This is a strawman. For one thing, a major focus of Al-Ghabi is the way in which elites choose to personally identify as "oppressed and marginalized," and this seems much harder to explain in terms of systemic constraints, particularly because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.

This is also a strawman of my position, because of course I acknowledge that even elites are bound to and by the very systems that give them their status. I have been commenting on what the American urban system produces. Should people be morally outraged by such a system? Sure, just as reformers were rightfully outraged over the excesses of the Gilded Age, slavery, etc.

American slave owners were surely also part of a system; that doesn't eliminate all of their moral culpability. And at any rate, even if it did and no individual slave owner bore any responsibility for the practice of slavery, it would still be the case that the system of hereditary chattel slavery in the US was morally abhorrent and in need of dramatic change. Likewise too for the Holocaust or the Holodomor. One doesn't need to embrace "Sartrean bad faith" to think these sorts of systemic events have moral valance. And if the outliers have moral valance, so to do the less outrageous cases of the Gilded Age or our new Guilded Age.

You've set up a false dichotomy where one either acknowledges systematic constraints (something Al-Ghabi certainly does) or gives systematic issues moral weight, but never both. Yet both are relevant. Those who campaigned to end slavery, serfdom, child labor, Jim Crow, etc. did so specifically because they saw them as moral issues, and they were successful, at least in part, because they eventually convinced others that their moral stance was correct.

The strawman lies in trying to reduce the entire project to a "gotcha." It isn't. If the books and scholarship that helped develop the ground for the "Great Awokening," and what has become the mainstream consensus in urban elite circles (e.g. Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow") have value, then surely a study of, and reflection on, how this social movement has actually pursued its stated goals is just as worthwhile.

But that wasn't even my original point. My original point was that I wouldn't hold up America's urban centers as a shining example of what the future ought to be, precisely because they seem to generate a social structure more akin to Saudi Arabia or Qatar than the what the leadership class actually wants. Yet those states, despite their tremendous wealth, don't represent good models. They are inherently unstable (for instance, most of America's major urban centers erupted into widespread riots not all that long ago), so even if GDP growth and technological innovation were our sole criteria they would have notable flaws. And I would argue that these systems make even the elites in those societies less free. Nor are people entirely constrained by systems. Even a member of a ethnocentric, jingoistic bronze age priesthood could remark of his own ethnic group in the 6th century BC: "the people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice" (Ezekiel 22:29, and note that this is not "Enlightenment individualism," the blame and punishment falls on the corporate whole precisely because society acts as a whole)

No doubt, institutions can constrain people, but people can (and often do) also change institutions, which is why it is hardly off base to point out cases where goals and actual policy are completely at odds. In particular, it's relevant when discussing why establishment parties in the West keep losing elections, particularly in cases where the populist right fields candidates with glaring problems.

I've seen the theory that it's a loyalty check, but also a way to create cover for other appointments. The Senate can reject Gaetz and show they have "some backbone," and then bow on everything else with some credibility.

Given just how hated Gaetz is by his own party, I wouldn't be shocked if this one actually fails, although it might very well go through. If he is withdrawn, maybe Giuliani can go in!

Actually recent scholarship from Christiaan Kappes has shown that the NT is explicit that they are not Jesus' siblings. There have always been very good arguments for that position (even apart from tradition), but Kappes co-authored a book in which he shows that the syngeneusin of texts like Mark 6:4 literally means "relatives of some other womb" (link). In any case, the Magisterial Reformers are all in agreement that Mary was ever-virgin (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli).

Thanks for this. I suppose this might explain why the Greek Fathers tended to write off Mary having had other children.

I didn't find that book overly interesting, either, but what he is doing at the beginning is trying to establish the primordial nature of dominance hierarchies (which he will later relabel as "competence hierarchies"). The idea is that hierarchical competence generates self-confidence and health (which at that lobster-level is seen primarily through serotonin). A large part of his point is that, pace Feminism, hierarchical orderings have been around as long as lobsters, and are not going away anytime soon. I see Peterson as correcting important cultural errors, but at a relatively superficial level. "Make your bed, do the right thing, be an effective communicator, do not fall into feminist traps, etc."

Sure, brutes have their hierarchies. Man can form his hierarchies much as the beasts do, or he can order them according to proper authority, in accordance with what is "truly good for the whole." We need authority and social structures, and we need those structures to be engineered in line with a realistic picture of human nature, while nonetheless enabling us to transcend that nature, what we already are ("the given") for what is "truly best." This is the idea of authority in Plato for instance, why he elevates the authority of reason (only logos can unify a person, just as it is the Logos who resurrects St. Paul from a death of personhood and autonomy, lost to a "civil war in the soul" in Romans 7). I think a similar notion can be found in St. Augustine, Aristotle, St. Thomas, or even Kierkegaard and Hegel.

I suppose what bothers me is the general tendency of naturalistic explanations of human hierarchies to lose sight of the role of the transcedent in human freedom. A naturalistic understanding of man—man as the rational/political animal—need not supplant the role of the transcedent, but it often does without careful attention.

The "competence hierarchy" sort of captures this, but not really. And anyhow I think historically, it's hardly chiefly feminism that has allowed for incompetence at the top. This has been a pernicious problem throughout human history, Marcus Aurelius elevating his incompetent son to the purple and ending the era of the "Five Good Emperors," for instance, or Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero taking Octavian's place through inheritance and sheer inertia. Or there is Tsar Nicholas II or Hitler's disastrous interventions in military affairs, and the great multitudes of men with good names who have "failed upwards" through history. The current state of the Russian military is another example.

At any rate, the dominant form of feminism (and much "anti-racism") seems to be largely comfortable with current hierarchies and disparities, so long as more diversity is seen at the top.

However, I will add that much criticism of Peterson, "how dare anyone assert that hard work and discipline might be good," is entirely off base.

But I find the whole topic of "Christianism" interesting (a term that some use for cultural Christianity). Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, and even Richard Dawkins to a minor extent hold up Christian culture as an important value, yet without professing Christianity.

IDK, it seems very much in the mold of the "post-modernism" advocates of "cultural Christianity" tend to rail against. Its focus on instrumentalism (a sort of outgrowth of the Protestant "prosperity gospel" perhaps?) seems to put it further outside the realm of Christian belief than belief in the "God of the philosophers" of antiquity (seemingly returning to some degree). I don't see how a family hewing to "Christianity as principles for success in modern life," wouldn't want to have Saint Francis committed to a psychiatric institution, or how Saint Augustine giving up his promising career and dispensing with all his family's wealth wouldn't be seen as "taking things a bit too far." The definition of human flourishing that makes Boethius or St. Maximus torture/mutilation and death (or most of the Apostles') "worthwhile" and even "choiceworthy" needs to be dramatically different.

Now, Charles Taylor does paint a more sympathetic picture of people who might consider themselves to be "cultural Christians," as those who admire and sometimes desire to pursue spiritual goals, but find themselves too drawn in and busy with the world. So I suppose my objection is more to the narrower range of cases where "Christianity" is advanced as a sort of set of principles for temporal success, as generally defined by secular culture.

Thomas

https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Absurd%20-%20Thomas%20Nagel.pdf

I really liked this piece when I first read it, but I slowly began to think it was a (more palatable) example of all that is wrong with modern philosophy.

Pointing out that super-wealthy residents of New York are predominately of certain ethnic persuasions while their servants are of another, and that social mobility among immigrants is greater in South Dakota in the midst of an economic boom doesn’t explain very much. The question is whether and how you can tie such facts to a liberal-progressive social value system.

Sure, that's exactly what al-Gharbi and others have done. I don't think it is just some "unavoidable problem of urbanization," that the oh-so-progressive residents of the Upper West Side balked at unused hotels in their neighborhoods being used as shelters for Manhattan's homeless during the pandemic. It was the recurrent theme of "yes, progressivism... but not in my backyard." Instead, the homeless were concentrated in poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Nor is it an accident of urbanization when urban school districts have effectively re-segregated their school systems. That was an intentional policy choice. Likewise, an expanding racial wealth gap that eclipses that under Jim Crown (and that between Arabs and Jews in Israel) didn't "just happen by accident."

Likewise, "university towns" (e.g. Chapel Hill) might be plenty progressive, but the residents still often fight tooth and nail against any high-density housing being put up in their communities. Chapel Hill is a great example because, despite being overwhelmingly progressive, it still remains the case that majority black Durham happens to have a county-line (and thus a school district) that neatly wraps around the city limits, so that its students remain segregated from the children of the progressive elite across the border.

What I’m saying is that the negatives you’ve been pointing out are not the direct result of the value systems I and other liberal urbanities embrace, but exist in spite of them, and are tangential to them.

I think there is ample evidence to show this is not the case. There is a wealth of empirical evidence and case studies on the "not in my backyard phenomenon."

You said you lived in New York, but I’m getting the impression you didn’t grow up in or near a big city.

No, I grew up in a rust belt city, so the wealthy had already largely fled the city and settled in the surrounding environs. They were welcoming of new arrivals, so long as they stayed compressed in the city limits. And what a great welcome it was, routinely one of the top 10 worst violent crime rates in the US, where freshman classes at the high schools would dwindle by 75+% by graduation day.

But that's precisely al-Gharbi's thesis (and I'm glad we have someone to be our Ezekiel) Of course the urban elite are sincere. Championing the cause of the marginalized is how they justify they own wealth and status to themselves and society. And of course they see a sort of comradery with what is essentially their servant class. The European nobility felt the same way, even as they had that class continue to pay them an indemnity for "giving up their serfs" (i.e. those workers' parents and grandparents) into the first World War (a policy only stopped by revolution). They're their "benefactors," just a Gilded Age industrialists were able to convince themselves that they were the benefactors of their workers (even after events like Johnstown).

It's the same sort of moral degeneracy that convinces a wealthy middle-aged man who (pre)dates young single mothers who are desperate for support that he is an irresistible casanova.

I think the threat of actual civil war is more wishful thinking than a likely possibility.

I was referring to the migrants who are often fleeing civil wars, state collapse, or major depressions in other countries, not the West. That is, offering people marginally better conditions than Syria and Venezuela isn't exactly a high bar. At any rate, I wouldn't call such an outcome as respects the US or EU "wishful." More "disastrous."

It suggests to me that the cities need to form alliances to support each other in the absence of political support coming from the rest of the country. People like myself who derive great value from this urban culture will continue to be loyal to its ways regardless of the economic challenges.

Alliance against what? Surely not military, since these places have been denuded of almost all heavy industry, not to mention that they rely on other parts of the country for food and other resources, while their populations are also by far and away the least likely to say they would fight for their state.

Although, assuredly, if it came to that, we know who would end up being press ganged into doing the fighting. And I'm sure some technocratic case could be made for why it wouldn't make sense to throw the well-educated, with so much investment poured into them, into the infantry.

To be sure, there is much valuable in these urban centers and universities, but I think it's entirely off base to think they are superior in everything. There is also a lot that is critically wrong with these areas. As Musa al-Gharbi puts it, in terms I can certainly relate to:

I cast my first presidential vote for John Kerry in 2004—and not begrudgingly. It’s humiliating to admit in retrospect, but I believed in John Kerry. At that time, I subscribed to what you might call the “banal liberal” understanding of who is responsible for various social evils: those damn Republicans! If only folks in places like podunk Arizona could be more like the enlightened denizens of New York, I thought, what a beautiful country this could be! What a beautiful world! I had already shed a lot of this in the years that followed—but the vestiges that remained got destroyed soon after I moved to the Upper West Side. One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s something like a racialized caste system here that everyone takes as natural. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you. If you need things from the store, someone else can go shopping for you and drop the goods off at your place. People will show up outside your door to to drive you wherever at the push of a button. It’s mostly minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds who fill these roles, while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served. The former earn peanuts for their work, the latter are well off. And this is all basically taken for granted; it is assumed that this is the normal way society operates.

And yet, the way things are in places like New York City or Los Angeles— this is not how things are in many other parts of the country.

For instance, these locales are among the worst preformers in terms of helping immigrants and their children attain eventual parity in income and education with natives. Maine, the Mountain states, etc. do this significantly better. Notably, the places where both migrants and natives are most likely to go from the bottom of the income distribution to the top are North Dakota counties, where the petrol boom has led to a chronic "labor shortage," which has enticed businesses to raise wages and working conditions.

We might also recall exactly where unrest related to routine police abuses has centered.

They’ll keep coming until they are replaced by automation.

Ha, well at least: "they're welcome until a machine can do their job cheaper," is honest.

The urban-based economic engine of the 21st century will mainly benefit those with enough education and the right skills, which leaves out much of the urban poor, regardless of race, and most of those with the right skills and education still struggle with college costs, childcare and housing prices. I suspect most of the reason for the huge disparity in income in the cities is because, as the source of our economic engine, they just happen to be the places with the highest concentration of super-rich.

I don’t think either the left or the right has a fix for this.

Yes, this line has been pedalled by folks like Charles Murray for the better part of a half century now. Any day now the sci-fi technology will finally develop and there will be no work for the undereducated masses! They most be content with whatever the "cognitive elite," see fit to bestow upon them via the dole, just like the Latins who were replaced by the "economic innovation" of industrial scale slavery and the superior economies of scale of the latifundium.

And yet, strangely, whenever these segments of the population see their incomes rise the crisis of "llabor shortage!" is proclaimed. These folks are superfluous to the economy of the future, nonetheless, millions more must come lest we face a "labor shortage." Curious.

Now there’s a nice unbiased view for ya. I especially like the phrase “ruthlessly exploiting them”. That’s a nice touch. My 102 year old father has 24 hour caregivers , who tend to be Nigerian, Philippine or from a Slavic country. Are they naive souls being “ruthlessly exploited”? Most of his helpers have been in this country for decades, are savvy about their options in the economy and what they can do to improve their career situation. If they are willing to take jobs that native-born residents reject, who is being exploited?
When did your ancestors arrive in the U.S. and what jobs did they take that others didn’t want? Was Ellis Island a plot to exploit naive foreigners?

Just like the folks in Southeast Asia wouldn't make our clothes for a quarter a day unless it was better, an opportunity right? This is also a very old line. No doubt, they are savvy agents as well, so surely industrialists couldn't possibly be exploiting them.

The last time the US had immigration rates this high was the Guilded Age. Does this mean things were good then simply because desperate people kept being willing to come to the US?

Yet surely offering living conditions marginally preferable to being in the middle of a civil war doesn't amount to much. No?

:up:

Exactly. Trump is extremely incompetent and is hiring an entire clown car of other incompetents, so I imagine he will face another mid-term disaster. It's actually good that he won the popular vote, since he no longer has a personal incentive to try to further enshrine minority rule into our electoral system (nor do I think he cares too much about actually helping other "conservatives" win in the future).

Unfortunately, it's not prima facie clear that holding huge popularity contests is the best way to achieve good governance. Democracy is often held up as a "good in itself," and it well might be one to some extent, but it seems that its biggest benefit is that it gives leaders some incentive to make voters happy and removes particularly bad leaders on a regular basis. However, in the US case, the electoral system pretty much guarantees a two party system, which then leads to the possibility of voters continually shifting back and forth between parties to punish whoever is in control during any period of long term decline.

I don't think these analyses actually tend to differ that much, they just focus on different things. Your classical neoliberal advocates, along with your political liberals, tend to focus on immigrations effects on national level accounting. They do this because immigration looks overwhelmingly beneficial in this context.

Immigrants tend to be young so they lower your dependency ratio. This is a boon when transfer payments to seniors dominate your national budget. They might not fix the problem of a tsunami of retirees expecting to cash in on underfunded benefits, but at the very least they help to "kick the can down the road," (and we can also cynically appeal to the "benefit" of undocumented workers who are forced to pay in to benefits they cannot receive.) Defense is the other major national level expense, and it doesn't cost significantly more to run the US military if we add even tens of millions more people. If anything, it gives us additional manpower if a major war starts. Everything else at the national level is a pittance compared to these, so immigration comes out looking very good, and it boosts GDP growth.

However, if you shift to state and local budgets (which for the US is actually larger than federal spending, once entitlements are taken out), things look dramatically different. This is why nativists look here for their data. Immigrants sometimes represent a huge drain on the resources of local governments, particularly school districts. They bring a lot of new students into a district, generally with dramatically higher levels of special needs (which tends to mean dramatically higher per pupil expenses if you actually give them the support they need), while at the same time not offsetting this expense with higher property tax revenues, since they tend to be low income. And of course, immigrants tend to be crowded into already low income areas and low performing school districts. As liberal as elite suburbs might be, they are not going to take more than a token proportion of resettlement, so the costs overwhelmingly fall on the municipalities housing the very same people who are competing with new arrivals for jobs and housing.

In terms of inequality, the picture looks even worse. Obviously, adding millions of low net worth, low income (at the very least in the medium term) residents spikes inequality. And high immigration also seems to tank support for unionization and social welfare spending, even as an oversupply of labor reduces wages. I have written about this before: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10332/page/p1

In particular, immigrants impose congestion effects on other immigrants, meaning that prior immigrants have an economic incentive to see lower immigration in the future (something we seem to see at play in exit polling data).

So, I think the West absolutely could sustain much higher levels of immigration, if people didn't act like they actually do, particularly if the well-off didn't shift the costs primarily on to the lower classes while having most of the benefits accrue to them. But realistically, I don't think this sort of self-sacrifice is ever going to happen, which means ideal levels of migration are probably much lower. Particularly, I don't think it's at all beneficial for people in the developing world to have this issue leading to far-right regimes dominating the West.

Anyhow, we saw what happened when labor force growth was significantly constrained during the pandemic (in part due to a precipitous drop in migration, and also an exodus of older workers). Suddenly McDonald's was offering $18 an hour in rural areas, where that amount can actually make people homeowners. Real wage growth for the lower half of the income distribution was the best it had been in a half century. Meanwhile, in a radical reversal, inflation was actually making the top worse off.

And it's not surprise that during this period the NYT, WaPo, etc. were full of op-eds ringing the tocsin re inflation and bemoaning how the stimulus had "gone too far," and how we had a "massive labor shortage." Then, when things reversed to their usual trend, with the top capturing almost all real wage growth and the bottom half seeing their real wages actually fall again, you had op-eds bemoaning how "these stupid plebs don't get how good the Biden economy actually is and what a great soft landing we are experiencing." It's almost comic.

So of course people gravitate towards a dictator who claims to want to protect them from recalcitrant elites. This is how the monarchs gained their power in the early modern period, how the Roman Republic died, etc. It's a sort of historical cycle of sorts. And sometimes it even works out, e.g. it's hard to claim that Octavian wasn't a massive improvement over the self-serving nobility battling for their own prerogatives, but often it doesn't.

Edit: anyhow, my main point was simply that I wouldn't necessarily hold liberal cities up as shining examples of some "new 21st century economy." If America's largest cities are the model for that new economy, then Saudi Arabia or Qatar seem like they might be the paradigm for what that economy looks like writ large

The immaculate conception is a (relatively quite recent) Catholic doctrine that stems from their particular understanding of Original Sin. So, while "most Christians," might tend to affirm it, because Catholics are still a majority of all Christians, there would be a great many who don't. And, at any rate, for most of Catholic history it was not an explicit doctrine. People, even people who went to Catholic school, also seem to often misunderstand it at any rate, sometimes even taking it to mean that Mary also lacked a human father (it's actually about her being conceived without Original Sin as inherited guilt, which the Orthodox deny, leaving them with no need to posit such a conception).

As for Mary's perpetual virginity, the Gospels are ambiguous on this, and the Church Fathers, reading them in their native language, did not think the text indicated in undeniable terms that Mary gave birth to more children. That Jesus tells his disciple John to take his mother on as an adopted mother and to care for her is often taken to indicate that she did not have other children to take on this responsibility. It's possible that Joseph had children from a prior marriage (nothing is said about this), and also the term for "brother" is used frequently in the NT for people who do not share a biological relationship.





As an aside, I had a few people, particularly middle aged Christians, talk up Peterson to me in glowing terms. I picked up his book and was quickly disappointed. It just seemed like fairly generic self-help literature framed in standard materialist terms—not explicitly reductionist, but certainly leaning that way. Far from being a "voice of wisdom for young men," the book seemed to be telling young men exactly what they do not need to hear.

For instance, he opens with a narrative about lobsters. Male lobsters who are big and strong have more "feel good chemicals," in their nervous systems. With more feel good chemicals, lobsters act more assertive and aggressive. By doing this they get to consume more resources and have more sexual partners. Therefore, we should act to boost our feel good chemical levels, that we might consume more and sleep with more women. Such wisdom...

Leaving aside the number of wealthy celebrities who end up in misery, commiting suicide or engaging in suicidal drug abuse, this seems to leave off anything like the classical connection between the virtues and happiness, or development of the virtues and real freedom. You don't see anything like Boethius, who finds himself to be more free in prison, having lived for justice, or Socrates who points out that the mob can do "nothing bad to a good man."

It's particularly sad because I think our culture could certainly benefit from a modern Boethius or C.S. Lewis. There is certainly an interest in "tradition," particularly amongst young men, but unfortunately this tends to manifest as little more than watching films like 300, and reading garbage like "Bronze Age Mindset."

Well, I considered sharing this quote from D.C. Schindler in the thread on Christians who don't believe in Christ (aside from as a good role model and source of "practical wisdom;" one is free to believe whatever one likes after all, it's just that no one should take it too seriously).

But it's as appropriate in this context:

Why might this neutralizing of truth claims be desirable? The point seems to be, above all, not to deny any particular truth claim outright, in the sense of taking a definitive position on the matter (“It is absolutely not the case that leaves are green, and anyone who says that they are is therefore wrong.”), but, just the opposite, to avoid taking an inflexible stand on one side of the question or the other. We want to allow a particular claim to be true, but only “as far as it goes,” and as long as this does not exclude the possibility of someone else taking a different view of the matter.13 Gianni Vattimo, the Italian philosopher-cum-politician, has advocated irony as the proper stance of citizens in the modern world: democracy works, he believes (ironically?), if we are sufficiently detached from our convictions to be capable of genuine tolerance of others,whose convictions may be different from our own.14 Such a stance is what Charles Péguy took a century ago to be the essence of modernity. According to him, to be modern means “not to believe what one believes.”15 Along these lines, we might think of the status of truth claims in terms of the so-called “right to privacy,” as analogous, that is, to private opinions. A thing is permitted to be true, as true as it wants to be, as long as that truth does not impose itself on others. Its truth is its own, as it were, and may not bear on anything beyond itself, may not transgress its particular boundaries. It is a self-contained truth,and, so contained, it is free to be perfectly “absolute.”


Let us call this a “bourgeois metaphysics." 6“Bourgeois” is an adjective meant to describe any form of existence, pattern of life, set of “values,” and so forth, that is founded on the principle of self-interest, which is posited as most basic. To speak of a “bourgeois metaphysics” is to observe that such an interest,such forms, patterns, and values, are themselves an expression of an underlying vision of the nature of reality, namely, a view that absolutizes individuals, that holds that things “mean only themselves”; it does not recognize things as belonging in some essential manner to something greater, as being members of some encompassing whole, and thus pointing beyond themselves in their being to what is other, but instead considers them first and foremost discrete realities.On the basis of such metaphysics, it is perfectly natural to make self-interest the basic reference point for meaning, the primary principle of social organization.17 In fact, given such a view of the nature of reality, nothing else would make any sense. This principle of social organization does not in the least exclude the possibility of what is called “altruism.”18 Quite to the contrary, we just articulated an expression of the “bourgeois metaphysics” precisely as a kind of concern for others: we are willing to affirm something as true only on the condition that we leave open the possibility for others to take a different position. We thus seek to give others a special respect. Toleration is, at least in our postmodern era, essential to this view of reality. In a certain respect, then, there is nothing preventing our judging that the “bourgeois metaphysics” is radically altruistic or other-centered.

Nevertheless, this judgment demands two qualifications. First, insofar as it is founded on a “bourgeois metaphysics,” it follows necessarily that any altruistic act will be equally explicable in purely self-centered terms. In this case, altruism will always be vulnerable to the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” such as we find,for example, in Friedrich Nietzsche: there can be no rational disputing the charge that what appears to be done for altruistic reasons is “really” motivated by the prospect of selfish gain.19 Second, the affirmation of the other inside of a"bourgeois metaphysics” is inevitably an affirmation of the other specifically as a self-interested individual. Altruism is not in the least an “overcoming” of egoism, but rather the multiplication of it. This is the essence of toleration: “live and let live” means, “let us agree to be self-centered individuals; we will give space to each other so that each may do and be what he likes, and will transgress our separateness only to confirm each other in our own individuality, that is, to reinforce each other’s selfishness.” One thinks here of Rilke’s famous definition of love, which may indeed have a deep meaning in itself, but not so much when it appears on a refrigerator magnet: “Love consists in the mutual guarding,bordering, and saluting of two solitudes.”20

Or we might consider here Nagel's ironic response to absurdity, one response to the post-modern era (and one can consider the hyper-irony of most far-right discourse too; nothing really matters or is really serious), and alongside this the more technocratic responses, which deflate every question in philosophy and life into a sort of bland "pragmatism." One can still call out social and economic elites for hypocrisy when these intellectual trends prevail, yet elites are hardly being inconsistent if they simply don't care about being hypocritical. Particularly, if nothing is really good or bad, then they are already saints of a sort simply for being even halfway decent while being under absolutely no obligation to be so. (And this is precisely the reasoning Bertrand Russell, who led a fairly odious personal life, used to elevate himself in moral standing over actual saints).

Anyhow, I do think it is fair to question if people who deny the reality of wisdom might rightly be said to deserve the mantle of "lovers of wisdom."

Anyhow, liberal parties world wide have a wider "male problem," that cuts across other demographic categories. This seems to be a particularly pernicious problem because of how it seems to be effecting family formation (and in turn, civic engagement).

I think the Democratic Party would find this essentially impossible. First, because the primary system in the US, where candidates are selected by relatively quite small numbers of older/wealthier/more radical voters invariably pushes both parties away from the views of the median voter and towards the fringes.

But also because the Democrats core wealthy urban constituency, who make up most of its leadership class, have come to frame almost all of its core issues as continuations of the US Civil Rights movement (similarly, in Europe decolonization is the mold). There is no compromise here. Opponents are simply on the wrong side of history. Unpopularity is sort of irrelevant if you think your issue is a replay of allowing black citizens to vote in the 1950s. The Civil Rights Movement was also initially unpopular, although it was still the right thing to do.

The problem is that it isn't clear that issues like migration fit this mold, at least not in the wider public's view. Increasing migration currently polls worse for the US as a whole then Harris fared in many rural, overwhelmingly white Southern counties... yet elite opinion is at total variance here, and this is the common thread of success for the far-right across the Western world.

Anyhow, I can't help but think that feelings on these issues are sometimes extremely self-serving. Migration can only ever directly benefit a vanishingly small percentage of the population in the developing world. Remittances, people sending money back to their home countries, do more (they absolutely dwarf aid flows), but realistically something like defense level spending on aid (or what defense spending should be, a meaningful % of GDP) which helps people in their home countries is the only way to benefit the vast majority. Yet elite opinion has gravitated towards the option for helping the world's poor that just so happens to help a small select few while also giving them an endless pool of exploitable labor, continued upwards pressure on rents in urban areas, and continued downward pressure on prices for people with the excess wealth to consume.

And sometimes this cynicism is right out in the open. People will praise immigration for all the great restaurants they get to eat at regularly, while ignoring that the food services industry is particularly brutal and wages there totally unable to provide a decent standard of living in urban locales with high rents. Or they will point out how illegal immigrants are such a boon because they pay into Social Security and Medicare without being eligible for benefits, which is the very height of cynicism (and at any rate, it will certainly hurt society to have millions of mostly low wealth seniors who are ineligible for benefits in the long run, with the costs simply falling on their children).

Depends on what you mean by "make an economy thrive." Liberal urban enclaves in the US certainly thrive in terms of aggregate GDP figures. In terms of inequality they are the worst places in the US or Europe. In terms of social mobility they are matched only by the abysmal showing of the Old South. In terms of having a "racial caste system," they are in many ways even worse than the Old South. In Alabama or Kentucky, one might at least find white citizens driving an Uber, selling shoes, etc., and the largest inequality tends to be between the marginally employed and the small town dentist or car dealership owner, not between the similarly poor and billionaires.

I am always reminded of this when I have to travel to major cities or recall my time living in Manhattan, and consider how virtually 100% of the people who worked menial jobs there (which pay absolutely abysmally compared to the cost of living, comparatively far worse than in poor rural areas even) are immigrants from the developing world. During the height of the 2008 recession I worked as a dog walker in Brooklyn's affluent Park Slope neighborhood and encountered the bizarre world of "the help," in these neighborhoods, all the nannies being women from the Caribbean taking care of other people's children 14+ hours a day and leaving their own in publicly funded, overcrowded childcare facilities; all the cleaners and drivers, and my fellow co-workers from various parts of the globe, many without a leg to stand on for fighting back against rampant wage theft because they weren't citizens.

It's like Musa al-Gharbi says in his new book, the urban elite simultaneously like positioning themselves as saviors of the world's poor while ruthlessly exploiting them. For a long time I pushed back on conservative claims that urban elites favored foreigners to the native poor, but I'm starting to think it's absolutely true. They constantly draw flattering parallels between the "hard working," (i.e., appropriately desperate and pliable) new arrivals versus those pesky natives who refuse to "get with the 21st century" (the century where their wages and life expectancy have stagnated, or as often declined, for half a century straight.) And now that Trump has won a majority of male Latinos a predictable distinction between "deserving new arrivals" and those recalcitrant second and third generation Latinos is being drawn.

Of course, the people who see migration as something of a black and white "human rights issue," are also never going to house said migrants in their communities or schools in meaningful numbers. "Not in my backyard."

I could say more, but I think the best summary is that the "economy of the future," of places like NYC, Boston, LA, San Francisco, etc. starts to look a lot like the Gulf states and much of Latin America.

E.g.,



At the same time, Ukraine has given me grave doubts about these economies ability to defend themselves. They are far more a Carthage than a Rome. Surveys show a marked decline in their citizens' willingness to countenance fighting for their country and the service economy doesn't produce the prerequisites for defense. We can see this in the absolutely gigantic GDP disparity between Russia and the EU, and the fact that EU arms production remains absolutely anemic despite this advantage. North Korea seems better able to ramp up production than some of the world's largest economies.





By way of contrast, in most of the world, which offers far less by way of standard of living or political freedom, and where large minority populations that want to break away from their government are fairly common, the norm is still on more like 2/3rds to 3/4ths. The map sort of undersells the gap as well, because in the urban hubs of the "new economy," willingness to make personal sacrifices to defend that wealth is dramatically lower than outside the cities.

Can isolated pockets of vast wealth survive in a world dominated by scarcity while their citizens are unwilling to fight and while also being reliant on a steady stream of outside goods for the basic necessities of life? Maybe, such mercantile societies have existed before, and while they are often targets of conquest they sometimes managed to last for long periods. Can such societies survive long term in a modern context while continuing to have ever higher levels of inequality and ever lower levels of social mobility? Perhaps. Automation is changing warfare and security in the same way the stirrup did at the dawn of the Middle Ages, such that small elite cadres of well-equipped soldiers are more effective than mass mobilization. But most of the masses' rights were won precisely because they had leverage due to how their buy-in was essential to winning wars. What happens when they are increasingly irrelevant?

I am left thinking the "economy of the future," is more a sort of globalized neo-fedualism, although lacking religious checks on elite behavior, rather than anything admirable.

Well, on one view critiques of philosophy along the lines that it is "useless," might be taken as a complement. It is among the few pursuits that is rightfully "pursued for its own sake, making it "higher" in another sense.

Well, I suppose it's sort of like asking: "can I be a 'Marxist' while rejecting dialectical materialism and the workers' ownership of the means of production, and while embracing neoliberal economic policies, voting for Donald Trump, and idolizing Reagan and Thatcher?"

I mean, sure, you can call yourself a Marxist, but you shouldn't be surprised if 99+% of Marxist and all the mainline Marxist authorities/institutions in the world reject your claim to be a Marxist.

I've been to a lot of Evangelical churches over the years (Baptist and non-denominational), regularly attending some. Also some Methodist and Presbyterian. I have regularly attended Catholic services, went to a Catholic university/seminary, and spent time at retreats at their monasteries. I currently attend an Antiochian Orthodox Church. In any of these disparate venues, I am confident that the denial of the Resurrection would be considered the gravest of heresies. This is going to hold true for my Mormon and Amish neighbors as well.

No doubt, there are people who call themselves "Christians" who have deflated the faith into some sort of allegorical/philosophical/cultural complex of sorts. This was a "thing" in early 20th century Anglican intellectual circles for instance (C.S. Lewis has a bit of fun with this trend in "The Great Divorce.") There are certainly people who embrace such positions today. Jordan Peterson seems to be suggesting something like this, although I haven't paid too much attention to him. People advocating "cultural Christianity," (e.g. Elon Musk now, lol) seem to be in the vein.

But such "Christians" certainly can't affirm the Nicene or Apostles' Creed, nor any of the Ecumenical Councils. And they clearly fall outside even the broadest definitions of Christianity that most Christians themselves would recognize.

There are similar issues with any popular lable of course.

2. The boundary between mental & extra-mental objects is blurry even if we accept this distinction. Pick any object X you regard as extra mental with following features a,b,c..etc. Its conceivable that I can alter all the features you perceive of X by changing your brain chemistry or neural structuring. In which case, the object X would just be some empty "thing in itself" with no inherent features to it, If we still establish an identity across change. Apply this argument to all objects in the world and you will end up reducing the entire world to one substance, which is neither mental nor extra-mental, since it cannot be grasped via concepts or experience. We have arrived at a contradiction. The boundary between extra mental and mental objects belongs to neither camps. Kant ran into this problem and there hasn't really been any satisfactory response to it.

Your post seems to be assuming something like representationalism, then knocking it down to prove an "anti-metaphysical" position. This sort of argument has been done a lot. I think the realist counterpoint is generally going to be to point out that we are under no obligation to accept representationalism, let alone the idea of "objective knowledge," as a "view from nowhere," or modern subject/object dualism for that matter.

Particularly, the account of perception above is going to be rejected. No doubt, if we were radically different, we would experience differently. As the old Scholastic adage goes, "everything is received in the manner of the receiver." But you are elevating potency over act in your analysis, such that hypothetical science fiction brain manipulation technology bordering on magic is being used to make a blanket pronouncement about perception, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Yet how we experience the world isn't arbitrary. And, on any scientific account of perception, the content on the senses isn't arbitrarily related to what we perceive (Matrix-style science fiction examples notwithstanding). No human has ever perceived anything in a vacuum. A human being in a vacuum will be a corpse, as will a human being placed in the vast majority environments that prevail in the universe (e.g. the bottom of the sea, inside the Earth's mantel, on the surface of a star, etc.). Experience occurs in a very narrow range of environments. The environment is not irrelevant to perception such that we can speak simply of "neurons" in a vacuum.

Thus , a weakness in the claim here is that it relies on an inappropriate reduction and separation. Of course if we say "perception is just neurons," then we can vary the environment as much as we want in our thought experiments, allowing perception to drift arbitrarily far from whatever is perceived. But show me the evidence of anyone having experiences once their brain has been removed from their body, or in a vacuum.

Sense awareness is the result of a physical system whose locus is the body of the perceiver, but that body is not an isolated system cut off from the world, the system responsible for any meaningful interval of perception extends outside the body of the perceiver. It takes a constant exchange of energy and causation across the boundary of the body to sustain conciousness and life.





Right, moral realism seems like another very obvious example.

Certainly that's one example, although I am mostly aware of the via negativa in terms of apophatic theology. I would say the entire Thomistic idea of limiting essence, the generally anti-reductive bent of classical metaphysics, the way things exist in "web of relations" and, as Deeley puts it while drawing on John of St. Thomas, a "semiotic web," etc. Also the way particulars are "virtually contained" in their principles (e.g. Scholastic commentaries on Diophantus of Alexandria)—which reminds me of discussions of Kolmogorov Complexity and the interplay of information and algorithmic entropy, or the notion of "virtual quantity" in Aristotle and Aquinas as being a "measure" of the degree of participation, possession, or perfection vis-á-vis some qualitative trait/generating principles.

IDK, maybe I am just seeing connections that might turn out to look superficial upon rigorous inspection, but there seems to be a lot of conceptual overlap. And in the whole "self-organization" literature space, which I've read a decent amount of, people very much seem to be reinventing the Aristotlean wheel, which is funny given the focus on semiotics (Deacon included) and that this is an area largely developed in the medieval period until interest kicked back up again recently through Peirce (although sources will sometimes present it as if he or Sausser invented the notion, and a similar thing happens with phenomenology).

I have noticed an unfortunate trend though, that the folks who tend to want to do more "scientific philosophy," tend not to look backwards as much for ideas.

I read this awhile back. Good book. Thought it just sort of begged the question when it came to "what constitutes computation/information?" by assuming that any folks arguing for the independent existence of information must be assuming some sort of Cartesian homunculus. Not that I necessarily disagree with Deacon, I just didn't think he really argued the point in terms his critics might agree with as representing stronger versions of their own pancomputationalist positions.

I read Etienne Gilson's book on natural selection later, and I wonder if, going back to this, how I might reappraise this.

I find a ton of overlap between the "classical metaphysics" (i.e. the (neo)-Platonic/Aristotlean/Stoic synthesis of the Patristics and Scholastics) and the whole semiotic, information theoretic, and complexity studies approaches to the natural sciences/natural philosophy (the semiotic connection is more obvious because C.S. Peirce was working right off the Scholastics).

Politically, Poland may be safe for the moment, but those antisemitic, anti-Muslim sentiments haven't gone that far underground - and the refugees keep on coming. Of course, if Putin picks them off one by one - a possibility of which they are all keenly aware, the question of elections becomes moot

Demagogues might often use xenophobic rhetoric to take advantage of the fact that the West's migration policies are deeply unpopular, even among many minority communities at this point. However, the key reason the center and the left's efforts to push back on the ascendent far-right have failed is an absolute inability to countenance major changes or compromises on migration.

First, because the current policies disproportionately benefit the elite, keeping wages low, rents high, and unions out, but probably moreso because elite opinion has shifted such that any opposition to high levels of immigrant is necessarily racist.

I think Musa al-Gharbi's "We Were Never Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite," does a pretty good job explaining how this happened. “Why is it that the ‘winners’ in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society?” is its key question. The main thesis is that, in the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis, faced with surging inequality, elites (in both status and wealth) felt the need to justify their own success to themselves and others. They did this by framing themselves as defenders of the oppressed—of minorities of all sorts. Long gone are the days where Clinton ran to the right of Bush on immigration, to the applause of labor unions (and long gone is the relevance of unions to national elections in the US).

I find this eminently plausible (and the book itself is well argued). It also explains why virtually every issue for the elite tends to get framed as a sort of rehash of the American Civil Rights Movement or the decolonization efforts of the mid-20th century vis-á-vis Europe. One need not worry too much about public opinion if one is on the "right side of history." After all, the Civil Rights Movement was initially very unpopular as well.

The problem here is that it's unclear if immigration is appropriately thought of as a "civil right" of sorts. Nor is it clear what the potential scale of the consequences will be if migration continues to undermine public support for the modern welfare states that underpin the success of liberal democracies.

At any rate, it isn't good for winning elections. While Biden's border policies might still seem racist, oppressive, and far from just for elites, they are deeply unpopular with the public for the opposite reasons. Increasing migration is less popular in the United States than Kamala Harris was in rural Kentucky counties this election. Support for a meaningful constriction of migrant flows is the majority position and the highest it has been in a quarter century.

But could Democrats even pivot on this? I sort of doubt it. Already the finger pointing has started for their latest disgraceful showing and, on seeing that Trump won a majority of Latino men, "toxic masculinity" seems to be getting identified as the main problem, not a disconnect on priorities.

I wasn't comparing the US and the Taliban, I was pointing out that the US did attempt to set up a liberal democracy in Afghanistan, as well as a domestic military capable of defending it, spending 20 years and hundreds of billions in the process.

That military collapsed on contact with the enemy and routed and domestic support for democracy never became particularly strong.

The early Cold War solution to the Taliban and their refusal to deliver up Al Qaeda would have been to back the more secular Northern Alliance, made up of various minority groups, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, etc. This was indeed the initial US strategy in terms of deposing the Taliban, and it worked great, driving them out of power mostly through the use of US airpower with a few forward observers on the ground.

The US could have backed that group, encouraged some sort of stable power sharing structure, and offered to provide them with the support they needed to maintain control of the military situation. Then they'd have leverage over them they could use to push women's rights, liberalization, etc.

Perhaps this would have worked better (it seems unlikely to have worked worse). Korea was a repressive dictatorship when the US was first propping it up after all. Maybe it wouldn't have. Iran is probably the key counter example here.

American values make it hard to use America's massive military supremecy. Could America stop the Houthis from firing missiles at shipping? Sure, that country is already starving and in crisis. A 19th century style punitive campaign that knocks out its power plants, water system, and port infrastructure could be done in a weekend, or the US Navy could simply stop letting the aid shipments the country relies on in. Would this really be a better option though?

The difficulty is that bad actors will leverage Western reluctance to use force, which is why you can have a country relying on aid ships to sustain itself willing to fire on shipping, or Iran willing to send proxies to rain rockets down on US bases even as it is virtually defenseless to punitive retaliation. But any sort of military conflict that tries to minimize civilian losses is extremely difficult and it becomes vastly more difficult if one also wants to engage in democratic nation building.

Do violent conquests sometimes eventually benefit the subject populace? It certainly seems it has happened in history, e.g. Roman colonization of Britain and other northern European areas. But those seem far more the exception than the rule. And even there, the benefits accrued to the descendents of the Gauls, etc., who would come to identify as Romans, not to those in the first generation, who were subject to the pillaging, looting, and slave taking of the initial Roman conquest (not that they weren't subject to this in their own wars already though).

like Talibanian Afghanistan

Like the US and its allies did for 20 years? The US public isn't even willing to support Ukrainians, who are actually willing to fight for their freedom in large numbers and seem plenty competent enough to win if given decent support. Initial support for helping them repel an invasion fell apart as soon as it was associated with a mild rise in prices and, all things considered, a fairly mild amount of expenditures. But that's democracy.

And it's hard to imagine the public being any more bought in to defending Taiwan, let alone occupying some place that doesn't want to be occupied.

The most successful US interventions: (West) Germany, Japan, and Korea had a level of involvement and expense that the current consumption focused politics of the US (and EU) would never allow for. Other relative successes, Kosovo and Iraqi Kurdistan, could just as easily have gone the other way, like Vietnam. Simply put, democracy itself warrants against such evangelism. This isn't 1946; people's views tend to be very zero sum. Something like Eisenhower doing a massive deployment to stabilize Lebanon could never happen today.

And note: the US didn't try to push democracy on South Korea originally. It applied some pressure, but that was largely internal, as it generally has to be.

Mike Duncan, who did the History of Rome and Revolutions podcast and put out a few popular histories, had a very good analogy back when he was covering Rome during the Obama-era.

When Rome still had rivals, it needed civic virtue to keep the fragile Republic going. It needed to levy large conscript armies from a willing and patriotic populace, particularly after the disaster at Cannae where Rome lost 65-80,000 men in a single day to Hannibal. It needed competent leaders, as well as at least some level of meritocracy to be able to overcome its many rivals.

After Rome finally defeated Carthage, they were left without any unifying adversary or real threat. Persia/Parthia was a rival, but a limited one, not an existential threat. At most they would take away a few provinces for a few years. Even when Rome took what is now Iraq, it wasn't particularly committed to sprawling out that far.

So, there was nowhere left to expand too. The Atlantic, Sahara, Persia, and the undesirablity of the north bracketed in the Republic. Thus, in the moment of Rome's great triumph, it suddenly became apparent that there was more to gain from trying to control what Rome already controlled then in trying to build up or expand the state.

That's the big parallel. With the USSR/Carthage gone, elites turned inward and began sharpening their knives. At the same time, for both, the military goes from a citizen force of conscript levies to a professional army—as Gibbon puts it in the Decline and Fall— "elevating war into an art, and degrading it into a trade."

China is a decent parallel to Parthia. And the large scale migrations to the West creates a similar set of problems to those faced by Rome due to the huge influx of slaves after their rapid expansion—most notably soaring economic inequality.

Rome faced a decline in all their institutions, and likewise America sees its unions wither away, its social clubs going extinct, its churches empty, etc.

But I don't think Trump is anywhere near competent enough to play Caesar, let alone Augustus. He's old and unfit, and he might not live out this term, let alone any additional ones (which he has no hope of engineering). This is probably more our Gracchi Brothers moment, or at most our Marius and Sulla.

Yes, but his party had full control of government and didn't even hold a vote on migration. To vastly oversimplify, Big Business wants migrant labor. They want wages down, rents up, and unions out, all of which are supported by more or less staying the course on current policy. Some headline grabbing moves that "trigger the libs," (e.g. family separation) is all the base seems to need.

Trump's senior citizen base wants their home values to keep always trending upwards and price stability for goods and services. Major shifts in migration levels, let alone removing large numbers of people, would cause huge problems for both. So I doubt they change much for the same reason that they ran on repealing Obamacare for 10+ years and didn't touch it—because as much as the base likes the idea of doing it they would hate the consequences.

Total immigration was higher under Trump than under Obama for most years and deportations were lower than under Obama as well, it's just that Trump adopted high profile, needlessly cruel family separation policies. But his general lack of competence and inability to pick competent leaders meant the CBP was in some ways less effective even as it widened its scope for who it would deport.

I don't know if Trump will actually do the things he promised. I hope not. But if he doesn't, his voters will be pissed.

Trump ran on immigration last time and he had the House, Senate, and Court for 24 months and they didn't even a single vote on migration, not even token changes, not even during the lame duck session. And he oversaw a 13 year high in illegal crossings. His base didn't get upset with him then. They would get upset if there were major disruptions in the economy, so he might not do much of anything.

Same for repealing Obamacare.

Maybe I'll be unpleasantly surprised, but I am thinking it's more of the same.

To me there is no shadow of a doubt that Trump will win. There are authoritarian tendencies rising in the world and the economy is hurting many people. Those two tendencies lead me to think Trump will win and there is a high turn out among republicans..

A fair point, but I actually thought this pointed in the other direction. Trump won after Brexit, with the Fac Five all winning or most winning right around that time.

Theresa Mayhem and Mo Mojo Bojo
2Dirty Dueterte
Majorly Magnificent Modi
Make Europe Great Again Le Pen (didn't quite win, but making it to the final was an unexpected win)
Outlandish Orban

:cool:

And we might also include Big Boy Bolsonaro and the apparent strength of Rootin Tootin Putin.

But since then the right wing waves have largely broken. Most of those people are out. The UK just had a hard shift the other way, and Modi lost a ton of seats, while Bibi is also looking in very rough shape. Xi is facing a Chinese economy facing a major, potentially sea change slow down. Meanwhile, Putin, the sort of arch mascot led his country into a disastrous war that destroyed and badly embarrassed his military, and had to flee his capital due to a mercenary coup.

To be sure, the anemic Western response in Ukraine (sending a handful of tanks years after it has become clear that sending actually meaningful numbers won't cause a catastrophic escalation, being unable to match Russian and North Korean shell production, etc.) is also embarrassing.

Yet in general, Trump's win seems more against the (short term) currents than with it. TBH, the exit polls make it seem like this is more of the Democrats than anything else. Biden had no business running for a second term and Harris was a bad candidate. That exit polls suggest that Trump lost significant support from white voters and yet seems likely to win the popular vote (the first GOP non-incumbent to do so in almost 40 years) should be a wake up call on Democrats. It seems to me that immigration is the number one issue carrying the far-right across the West and so far the liberal establishment in North America and Europe has largely refused to budge on it.

Of course, when far/further right parties win elections in Western countries they also don't really change immigration either. Trump seems to have the House and Senate, so we'll see. I think they will be far more interested in cementing systems or minority rule, cutting taxes, and removing various regulations than actually cutting off the supply of cheap labor or fixing the debt.

Suppose we have:
A → ~A
A
Therefore, B

In a logic with a relevance condition such that not everything follows from a falsehood. And suppose our logic also has removed disjunctive syllogism and disjunction introduction so that it is not explosive.

In this case, wouldn't it be true that:
-A premise is still necessarily false
-B does not follow from the premises by any inference even if both are assumed true?

The point being, the argument would be valid in the sense that it is impossible for the premises to both be true, but even if they were both true they wouldn't entail the conclusion anyhow.

But definitions of validity (e.g. IEP) very often will define it in both terms, i.e. that the conclusion cannot be false while the premises are all true and that the conclusion must follow from the premises or "be contained in them."

Wouldn't this be a case where the two are seperate?

I don't claim to have academic definitions of 'univocal' and 'equivocal', but at a naive level, as I'm merely winging it here, it seems to me that:

'totally univocal' is redundant. An expression is univocal if and only if it has one meaning. That's total.

'totally equivocal' is hard to conceive. An expression is equivocal if and only if it has more than one meaning. What would it mean to say it is totally equivocal?

Yes, that's a common view today. Analogy is a difficulty for logic. The move towards the univocity of being in the late medieval nominalist period (important for theology, but also for how the rest of philosophy developed) was largely born out of a period in scholasticism that was intensely focused on logic (perhaps analogous to early analytic philosophy). Yet if one wants to develop a metaphysics that avoids atomism or nominalism, it might end up being quite important to have analogy as an option.

The most obvious example where this comes out is something like:
"The shot that Lee Harvey Oswald took that killed Kennedy was a good shot."

We can say this is true, because it was something that only a "good marksmen" could regularly accomplish. But, unless we really don't like Kennedy, we would not say this is "good" in a moral sense. And yet, if we are forced to claim that the "goodness" of things like "good food" and "being a good basketball player" or "being a good teacher," have nothing to do with moral goodness, I would argue that we effectively isolate moral goodness. I don't think "castrating the Good" would be too strong a term here. By my reckoning, this change in philosophy seems to be directly responsible for the descent into emotivism in ethics, until we reached a place where Moore is forced to argue that "goodness" is just a "non-natural" quality that "just is."

Not sure what you mean by this.

I guess my first thought was essentially agreement. A syllogism with two negative premises is not valid. Making the premises inconsistent doesn't seem like it should change this.

However, I understand how the claim that "if it is impossible for all the premises to be true while the conclusion is false, then an argument is valid," flows with the idea of validity as truth preservation. And I won't deny that you can find this definition in some logic textbooks. It seems like something akin to the paradoxes of material implication in terms of the "smell test" at first glance though.

I mean, I don't think you can turn it into an argument that doesn't sound very stupid at any rate.

My thoughts were just that an argument isn't considered valid just because there is no way for the premises to be true and the conclusion false.

Consider:

A is not A
B is not A
B is A

This cannot have true premises and a false conclusion because one premise is necessarily false. But surely we don't want to claim that the fallacy of exclusive premises is true just in cases where it is possible for its premises to be true.

To be sure, one might use disjunctive syllogism to prove that B is A from the contradiction, but that doesn't make the form of the above valid.

Well, we also have cases like:

I mentioned it several posts back, but it seems possible to have an invalid argument with necessarily false premises.

You could construct a syllogism with an illicit negative, exclusive premises, undistributed middle, etc. and an inconsistent premise.

All triangles are not three-sided shapes.
F is not a three sided shape.
Therefore F is a triangle.

Aside from the first premise being necessarily false, this is not a valid syllogism. Even if we assume true premises and a true conclusion we get something like:

All dogs are not reptiles.
Chloe is not a reptile.
Therefore, Chloe is a dog.

Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.

You are correct. I was speaking to our intuition about: "This sentence is false." If it is true it is false, yet we say also because it is apparent that if it is false it is also true.

An example where we might want to argue that both premises are true might be instructive.

Suppose A = "This sentence is false."

We might suppose that "A → ~A." And, because, if the sentence is false, it will thereby be true, we might also want to assert "A" as a second premise.

The argument preserves the truth of our two (assumedly) true premises. If A is true it implies that it is also false, but if A is false it is true. Our problem here is a "truth glut," we have too much truth for A on account of both A and its negation being (arguably) true.

The inferences in OP's argument are right in line with the idea that if A is true then it is also false. And so the argument is valid in that, if we want to maintain the truth of both premises, the conclusion will follow.

However, it seems possible to construct an argument where you have a necessarily false premise that is nonetheless invalid.

For example:
All cats are mammals.
Samuel Clemens is not Mark Twain (necessarily false because they are the same person)
Therefore, Mark Twain is a mammal.

We have no middle term (and none implied, i.e, this is not an enthymeme) in something that looks like a syllogism. My first thought is that we could also probably construct an undistributed middle fallacy with a necessarily false premise.

Blame the analytics. Before that demon lord Ockham showed up we had perfectly intelligible gems like:

By way of the usual translations, the central argument of the Metaphysics would be: being qua being is being per se in accordance with the categories, which in turn is primarily ousia, but primary ousia is form, while form is quiddity and quiddity is actuality.

If we exclude necessarily false premises can we still demonstrate explosion? Or does keeping contradictory premises out of valid arguments remove explosion?

I haven't given it much thought but I am pretty sure this holds for strict implication as well.

If: "if p is true then q is necessarily true (true in all possible worlds)" then if follows that we cannot have both not-q and p. So, I guess the xor.

And my guess is that this would be true in other attempts to capture relevance vis-á-vis entailment too, since it intuitively makes sense.

See: "implications are disjunctions."

https://discrete.openmathbooks.org/dmoi3/sec_propositional.html#:~:text=Implications%20are%20Disjunctions.&text=P%20%E2%86%92%20Q%20is%20logically%20equivalent%20to%20%C2%AC%20P%20%E2%88%A8%20Q%20.&text=Example%3A%20%E2%80%9CIf%20a%20number%20is,else)%20it%20is%20even.%E2%80%9D

This plus De Morgan's Laws end up being important because we can do transformations into disjunctive normal form, which is easy for computers to check.

Just to note: tautology is semantic and contradiction is syntactic.

Sure, tautologies might be semantic, e.g. "bachelor's are unmarried men," or "triangles are three-sided." Yet aren't these really just expressing that the two terms are actually the same term, i.e. A = A, something taken to be true by virtue of its form?

Anyhow, it seems like we also have cases the formula itself is always true, regardless of which valuation is used for the propositional variables. Wouldn't these be tautologies?

For example:

(p→q) ⇔ (~q→~p) (contraposition)

Or:



Or, in the context of this thread A→~A and ~A or ~A

At least in propositional logic, my understanding is that tautologies are defined in terms of form, hence Wittgenstein's claim that the propositions provable in logic are all in some sense tautological.