Impeachment and philosophy

I'll begin this post with a timeless quote from Plato's Republic, Book V:

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,-- nor the human race, as I believe,--and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. Such was the thought, my dear Glaucon, which I would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant; for to be convinced that in no other State can there be happiness private or public is indeed a hard thing.

(In other words, why can't political rulers be more like this guy?)

The reason that the nation is in this mess is because the advice contained in the above has been flouted so thoroughly.  As I've pointed out many times already, all the major American framers were philosophical-enough people to be founders and/or members of the American Philosophical Society.  We don't have anything like that in the politician class right now.  As few as four years ago, Sen. Rubio declared in a presidential candidate debate that "we need more welders and less (sic) philosophers," apparently to the approval of the audience (while philosophy-major Carly Fiorina, also on the stage, didn't even rebut).  (To Rubio's credit, he later acknowledged value in philosophy.)

I think the American people are well aware that partisan hypocrisy is front and center - perhaps the issue - of this whole impeachment thing.  What the American people aren't agreed upon, is which of the two sides is the worse offender in the partisan-hypocrisy department.  (It's the other side, of course.)  But I think they're all quite aware that were the party roles reversed, the parties would be singing quite a different tune.

All the Senators signed an oath of impartiality.  This oath is belied what I believe to be a statistically impossible scenario: that 100 seriously impartial people would somehow almost all vote along party lines.  So let's dispense with any notion that impartiality is a serious factor in all this.  [Edit: an alternative explanation is that the political Left and Right have differing information-processing protocols, a different can of worms....]

Just about the only person prominently involved in this process who has an air of credibility and impartiality is Prof. Dershowitz, who has made arguments that certainly raise some serious questions and concerns, and are of historic import.  Dershowitz has said (on Cuomo Primetime, twitter, and elsewhere) that his argument has been twisted by critics into one he didn't make, and when he says something like that, it should tell the critics that they need to be more careful - or, as I like to put it, to bend over backwards in the name of fairness and context-keeping.  (As in: Dennett/Rapoport Rules.  For instance: Rand-bashers invariably encounter pushback from Rand-fans that the bashers are misrepresenting Rand's position.  That should be a red flag for any fair-minded person that the bashers need to get more careful and (even better) backwards-bending, but the bashers invariably don't do this - they disregard the pushback - a further and more serious red flag about their intellectual character.)

With that background, let's consider numerous facts:

By all appearances - and no one seems to contest this in good faith - Trump conditioned Congressionally-appropriated military aid to Ukraine on Ukraine's president announcing investigations, notably into '20 Dem aspirant Joe Biden and his relation to the energy company on the board of which his son sat.

It also appears that Trump got various ideas about Biden's apparent conflict of interests - something his son was warned about by people connected to Secretary of State Kerry among others who wanted no such involvement, BTW,  - from Sean Hannity's show.  Hannity's show is a cauldron of (partisan) theories about Democratic corruption (in addition to endless Trumpian talking points).  As the previous hyperlink indicates, Trump/Hannity's enemies regard these theories as kooky conspiracy theories, but Hannity was essentially proven right about the Obama/Comey FBI's partisan FISA abuse (about which Hannity/Trump's enemies were most incurious until it became too obvious to ignore any longer).  And given the partisan nature of all this, it's not like Trump/Hannity's enemies weren't involved in conspiracy-theorizing themselves about Trump/Putin collusion, debunked by the Mueller Report.  (See Greenwald for how bad this makes these conspiracy theorists/allies/enablers look.)

So it's not like Hannity doesn't have some credibility and that his/Trump's enemies don't lack a good deal of credibility themselves.  And by appearances Trump accorded Hannity's (crucial-context-omitting) claims about Biden/Burisma more credibility than it deserved.  It speaks (poorly) to Trump's flaky political-belief-formation processes which rear their ugly head elsewhere.  According to Trump's July 25 phone call with President Zelensky, the Biden/Burisma situation sounded "terrible" to him.  Now, unless there is good evidence that Trump had good evidence available to him that the Biden/Burisma situation was probably not as corrupt as he expressed in the July 25 call that it could be, then he has some legitimate pretext (in his mind, supposedly or presumably) on national security and corruption grounds for wanting investigations initiated.  The House's impeachment managers have presented a case to the contrary, i.e., that Trump did or should have known better.  And a faulty-belief-formation-process "out" here doesn't exactly work in his favor, fitness-for-office-wise.

But even granting this "out," the manner and method by which Trump conditioned this aid on investigations is the most disturbing aspect of all this.  He apparently kept it as much under wraps and related to as few people as possible, and he involved his private attorney Rudy Guiliani in it.  Rudy's involvement in this appears not to have been along policy or national-security-related lines, but along personal and partisan-political lines.  Legitimate interests in Ukraine-related corruption could have involved more fully and transparently people in his agencies and in Congress.  But it appears that he tried to hide this aid-conditioning as much as he could, which points to a culpable knowledge that this quid pro quo (and that's what it is) is dirty and accordingly wouldn't pass policy muster.  Bolton referred to it as a "drug deal" to suggest how sleazy and corrupt it is.  From plausible and fair-minded arguments I've seen, it constitutes (to this or that extent) an abuse of power.

That's where the Dershowitz Argument comes in: does an abuse of power as such constitute an impeachable/removable offense?  Here's where non-partisans should balk, as Dershowitz has vigorously been suggesting.  Dershowitz holds that there needs to be something more to the action, namely the committing of crimes (hence his support for Nixon's impeachment), else the abuse-of-power criterion is too vague and malleable, and too exploitable (i.e., abuse-able in its own right) by partisans of the opposing party.  (Note: he seems to leave open the possibility - which would be consistent with the 'consensus' of other legal scholars - that purely self-dealing motives in a non-criminal but abusive act is enough to impeach/remove.)  Dershowitz raises historical examples - notably President Lincoln's partisan-election-related actions releasing Union soldiers from the battlefield to vote for his party in an Indiana election.  (Is there any serious doubt that had Trump done likewise, today's Demo-rats would call for his impeachment?  I recommend carefully chewing over this question.  Further, given the tenacity with which Dershowitz argues his case, it's pretty much inevitable, given the opportunity, that he will bring the Lincoln example up for consideration by the legal scholars ganging up on him.  (He brings it up here on CNN [shorter youtube version here] and it's not addressed.  How friggin' hard can it be to address, I wonder?))  Republicans like to point to Obama's hot-mic moment where he offers a quid-pro-quo to Russia about missile defense - "I'll have more flexibility after the election."  (Having heard about this back then, I found it cynical and typical of the D.C. Swamp, and a cause for political embarrassment, but I don't recall the prospect of impeachment entering my mind.  As I said, it seemed all too typical.  [Edit: And what's more, Trump was supposed to be an antidote to the Swamp; so much for that hope.])

I don't know whether this warrants Trump's removal from office.  At the moment I assign it about a 50/50 probability.  For me to think that measure is warranted, the probability should be at least 2/3.  I do think it shows that Trump is ethically and/or epistemically unfit to be president.  Up until this Ukraine episode, I was almost enthusiastic about his beating the obviously-bad Demo-rats/leftists in 2020.  (Indeed, I even boldly predicted his '20 victory given the alternative which the American mainstream would have ample reason to find odious and ridiculous.)  My hope is that they nominate a candidate who is not so loathsome and idiotic that we're left with Trump as the default option.

And Demo-rats have to be on the hook for so much of the intellectual bankruptcy and corruption in all this.  Relevant points:

(1) This is the same party that bent over backwards to be unfair to, i.e., to blatantly dishonestly smear, Brett Kavanaugh.  You want to talk abuse of power, extreme bad faith?  What business did Demo-rats have agitating and demanding that his accuser be given a nationally televised Senate judiciary committee platform, once they had in hand and knew about Leland Keyser's debunking testimony?  ("Believe women" doesn't extend to Keyser, a woman....)  Or their extensive efforts to gaslight the public with their "we believe Ford" or question-begging "believe survivors [i.e., accusers]" stuff both before and after the assault-allegation hearing?  Appropriate retribution for this effort at personal and career destruction is loss of another SCOTUS seat, if not a presidential acquittal.

(2) This is the party that bent over backwards not to know what was wrong with Crooked Hillary's unauthorized server setup and the consequent mishandling of 110 classified documents.  The legal authorities have declined to bring charges, but no one that I know of has contested the point that anyone who engages in such behavior should not have a security clearance - something that should be a major consideration in whether she is objectively disqualified from holding the office of the presidency.

(3) Certain arguments made by the House impeachment managers can be thrown right back at them - namely, about pulling levers of power where so much as even a scintilla of corrupt partisan political intent is involved.  (That was their pushback against Dershowitz's argument about mixed motives, i.e., in between pure national-interest motives on one end and pure self-dealing motives on the other.)  In making the House case on the Senate floor, Schiff claimed that Trump is "scared to death" of facing Biden in 2020.  Well, Demo-rats are scared to death of having to face Trump in 2020.  Using selective presentations of evidence, Schiff peddled the Trump/Russia collusion narrative ever since early 2017.  (BTW, his many references to the June '16 Trump Tower meeting, between Trump aides and the Russian lawyer promising dirt on HRC, don't establish collusion claims but they do establish the extent to which Trump and his son are willing to deceptively/dishonestly spin.)

As for manager Nadler, he's been caught dead-to-rights on video from back during the Clinton impeachment saying on the House floor that impeachment should be bipartisan; this is obvious prima facie evidence that Nadler's motivations this time around are partisan-political and not purely in the nation's interests.

As for manager Jeffries, he's referred to Trump as the "Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," itself a claim beyond the pale of honest discourse and clearly indicating an animus and prejudice that would distort his motives for impeachment.

And let's face it, if the Demo-rats are too fucking lazy or dishonest to mount a clear non-strawman counter-argument against the eminently non-partisan Dershowitz, enough to get his recalcitrant mind to relent rather than be coerced into agreement (through dubious 'consensus'-mongering or whatever), then have they really cleared the hurdle that they ought to clear in order to convince 2/3 of the American people of their case?

And that's another thing - both parties but Demo-rats in particular (there isn't much of a case for a moral equivalence here, however odious the Republicans get at times) have so squandered trust and credibility that I can't treat the House managers' case as having been presented in full good faith ("with all due respect..." etc.).  They've cried wolf too many times about how bad Trump and his supporters are, their treatment of Kavanaugh belies any professions to concern for justice and fairness, they look the other way when Crooked Hillary mishandled classified info, etc.  If Trump were to be removed, consider that this empowers these intellectually and morally corrupt people, and that is the wider context in which impeachment- and removal-related arguments should be considered.  (As for those sometimes-odious Republicans, are they even going to censure Trump for his underhanded and dirty aid-withholding?  Do they deserve to lose control of the Senate where the 2-per-state format heavily benefits them already?)  The notion that he would need to be removed from office in order to restore some sense of honor and decency to our politics . . . I think that ship had already sailed some time ago.  The American people are getting the politics they deserve, commensurate with an intellectually bankrupt culture.  Plato is right.  (See the "philosophy ffs," "philosophy for children," and "p4e" tags, and this blog's masthead hyperlink, for leads to the solution.)

[Addendum 2/2: NOTE that my treatment both of the facts of Trump's case and of the Dershowitz Argument is provisional - I am fallible af especially on matters such as legal theory that are outside my area of expertise - and I'm still taking in the for-and-against arguments [e.g.] as they keep emerging.   I will likely have more to say on this in coming posts.  I'm wary about exactly how much leeway, short of the "committing a crime like Nixon did" standard, the Dershowitz Argument gives to a president who - of course? - believes his political interests are aligned with the nation's.  So this Argument and other facets of this case don't altogether sit well with me.  (Note that the just-linked argument links to this pro-impeachment letter signed by over 800 legal scholars.  Now, this passage doesn't sit well with me: "[Trump acted] for his personal and political benefit, at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress."  Except that there's a separation of powers in which Congress and the President can differ about what is in the national security interests.  My (fallible) ring-of-truth detector tells me that this passage isn't worthy of politically impartial legal scholars and I'm pretty sure a Dershowitz would also pick right up on this point immediately.)  I'd like to add that one of my favorite moments of the Senate proceedings was when John Rawls was mentioned in connection with Dershowitz's "shoe on the other foot" test.  Would that there were a lot more such moments in politics.  (Why only Rawls, and not also Plato, Aristotle, et al?  In a Fox interview in the last day or so, Sen. Cruz mentions one of his classes at Harvard taught by Dershowitz, someone else [not Michael Sandel, though (surprisingly?)], and "world famous philosopher" Robert Nozick.  I liked that moment, as well.)  The Rawls & shoe-test point was about (justice-as-)fairness, and the complaints from both sides about the unfair processes in the houses the other party controlled, speaks volumes.  Let's say that the House Democrats were to say to the House Republicans, "Okay, put your fairness demands on a list, we'll make every effort to meet them, and when we do, you sign your names to the list so that you have no complaints about process going forward."  And then imagine the same scenario with the opposing Senate parties.  The thing is, the demands of "fairness" would mean - in both cases - a more long, drawn-out process that in this political context both parties seem to want to avoid.  (Elections are fast approaching, see.  An avowed socialist candidate leading in the nomination betting markets, whom the DNC would rather not see nominated and (conversely) the GOP would probably prefer to see nominated, has had to sit through these proceedings in D.C. as the Iowa caucus approaches, see.  [Don't think for a second that Nancy Peloser's motivations for the month-long delay in sending the impeachment articles to the Senate, or the Senate 'rats demands for prolonged process notwithstanding a very predictable outcome, have nothing to do with this.  BTW, Peloser & Co. showed their unserious hand when she used and gave out many souvenir pens at the signing ceremony.])  Hence the "rushed" process in both instances.  Applying a fairness test, do they really have a basis for complaint for what the other side was doing in the respective houses they controlled?  Will they come clean that maybe the proclaimed fairness considerations and the political considerations can't be reconciled here?]

[Addendum 2/12: Note that the second impeachment article - "obstruction of Congress" - is so obviously bullshit that even Mitt Romney dismissed it while voting to convict on the first one (which is what anyone really cares about).]

[Addendum #2, 2/12: Good discussion going on here, in the linked argument signed by legal scholars, and in the comments section, coming from both Trump's opponents and defenders.  One thing I think is for sure: the vast majority of the American people just aren't in an epistemic position to understand with full and clear finality that Trump should be removed from office for his Ukraine-related actions.  I still don't know how Dershowitz's example of Lincoln is answered, by the signed letter or elsewhere.  I still don't see how his actions are in a fundamentally different category than a number of other things other presidents have done without raising an impeachment stink.  I do know that the Demo-rats spent 3 years squandering all credibility and good will, for which they arguably deserved, as a political matter, to lose the impeachment case.  I'm still not clear on whether just any verifiable abuse of power is impeachable, or if it is best left for the most obvious and severe abuses and that this should be left up to the (obviously partisan, obviously politically-motivated) discretion of the members of Congress.  Anyway, the lesson Demo-rats should but won't learn from all this is that their best shot at beating Trump is not to be so loathsome, dishonest, etc. themselves; their sense of desperation and panic in the current primary nominating process is palpable, but they and their allies/enablers/ilk in academia, media, and elsewhere brought this on themselves through years upon years of dishonesty and hubris.  Had they ever shown the remotest amount of decency and good will in their attacks on Rand, I might feel the least bit sorry for them.  Their complaints related to lack of justice, fairness, honesty, etc. of Trump and his defenders ring all too hollow and hypocritical.  BTW, this year's census should help to highlight further that the Demo-rats' efforts to benefit politically from illegal immigration need not happen through the ballot box directly such as by getting these immigrants registered and voting, but through population-based apportionment of House seats.  (They also hope to capitalize on illegal immigration, not just by refusing to create much if anything in the way of disincentives against it - if anything, it's just the opposite - but by smearing people who oppose it, like Trump, as racists. That includes Peloser crying that the border wall - which would only prevent illegal border crossings, mind you - is "an immorality" and is "about making America white again."  You might get a sense from this alone about what I mean by 'rats spending years squandering credibility and good will.)  Not that this House-seat-stealing scheme - also an electoral-vote-stealing scheme - helps them with the Senate, thank goodness.]

Socrates/Plato/Aristotle vs. Christianity?

Or: is Original Sin plausible?

(a 'Green Friday' special lol)

Based on my exposure to Christian thinking over the course of a few decades, it strikes me that very short shrift is given in Christian thought to the message and examples set by the iconic Greek trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  It compels me now to ask such questions as: Okay, that is a highly disappointing apparent performance by Christendom on the whole, but what about the strongest examples of Christian thought, especially ones deeply conversant with the Greeks and Aristotle (the pinnacle of Greek learning/thought) in particular.  And so, my mind goes (of course?) to Aquinas.  And so I have to envision (for now) what Aquinas might have said on the topic of Original Sin in light of these three sage examples, and it might also work to research whatever he actually did say on the connection between these two topics.  (If he had said things about this connection, wouldn't we have heard a lot about it by now?)

I recently saw quoted a letter from Ben Franklin to a man who claimed to be able to self-rule just fine without traditional religious beliefs, and Franklin said that this may be fine for him (the correspondent) but a lot of people simply don't have the discipline; they're weak of will, perhaps incurably ignorant -  fallen and corrupt if you will.  Some Christian thinkers go further with their wording: "wretched and miserable."  And Aristotle even seems to say as much about a lot of biological humans who just don't seem cut out even remotely for a philosophical life.  They being oftentimes base and vicious, the best we might hope to do in such cases is to train them in nonphilosophical habits of thought that nonetheless encourage socially acceptable behaviors.  The Framers of the United States Constitution said that because of human weaknesses it is best that powers be separated so that bad judgment and appetites be kept in check (especially where the levers of coercive force/power are concerned).  Many present-day American Christians take this as part of the body of evidence of the nation's "Judeo-Christian provenance".  (I ask as I've asked before: so how come it took only until after John Locke, who formulated the most complete theory of individual rights up to that point, for there to be an America-like nation "founded on Judeo-Christian principles"?  Perhaps such Christians should make extra efforts to avoid the vice of epistemic hubris, heh heh.)

But isn't Original Sin supposed to be an unqualified and universal condition of man the species, of mankind, and not merely (say) the vast majority of men, and that all humans need Christ as redeemer?  And isn't it supposed to be eminently plausible (from overwhelming evidence in the world) according to standard Christian doctrine that there are no exceptions to this?  And so now, the obvious(?) question: How do Socrates, Plato and Aristotle fail to be exceptions?

I guess I'll leave it there for now.

[Addendum 12/12/2019: This isn't even to bring up Nietzsche's well-known antipathy to Christianity, particularly its human-weakness anthropology in contrast to his own heroic-possibilities, noble-soul one which he appears to share with Aristotle.  To him, it didn't ring true that even people like him were unavoidably weak and corrupt (without Christ).  But something is telling me that bringing up the examples of the ancient Greek trio is less triggering to Christians than bringing up Nietzsche.  Nietzsche's aphorism about the noble soul comes, after all, in a book triggeringly titled Beyond Good and Evil.  What does Nietzsche's new value system have to offer the weak and less-smart masses?  Roughly, his modus ponens looks like Christianity's modus tollens: if man is weak and corrupt, then he needs Christ for redemption or salvation.  And from what I can tell his anthropology divides humanity into the weak/dumb masses on the one hand and people such as him on the other, whereas Christianity doesn't make the division (except, I suppose, for the one human+divine person in history).  Plato and Aristotle are less triggering in this regard (how much so?...), and there's the Aquinas connection that would be a bad idea for Christians to ignore....]

When it's Politics vs. Principles

There's political philosophy - where high-minded idealists discuss and debate the relative merits of Rawls, Nozick, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rand, Chomsky, Hayek, Marx, Mill, et al - and then there's politics, a practice that "in the real world" (read: as the practice is done today, not involving philosophers but - put politely - another subset of human beings) has next to zero connection to what's just, right, good, or honest.

Just one very recent case in point: a young idealistic Ron Paul supporter in Massachusetts receives a lesson in political practice from his state's GOP. Long story short, the corrupt assholes running the state party decided to change the rules mid-game to effectively exclude Ron Paul supporters from attending the national GOP convention later this year, after they had won the delegate positions fair and square.

This is a microcosm of politics today in its essence. You can see it everywhere. It's reflected in all the insider and pundit manners of speaking. It's reflected by the number of outright idiots who participate in the process, including elected representatives (another recent case in point). Political practice (at least in these United States) is, in short, broken.

This problem goes all the way back to when a democratic government sentenced Socrates to death by hemlock; his pupil in turn wrote a political treatise in dialogue form, envisioning a philosophically-enriched utopia. Many folks are resigned to politics being the way it has been practiced for so long, viewing philosophical proposals as impractical and unrealistic. That attitude strikes me as leading to a vicious cycle in which politics never improves. I don't accept this as inevitable, and there is one significant piece of historical data that backs me up on this: a real-life "philosopher-king", one who was not merely a lover of wisdom the way the U.S.'s third president would qualify as such (though this is another historical precedent of the sort I'm speaking of), but one who also made a notable contribution to the history of philosophical thought. So I don't consider politics to be a hopeless cause as such, but fixing broken political practice requires activity that goes well beyond participating in the prevailing travesty of civic activity.

One doesn't have to agree with the specifics of Plato's vision to agree with one central truth therein: a polity eminently worthy of one's participation requires a citizenry well-educated in what might be broadly termed the philosophical arts. That would not only result in an enriched polity, but enriched lives on the whole. And here's the practical question, posed in the name of the best within us: How do we get there from here?

To be continued . . .

Question for the Day

Is all philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead once said, a series of footnotes to Plato?

(Some thoughts on that question: Plato's ideal utopia described in the Republic had a strict regimen of activities inculcating virtues. At the "head" of this utopia is a Philosopher King. Seems that if Whitehead is right, then everyone throughout the history of philosophy is responding to that ideal. I, for one, like Aristotle's more integrative, or perfective, sensibility, as I've made clear on numerous occasions in this blog, about which recent newcomers to this blog might not be aware. The contexts of understanding may be clashing. But Aristotle was, as dialectical grandmaster or perfectivist, a master of the art of context-keeping. That's why certain perceptive philosophers - Ayn Rand, for one - have the highest regard for him. You can't refute perfectivism. :-) )

Platonic Realism vs. Science, Evolution, Etc.

Question: How badly does Platonic Realism interfere with science, secularism, evolutionary biology, etc.?

The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.

It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.

The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.

And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.

Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.

I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.

The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.

Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.

Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.

This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)

The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.

(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)

How Aristotle beats Plato and Kant

On the tail of my last posting, I'd like to take up - briefly, not in detail - the fundamental difference between Aristotle on the one hand and Plato and Kant on the other. In my last posting I made reference to Aristotle's defense of what I termed classical realism.

Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.

Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.

In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.

If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.

No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!

I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.

(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)

Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.

Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.

How this Philosopher is Looking out for You

There is a deep "fit" between someone's adopting the Ultimate Philosopher moniker and writing a book titled Toward Utopia, and that someone being a huge and well-informed devotee of Ayn Rand. It's really no surprise in the slightest to someone in my epistemic position - someone with tremendous amounts of intellectual curiosity combined with a deep familiarity with philosophically-sound cognitive guidelines (explicated at length by Rand and Peikoff, as it turns out). But even taking Ayn Rand out of the picture, there's Aristotle, and he was looking out for the everyday human being as skillfully as anyone.

Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.

The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)

So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?

Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.

It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?

Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?

Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?

Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?

Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?

Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?

Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?

John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?

I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.

It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.

The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.

I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.

Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?