is in conflict with the claim that there is no right to do evil. Private property, can, for the most part, be used for a variety of different ends. Some of these may be evil (and many others good). To claim that there is no right to use private property for evil, as (b) seems to, then, is to claim that there are exceptions to (a3). Only a weakened version of (a) or one with a set of exceptions can be consistent with (b). But to weaken (a) in this way is to make it meaningless. Rights which have such a large set of loopholes and exceptions aren't rights at all.

Members of the religious right as defined by Reynolds, then, have a bullet to bite. They must either drop all semblance of substantive commitment to the natural rights tradition, or drop the (admittedly tempting and often repeated) claim that "no one has the right to do a wrong."

Some try to ride this tension-ridden line; I'm suspicious of their ability to do so for any length of time without a great deal of self-deception or cognitive dissonance, however.

Derrick Darby replied...


... a month and a half later. He's "delighted that I found his work on rights useful." =)

Silly Bourbon, Trix are for Kids


Brian Leiter draws his attention to the following nonsense from Brett Bourbon at Stanford. As Leiter notes, this is just the sort of incoherent babbling that causes philosophers to be suspicious of much theorizing that goes on in English departments.

In this essay I begin with the proposition that AI [Artificial Intelligence] programs attempt to construct poems to blow our heads off. Beginning with this proposition opens up at least two pathways. The first pathway leads to the investigation of the nature of theories of mind, logic, and language. This is the domain of cognitive science and philosophy. I will say something about this pathway, but my concerns involve the construction of a second pathway, a path characterized by the transformation of the question 'what does it mean to be human?' into the question 'can one construct a philosophy of mind from literary aesthetics?'. Both questions should be understood as ways (failed ways) of trying to figure what is real as what is meaningful, what I understand as the paradigmatic goal of theology. Consequently, the mind understood in this way is both a theological and aesthetic problem, as much as a scientific question. Accomplishing the transformation of these two questions will delineate a domain of inquiry in which the relation between what counts as the mind and what counts as ways of meaning can be sensibly questioned. 

These questions are partly motivated by the conflicting claims a string of related words have on me, or anyone, words through which I emerge as a human being to myself within language: 'psyche', 'animate', 'inanimate', 'soul', 'mind', 'inhabit', 'meaning', understand', 'description', 'justify', 'I', 'we', 'mine', 'our', 'world, 'before', 'after', 'then', 'now', 'soon', 'change', and 'time'. I organize this collection around four superordinate words: 'meaning', 'self-reflection', 'mind' and 'animation'. These four words mark the primary areas of contention between the disciplines of literature, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science (or AI). I call these words and the area of contention they delimit cognitive aesthetics.

This is a good example, I think, of the phenomena I identified earlier. Garbage in, garbage out.

Method matters, and Bourbon seems to have missed this.

Blood Sport Philosophy


Philosophy as Blood Sport By Norman Swartz of Simon Fraser University.

A List: Top 10 Philosophers


The end of my philosophical study at Biola draws near (one more year). In the time I've been here, I've read thousands of pages of philosophy from dozens of brilliant thinkers. Favorites inevitably arise from such effort; here are a few of mine. Philosophers, historical and contemporary, whose writing I adore--and one or two reasons each for why this is so. =)

1. Rene Descartes--for the affinity I feel between his mind and mine.
2. Alvin Plantinga--for the clarity of his thought and academic role model.
3. Aristotle--for careful, systematic inquiry.
4. Peter van Inwagen--for his razor-sharp wit and prose.
5. Robert Nozick--because he's right, damnit, and he's right with style!
6. John Martin Fischer--for his friendly and refreshing honesty.
7. John Locke--a wonderful mix of clever dreaming and practical, down-to-earth work.
8. St. Thomas Aquinas--see number 3.
9. St. Anselm--author of the Proslogion and father of the ontological argument.
10. Plato--author of Phaedo and father of the philosophical project.
(They are roughly listed above in the order of my preference).

On Kuhn


I today completed what's very close to the final manuscript of my Kuhn paper to send in to Sorites for publication (it was recently accepted by the review board, pending these changes). I substracted nearly 300 words from the paper, and in a flurry of inspiration added nearly 1000; it's a better piece for it, and I trust that many points which before were "hanging" are such no longer. The title is now Kuhn, Metaphysical Realism, and Reduplication, and the abstract will read as follows:

I offer in this paper an analysis of one troubling passage in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. First, I lay out a dilemma for Kuhn; that he is confronted with either an incoherent formal contradiction or a form of metaphysical anti-realism. Second, using reduplicative propositions, I attempt to carve out a third reading which avoids the dilemma. Finally, I answer two objections to the coherence of my reduplicative reading. In doing this, I dismantle one reason many have found compelling to view Kuhn as a metaphysical anti-realist.

I added a few necessary citations, including one to one of my favorite passages of van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will. Find a PDF of the final article here

Now that's what I'm talking about


One of my favorite sorts of meals. =)

Institute for Humane Studies


Today I recieved notice that I have been named as a Humane Studies Fellow with the Institute for Humane Studies for the 2005/06 academic year. This is quite nice of them; the package deal includes some side benefits and a fellowship. I'm told that there were 550 applicants for the fellowship this year. Winning one, then, is what I'd call pretty sweet. =)

Undergraduate Philosophy at Biola: Time for an Upgrade


The undergraduate philosophy department at Biola is getting a substantial upgrade this Fall—Tom Crisp is joining the crew with a full-time appointment. He leaves behind a tenure-track position at Florida State). This is exciting news for several reasons.

First, Crisp is already a promising scholar. He recieved his PhD in philosophy from Notre Dame (Alvin Plantinga was his dissertation advisor) in 2002, and since then has already written a dozen or so articles in peer-reviewed professional journals and edited a book. Additionally, Crisp has what amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy over his head from Alvin Plantinga himself:

Take, for example, the pride of Talbot's philosophy department, Tom Crisp. He earned his master's degree in philosophy of religion and ethics from Talbot. Then he excelled at the University of Notre Dame, which has one of this country's top Ph.D. programs in philosophy. Crisp studied under Notre Dame philosophy of religion professor Alvin Plantinga, an evangelical who is one of the most respected philosophers in this country. Having graduated from Notre Dame, Crisp took a job as assistant professor of philosophy at Florida State University. At last year's meeting of Metaphysical Mayhem—the prestigious, invitation-only, "Who's Who" of metaphysics—Crisp was asked to give a paper. Crisp is "widely—and in my opinion rightly—regarded as one of the best young philosophers around," Plantinga says.

Provided that Crisp can make good on Plantinga’s proclamation, his ongoing scholarship and service to the profession will only add to the value of a Biola undergraduate philosophy degree. This will have a sort of backtracking effect, I predict—and increase the value of the degrees even of those who’ve already graduated.

Second, Crisp is relatively young. This means that should he choose to stick around Biola for a long time (and key indications suggest that this is the case), he could make a lasting contribution to the program for decades to come. That is, he’s not going to be dying or retiring anytime soon. Over the next thirty years, hundreds of undergraduates could potentially be impacted by his intellect, teaching, mentoring, and friendship. Additionally, Crisp adds to the critical mass of the undergraduate department’s younger constituency. Make no mistake—Ciocchi is a gifted teacher and I respect the man a whole lot. Nonetheless, he lacks a youthful enthusiasm for the discipline that Ten Elshof so often emanates. This particular sort of enthusiasm is contagious, and, in my experience, can only rarely be gotten from “old” professors. Thus, Ten Elshof + Crisp = a thriving environment for enthusiastic inquiry.

Third, I'm particularly pleased that Crisp is joining the undergraduate department, rather than Talbot's. There are enough undergraduate philosophy majors to deserve a full-time professor in addition to Ciocchi and Ten Elshof--and Talbot is already adding Richard Davis to their faculty come January. It's only fair that we should get an all-star player this time 'round too. =)

Fourth, Crisp seems to be an active thinker with a variety of interests. One look at his CV suggests this much. He has already published in a variety of areas (though concentrating thus far in the area he wrote his dissertation in), and this bodes well for future students—having a teacher with a plethora of projects and passions can only contribute to a quality classroom experience. That he published several extremely high quality articles while still in graduate school is prima facie evidence of ingenuity and enterprise, features which will only serve him and his future students well in the classroom.

All of this is to say that I'm quite jazzed about the change. I hope to take an independent study with him next Fall on van Inwagen's Beta rule of inference. Given that it's his first semester teaching at Biola, it would be no surprise should he turn down the proposal; but it'd certainly be nice if he accepted. =)

Happiness is...


... a new book. Or two. Or three.

I got three books today: On Nozick; Robert Nozick: Property, Justice and the Minimal State; and Robert Nozick by Edward Feser, Jonathan Wolff, and David Schmidtz, respectively. These should provide good political-philosophical meat for me to sink my teeth into this summer. =)