blog.kennypearce.net

Philosophers' Carnival 66

I'm a couple days late with this (my apologies), but Philosophers' Carnival 66 is now up at The Uncredible Hallq with a link to my post, Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?

The 67th Carnival will be held right here, so stay tuned!

The Philosophers' Carnival Returns to blog.kennypearce.net

The 66th Philosophers' Carnival is coming up this Monday at The Uncredible Hallq. The Philosophers' Carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of blog posts on subjects related to academic philosophy including, but not limited to, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, "continental" philosophy and the history of philosophy. Submissions are due online every other Saturday for inclusion in the carnival the following Monday.

Following the Uncredible Carnival 66 this Monday, Philosophers' Carnival 67 will take place here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, April 14 (submissions due by Saturday April 12). Some of you may recall that I had previously hosted Philosophers' Carnival 31. The 67th carnival will be focused on the theme of "idealism" - the view that minds and/or their ideas are the fundamental stuff of reality. Posts are invited which argue for or against idealism, which track down the consequences of idealism, or which examine the views of historical idealist philosophers, such as Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Bradley (to name a few). Space permitting, I will include all posts with substantive content related to academic philosophy, but posts related to the theme outlined above are especially welcome and will have pride of place at the top of the page.

If you need some help thinking of something to say about idealism, let me recommend that you read some of my previous posts. For arguments for idealism, see Why Idealism? and The Ontological Economy of Idealism. Also, my more recent post The Idealist Strategy outlines a direction of argument common to most historical idealists (and to the contemporary idealist John Foster). I don't argue against idealism myself (since it's true) but I have dealt with Moorean arguments against it, if only to refute them. Finally, if you have more historical interests you can check my archives on Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Berkeley.

Enjoy!

Philosophers' Carnival 61

Philosophers' Carnival 61 is up at Inconsistent Thoughts with a link to my post, "A Brief Argument for Descriptivism About Laws of Nature".

Christian Carnival CCVI

This link is a little late in coming (my apologies), but Jeremy has included my post on hyper-Reformation theology in Christian Carnival CCVI (that's 206 to you barbarians) at Parableman.

Blog Year 2007 In Review

The year 2007 on this blog saw over 214,000 visits from over 72,000 distinct users. This is down just slightly from 2006, a trend that I attribute to less regular blogging, and especially less regular carnival submissions, and also to not hosting the philosophers' carnival, which led to a big surge of hits in 2006. Here are the top ten most popular posts:

1. June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI. This post also made third place last year.


2. May 2, 2006: "Three Persons, One Substance" - Paradox or Solution?. This post discusses the difficulties in accepting the trinitarian definitions of the councils and Church tradition while holding to a sufficiently strong version of sola scriptura. Although this post is also from 2006, it didn't make the top ten before.


3. May 15, 2006: Why is the NSA Data Mining Operation Bad? This post discusses the privacy issues associated with the data mining operation which was reported in 2006, and why we should bother objecting to it.


4. March 5, 2006: Rights, Obligations, and Abortion. This post discusses issues at the intersection of libertarianism and Christian ethics, especially as they relate to abortion.


5. October 12, 2005: Leibniz on "Efficient" vs. "Final" Causes in Physics: Its Application to God, Science, and Miracles. This post, from clear back in 2005, briefly develops a Leibnizian account of the relationship between theology and science and of miracles.


6. November 4, 2005 What Is Judicial Activism? Another 2005er, this post gives a conceptual analysis of the concept of judicial activism, which attempts to apply some descriptive content to the term (rather than merely value judgment), while explaining why we think it is bad. This post is down from number 5 in 2006.


7. March 21, 2007: Catholicism and Church History. This very brief post is the highest ranked of those written in 2007! It simply links to a little debate that was going on on another blog, and announces that I intend to continue the debate here. Funny that a post with almost no content should be the highest scorer of those written in 2007...


8. May 11, 2006: NSA Domestic Spying Revelations. This post provides a brief summary and link round-up of the reports on the NSA's domestic spying operation. It is a predecessor to number 3 above.


9. February 11, 2007: Degrees of Literalness in Bible Translation. This post points out that translations cannot be divided into two camps of "literal translation" and "paraphrase" but, rather, exist on a spectrum of literalness.


10. August 6, 2005: Translation of 2 Timothy 2:2. This post discusses the meaning of the prepositions used in the mentioned verse.

1. cotton patch bible


2. kenny pearce


3. hcsb review


4. calvary chapel blog


5. the source new testament


6. holman christian standard bible


7. calvary chapel blogs


8. ambiguity in translation


9. hcsb translation


10. translation transliteration

Finally, here are the top ten real (non-spam) referrers:

1. A Brood Comb Power-Blogroll


2. Movement of Existence: Philosophers' Carnival 44


3. Better Bibles Blog


4. Fides Quaerens Intellectum


5. Philosophy Sucks!: 58th Philosophers' Carnival


6. The Space of Reasons: The 46th International Philosophers' Carnival


7. GetReligion


8. Parableman


9. BlogCadre: How I Failed the Turing Test


10. Siris

"The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley"

My paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" is now available on my writings page. An earlier version of this paper served as my undergraduate honors thesis, and a somewhat reduced version of it has been accepted for publication by Religious Studies. I haven't heard anything about what issue it will appear in.

This paper discusses Berkeley's theory that our sense perceptions (especially visual perceptions) form a language by which God communicates with us, and asks how we are to interpret this language. In particular, it argues, against Walter Creery and Kenneth Winkler, that Berkeley's language must have what Winkler calls "vertical signification" - that is, ideas must be able to signify non-ideas - or Berkeley will be stuck in solipsism. (Winkler denies "vertical signification" on p. 21 of Berkeley: An Interpretation; Creery denies that the Berkeley's language has any "referential function" at all on p. 219 of "Berkeley's Argument for a Divine Visual Language," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1972). See my paper, endnote 8.) The paper goes on to discuss a number of ways in which the difficulties in the semantics of this language mirror difficulties in the semantics of human language, and briefly discusses the interpretation of a few specific perceptions.

I have also reorganized my writings page to give a feel for which papers I regard as finished and/or good and which I am currently still working on, rather than just organizing them chronologically or lumping them all together. Go check it out.

Introducing Guest-Blogger Lauren!

So, now that I've started blogging regularly again (at least for the last three days or so), I'm leaving town and going to be away from the computer for about five days. However, there is good news! This, I think, will be an excellent opportunity to hand over the reins to my lovely fiance, Lauren. (I expect she will continue to blog occasionally after I come back, but I figured this was a good time to start.) Lauren is entering her senior year at Penn, majoring in physics, math, and philosophy. She's been instructed to stick roughly to the general subject areas ordinarily discussed on this blog (but that can be interpreted a bit broadly), so I'm hoping she'll tell us about some of the philosophical insights we can get from physics, or vice versa. Additionally, Lauren, like me, is an amateur Bible scholar/theologian, and often picks up things I miss in these areas. In particular, she is much more knowledgable than I on the subject of Reformation-era theology (this probably has something to do with her Presbyterian pedigree). Political issue are, of course, always on-topic on this blog as well.

Lauren and I met through Campus Crusade for Christ at Penn. The wedding is set for August 2, 2008.

Philosophers' Carnival 46

Philosophers' Carnival 46 is now up at The Space of Reasons with a link to my post, "Libertarian Compatibilism?"

blog.kennypearce.net: Now With Boring Colors!

As of right now, users of this blog have access to a new feature: boring colors! Seriously, though, I was trying to print something off this blog so that it was readable on a white background and realized this was a non-trivial task. This combined with the fact that people have often complained about my site being difficult to read has motivated me to finally create a feature to view the site with a more normal stylesheet. Clicking "View With Boring Colors" on the top right of any page should cause the page to appear in black on white. Reloading the page will bring it back to green on black, as will navigating to another page. It's been tested only slightly, but seems to work on Mozilla derivatives (such as Firefox) and Konqueror (the KDE web browser on Linux) but not Safari.

Blog Year 2006 in Review

The year 2006 on this blog saw over 265,000 visits from nearly 95,000 unique users. Here are the top ten most popular posts (note: there is some margin of error here, as a configuration change part way through the year caused some posts to be accessible at two URLs, screwing up the statistics):

1. May 30, 2006: More Comment Spam Reconfiguration. People must be finding this on search engines thinking it will help them eliminate spam from their own blogs (although none of the top ten searches get you here, so everyone must be searching with a different phrase). Kinda sad that that's enough to make it number one, isn't it? Sorry I couldn't be more helpful.


2. October 6, 2005: Ronald Dworkin on John Roberts and Principles of Constitutional Interpretation. A brief review of an article by political philosopher Ronald Dworkin on some statements John Roberts made during his confirmation hearings, also containing a few remarks on Dworkin's book Sovereign Virtue.


3. June 12, 2006: Philosophers' Carnival XXXI. You knew that one had to make the list. There was actually a quite substantial spike in the number of visits in June and July as a result of the Philosophers' Carnival being hosted here, though the increase in pages viewed, hits, and bandwidth is pretty steady throughout the year, maxing in December. The Philosophers' Carnival is, of course, always worth a look, regardless of who is hosting.


4. January 9, 2006: The Holman Christian Standard Bible. My first look at the HCSB, which is now my primary Bible translation. Compares the HCSB and NKJV renderings of three verses where I think the traditional translations are flawed.


5. November 4, 2005: What Is Judicial Activism? An attempt to form a descriptive, rather than merely normative, account of just what 'judicial activism' is, and why it is undesirable. I'm glad to see that this is still one of my most viewed posts, over a year after I wrote it, since I think it is one of my better ones, and it is also an important subject for voters to be thinking clearly about.


6. November 21, 2005: Ivy League Elitist ... Porn? A report on the Penn Student Activities Council decision to fund Quake Magazine, a "literary erotica" magazine created and published on Penn's campus. (As far as I know, the magazine is still around and still funded - the last thing I saw about it was a poster asking for submissions at the beginning of last semester.) The inclusion of this post on this list is probably a search engine accident (see the tenth most searched term, below).


7. November 28, 2005: Can the New Testament be Both Influenced by Plato and Inspired by God? A discussion of the influences of prior literature on the New Testament writers, and the significance of this to the doctrine of divine inspiration.


8. December 7, 2004: An Internal Critique of the Beth Stroud Case. A discussion of what was done right and what was done wrong in the handling of the case of Beth Stroud, the youth minister at First United Methodist of Germantown in Philadelphia. This post is now over two years old. According to Ms. Stroud's own web page the situation has not changed much.


9. January 7, 2006: Christianity and Aristotelian Metaphysics. This post discusses the influence of Aristotle on Christian theology (from a decidedly unsympathetic perspective). I am no longer convinced that the use of hupostasis in the Chalcedonian Declaration is from Aristotle; it seems more likely to me that it comes from Neo-Platonism. In addition to the fact that there was a significant amount of cross-pollination, as it were, between early Christianity and Neo-Platonism, some Neo-Platonists spoke of the fundamental principles of the universe (at a deeper level even than the Forms) being the "three hupostases." The three are "The One," "Mind," and "Soul," which is interesting because Mind (nous) is "that which thinks or reasons" and Word (logos, as in John 1) can mean reason (as an abstract noun), and also because in some contexts Soul (psuche) can be a synonym for Spirit (pneuma), though Paul uses them differently, and I think Plato does as well. So this post may not be entirely correct, but it is still interesting subject matter.


10. April 12, 2006: The Language of Athenian Democracy in the New Testament. A discussion of the New Testament's usage of the words ekklesia and kerux in relation to the usage of those words in classical Athens.

And here are the top ten search phrases:

1. cotton patch bible


2. holman christian standard bible


3. http //blog.kennypearce.net


4. calvary chapel blog


5. hcsb review


6. calvary chapel blogs


7. kenny pearce


8. christian naturalism


9. moral idealism


10. ivy league porn (link omitted)

Finally, here are the top ten real referrers (as opposed to the ones spoofing the system to appear to be referrers):

1. Leiter Reports


2. Philosophers' Carnival


3. Parableman


4. Philosophy, et cetera


5. GetReligion


6. Better Bibles Blog


7. Philosophers' Carnival #24 at Rad Geek


8. SmartChristian.com


9. Suzanne's Bookshelf


10. Philosophers' Carnival #32 at Adventures in Ethics and Science

On the whole, not a bad year!

Poll: Is My Color Scheme Too Hard to Read?

I like my color scheme. It looks like an old computer terminal, which I think is kind of neat. I can read it fine, myself. However, since I posted the the Philosophers' Carnival here yesterday, I've had two different people (Clark at Mormon Metaphysics in his post linking to the carnival, and play_jurist, commenting on the carnival itself) comment that the text is too difficult to read. So, what I want to know is, how many people think the blog in its current format is hard to read? If a lot of people do, I'd like to get a feel for whether it varies by person, or by platform/browser (perhaps it looks different in some browsers and is harder to read - if so, I might be able to fix it without abandoning the color scheme altogether). So if everyone could let me know in the comments here whether you find this blog difficult to read in its present green-on-black format, and what browser and operating system you use, it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

PS: Perhaps people would also like to tell me whether they are over or under the age of 25, so we can see whether I've perhaps discovered a visual equivalent to the mosquito ringtone! (Only sort of joking about that...)

Philosophers' Carnival XXXI!

Greetings one and all, and welcome to blog.kennypearce.net and the 31st Philosophers' Carnival!

The Philosophers' Carnival is an every-few-weekly compilation of philosophy posts from blogs all over the web. The next Philosophers' Carnival is scheduled for July 3rd, and is still in need of a host! If you would like to host Philosophers' Carnival XXXII, visit the hosting guidelines then contact Richard Chappell of Philosophy, etc. to volunteer.

Today's Philosophers' Carnival contains a truly fantastic collection of deep and insightful posts which will be divided into the three traditional sub-divisions of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology (including logic/dialectic), and ethics (including political philosophy). Within each category the posts appear in approximate order of submission. As philosophy is a very hard thing to define and categorize, a couple of posts have had to be squeezed into categories they don't fit very well in. In these cases I've attached an explanation of why I put them where I did. I have also included my responses to each of the entries, in the hope of facilitating continuing philosophical discussion.

1. Metaphysics
   • Dr. Justin Good of Design Observer discusses an interesting blend of metaphysics, aesthetics, ecology, modernism and wind farms (!) in his post "What is Beauty? Or, On the Aesthetics of Wind Farms." Discussing the opposing views on the aesthetic value (or lack thereof) of wind farms, Dr. Good concludes that "what at first looks like two subjective impressions of the same visual image turns out to be two different understandings of order in the world." The core of the argument is that our aesthetic sensibilities are deeply dependent on our understanding of nature around us. This does indeed seem to me to be an astute and substantially correct observation: in some sense, the natural world - the world around us 'as it should be' - is a paradigm of beauty by which other things are measured. Differing ideas about nature lead to differing ideas about beauty, but, as Dr. Good points out, this doesn't necessarily make beauty a purely subjective idea, because the ecological facts are quite objective.
   • Joe Kissel has posted a discussion of Zeno's Paradoxes on Interesting Thing of the Day. There is a long and interesting discussion of just what Zeno intended to prove and how this was supposed to support the Eleatic (Parmenidean) system of metaphysics as a whole. A very good read.
   • A post at On Philosophy develops a detailed and rigorous account of causation, complete with diagrams and formal logic. The theory is given briefly as "if we are looking for causes for event X at time T then Y is a cause of X if and only if removing Y from the universe at time T would result in the failure of X to occur." In other words, it is a temporally-sensitive account of necessary (as opposed to sufficient) causation.
   • Steve Esser of Guide to Reality discusses, the definition of physicalism/materialism, and relations between entities at different ontological levels. The key question seems to be whether someone who allows that worlds in which non-physical entities or relations "strongly supervene" on (i.e. arise with metaphysical necessity from) physical entities are physically possible should be considered a physicalist. As Steve observes, it is very interesting - and a far cry from the popular/naive version of the modern scientific worldview - that physicalist/materialist philosophers are recognizing the need to allow for the existence (on a lesser ontological level) of "relations (or entities) which go beyond current or contemplated physics."
   • Kevin Winters of Heideggerian Denken discusses the way of phenomenology, a very interesting discussion of the process of Heideggerian phenomenological investigation (a subject with which I am not terribly familiar). While I am generally sympathetic to the idea of arguing first and foremost from phenomena/experience (see my own contribution below), I must say that I can't see how Kevin can claim that "logic is not ontologically fundamental" and then talk about "presenting a coherent case." I would like to hear why he wants to, and how he can, present a coherent case (by which I assume he means a logical argument) if experience is more fundamental than logic. Of course, such is the nature of continental philosophy, and those of us more in the analytic tradition have always had difficulty comprehending it (when we have bothered to take the effort, which hasn't been often enough).
   • PathEffect blogs on, well, everything. I'm an appreciater of the Parmenidean overtones. (If I had studied more contemporary philosophy, I would probably also have intelligent and insightful remarks to make contrasting PathEffect's version of modal realism with that of David Lewis but, alas, I am underqualified for this task.)
   • I present "The Foundational Argument of Berkeleian Metaphysics." This truly spectacular post needs no introduction, should be read by everyone everywhere, and has no flaws whatsoever. I'm lying. (And also starting to sound like Isaac Asimov.) Actually, this post briefly discusses the argument George Berkeley uses to establish the foundations of his metaphysical theory. It could use some situating within the broader scheme of Berkeley's works and general view of the world, which is something I may tackle in future posts.
   • Dr. Alan Rhoda of Analyzer discusses the relationship between indeterminacy and libertarian free will. The post argues (correctly, I think) that as far as libertarian free will is concerned, determinism and indeterminism are on roughly equal footing.

   
   


2. Epistemology
   
   
   • Chris Hallquist of The Uncredible Hallq discusses whether theories and propositions can be simultaneously unfalisifiable and falisfied. Chris argues that, counter-intuitively, they can. This happens in the case when there are observations which ought to falsify the claim, and those observations are made, but the supporters of the claim keeps supporting it anyway. While Chris is correct that those who charge others with making unfalsifiable claims that have been falsified are not necessarily caught in internal contradiction, these people are nonetheless speaking sloppily. The creationists in Chris's example ought to say to the evolutionists (and some of them do, in fact, say things like this): "the weight of the evidence is against your theory, yet no evidence will suffice to persuade you to reject it." To say that the theory is unfalisifiable yet falsified is sloppy and misleading because the unfalsifiable claim and the (allegedly) falsified one are not really the same: the (allegedly) falsified claim is a matter of science dependent on evidence, but the unfalsifiable claim is a matter of blind faith.
   • A post at A Brood Comb argues for philosophy as comprehension. Although this is, of course, meta-philosophy (for which I have not created a category), I've categorized it as epistemology since it talks a lot about the practice of thinking critically about human understanding.
   • Sam Douglas of Philosophy Hurts Your Head discusses the connection between mind and meaning. In particular, Kripke's account of meaning as having to do with passing certain speech-act tests is juxtaposed with Chalmer's 'zombie' [aka 'functional isomorph'] argument in a fascinating discussion of the question of whether an entity with no subjective experience of the world can actually 'mean' something by its words.
   • Clayton Littlejon of Think Tonk discusses the circumstances under which we ought to believe propositions, in light of Moore's Paradox. Since I'm not familiar with Moore's Paradox, and neither Wikipedia nor The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on it, I don't have much to say here. Perhaps someone would like to further enlighten us on the various paradoxes and thought experiments Clayton refers to.
   • DuckRabbit has a post discussing our reasons for valuing truth, in conversation with some pragmatist thinkers. He argues that there is some confusion between truth and belief in this discussion, so that it's not clear what we actually value. As a commenter pointed out (sparking a long discussion), this already quite insightful post could benefit from more discussion about degrees of uncertainty in our beliefs: that is, most of the post seems to assume that belief is an "all or nothing" sort of thing.
   • David Corfield of Philosophy of Real Mathematics discusses Robert Brandom's recent John Locke Lectures in Oxford on his "objective pragmatism" and Wittgensteinian language-games and so forth. The post makes interesting application of the author's philosophy of mathematics focus to the subject at hand.
   • Doctor Logic discusses causation, on a verificationist epistemology, arguing that the Principle of Sufficient Reason is meaningless. The discussion is definitely worth reading, but if you're not a verificationist, don't expect to be convinced.

   
   


3. Ethics
   
   • Alex Gregory of atopian.org argues against the idea of 'human rights' as a fundamental ethical principle. Alex's argument is that due to the uncertainty of the actual world, rules like "thou shalt not kill," interpreted to mean that one must not cause the death of another human being, on a human rights interpretation will make it wrong for us to interact with other people, since the interaction will introduce a possibility that we might cause the death of the other person, and we are not permitted to gamble with the rights of others, no matter how good the odds. In order to defend non-consequentialism in general, one might introduce intention and knowledge as relevant factors in the ethical status of an action, and this can also be used in a human rights theory to serve for the foundation of a libertarian political philosophy. However, the way in which this weakens human rights (it is not possible for someone to violate your rights unintentionally, at least in the type of violation that makes the violator morally culpable) is troubling.
   • Francois Trembloy of Goosing the Antithesis presents part one of his series The Morality Disconnect, a reflection on the reasons why most atheists insist on fact in virtually every field, but operate on a relativistic "true for you" model in morality. This post is part of The War on Relativism, with which I was not previously familiar; allow me to insert here that the idea of a movement in opposition to moral relativism among atheists/secularists seems to me to be an extremely good thing for the future of intelligent discourse on ethical issues.
   • Eteraz of Unwilling Self-Negation discusses the varying responses to Wahhabism available to traditionalist and 'pragmatic post-modernist' Muslims, and argues in favor of the post-modernist response. Eteraz states that, while traditionalist Muslims must give complicated arguments and often use questionable reasoning in order to condemn Wahhabi terrorism, the pragmatic post-modernist has an easier time because "The fundamental belief of a pragmatic postmodernist is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought of worth dying for, by people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing more than the fact that we have belief in it." Of course, it is not clear how this view is supposed to persuade anyone, it just states (as a fundamental assumption) that it is ok for us to continue believing that terrorism is wrong and deserves to be punished, even though we (allegedly) have no justification for that belief. I can't say I find this very satisfying.
   • Professor Laurence Thomas argues at moralhealth.com that "good will" between citizens is a prerequisite for successful democracy, but notices with puzzlement that, although there is more equality today than at any other time in US history (world history?), good will seems to be decreasing. He concludes that "there is no logical connection between good will and equality." Of course, a libertarian (e.g., me) might argue that good will is actually inversely related to the prevalence of egalitarian politics, since the latter leads the poor to believe that others' hard-earned (and not-so-hard-earned) wealth is rightfully theirs and was somehow stolen from them, and puts the rich in the position of having their money confiscated by the poor, thus creating more rather than less opposition between socio-economic classes, and decreasing good will in society as a whole. When we had a lot of good will between people in America, we had a culture in which people were ashamed to accept government handouts and sincerely wanted to work hard and contribute to earn their own living. The welfare system has gone a long way toward destroying this.
   • Professor Steve Gimbel, in his post "Help, Help, I'm Being Oppressed!" at The Philosophers' Playground, discusses the criteria for oppression. Does it require intention? If a policy is implemented for good reasons, but happens to negatively effect an identifiable ethnic or socio-economic group, or one gender, disproportionately to others, is that oppression? Or what if a certain group just happens to be below-average in society according to some metric? I remember in the last US presidential election the Green Party candidate David Cobb arguing in a debate with Libertarian Michael Badnarik that the death penalty must be abolished permanently because it was racist and classist and therefore oppressive. Of course, Cobb's insistence that the death penalty was "inherently" racist and classist (and not just racist and classist right now due to biased implementation) is probably racist and classist itself, since it assumes that it will always be the case that most capital offenses are committed by lower-class members of ethnic minorities (a rather offensive notion - but maybe Cobb didn't mean it and simply doesn't understand the meaning of the word 'inherent'), but it is true that today many more poor black people are executed than rich white people. Does that in itself make the death penalty racist/classist? I tend to think that in this case it is pretty obvious that there is only oppression in the application of the death penalty if a greater proportion of poor black people convicted of capital crimes receive the death penalty, compared to convicted rich white people (and I remember reading somewhere that this IS the case in the US right now), but Professor Gimbel's post demonstrates that these issues are much more complicated than many people on both sides tend to think.
   • Speaking of discrimination/oppression and capital punishment (no, I didn't leave the submission order to put these two posts next to each other), David at Sago Boulevard discusses an argument by Earnest van den Haag that "If the death penalty is morally just, however discriminatorily applied to only some of the guilty, it remains just in each case in which it is applied." In other words, if it is morally legitimate to execute those convicted of murder by a jury of their peers, then this legitimacy is not undermined if only some convicted murderers are executed and the decision of which convicted murderers to execute is made in a discriminatory fashion. David seems skeptical. Personally, I tend to think that, granting the antecedent, it is not unjust to execute those who are executed, but it is unjust not to execute the others. At any rate, we seem to have a pretty strong moral inuition that selective or capricious application of penalties is unjust.
   • Richard Chappell in Philosophy, etc. wonders if there is objective, rational ground for our culture's almost universal moral condemnation of public sexual displays. He discusses several possible justifications and finds them all more or less inadequate. I would propose this line of reasoning: my mind is mine, and there are some things that I choose not to take into it. I act intentionally to avoid these things. If I have a personal objection to seeing something or other (say, for simplicity's sake, nudity in general), and I am somewhere where I have a reasonable expectation not to see nudity, and you walk by me naked, it seems that a case can be made that I am somehow violated or invaded by this. Of course, the 'reasonable expectation' part makes this culturally relative again, and so doesn't really answer Richard's question. It is more to the point to ask why I object to seeing these things in the first place, and this will take us deep into philosophical psychology. To make a brief suggestion: if we think about the very general type of philosophical psychology found in Plato, Paul, and Augustine, we might say that seeing this particular type of sight strengthens the 'bad part' of the soul (the 'money-loving soul' in Plato; the 'flesh' in Paul and Augustine) and causes it to rebel against the good part (the 'wisdom-loving soul' in Plato; the 'spirit' in Paul and Augustine). Of course, we will want to be careful not to become completely prude and make sexual desire evil (as, I understand, Augustine does), but rather to say that the types of sights we object to are those which direct our sexual desires onto improper objects (and we all agree that at least some persons are improper objects of sexual desire - children are the most obvious example). Since this means that viewing certain types of sexual behaviors - or even simple nudity - can perceivably be damaging to the proper order of the psyche, we can go back again to the first argument and say that to engage in public sexual acts violates the personal autonomy of those who view it unwillingly by denying them the opportunity to determine for themselves which things are and are not destructive for them personally, and to avoid the destructive things.
   • Hell's Handmaiden critiques a statement recently released by the Witherspoon Institute on the social effects of marriage. The criticism is essentially that the statement isn't what it pretends to be - an objective and cross-cultural look at the effects of the redefinition of marriage currently going on in the US - but rather presupposes certain goals for marriage which amount to question-begging in the broader argument.
   
   
   
   

Philosophers' Carnival #31 Reminder

Just a reminder: Philosophers' Carnival #31 will be hosted right here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, June 12, one week from today! Any philosophy-related blog post is eligible for inclusion, so get those submissions in! The submission deadline is midnight, US Eastern time, next Sunday night.

More Comment Spam Configuration

So I've discovered that by increasing my comment spam filter's aggressiveness by .1 I can eliminate nearly all spam (I was getting a whole bunch of spam which the filter scored at exactly 0 and referred to me for moderation, and it was clogging my email box like mad). The downside is that certain non-spam messages will also get junked, and MovableType will direct the user to a page that says the comment was 'held for moderation' rather than junked. When I get a chance (probably next week) I'll work on getting a more accurate message up there. For now keep in mind that the most common mistake of the spam filter is this: if you have never commented on this blog with your email address before (or if you do not enter an email address) and you put any links in your post (including linking your web-site in the 'URL' box), your comment will almost certainly be junked. Therefore, to avoid the spam filter, please do not include any links in your first post. Thanks.

Comment Problem Fixed?

I think comments may not have been working the past week or so (that is, I think a lot of them were giving the 'held for moderation' message, and then getting junked). I hope I have fixed this now. If you had something to say within the last week here, please either post again, or email me and I'll try to dig it out of the spam box. Sorry!

More Comment Spam Recongifuration

I've added to my blog configuration a list of words used in offensive comment spam (especially those that link to porn sites). I realize, however, that the relevant words (which I will not list here, as I will probably add more later as the need arises) have legitimate uses (which is why I'm moderating rather than junking them). So, if you write a comment that contains, for instance, the word 'nude,' you will receive a message that says "Your comment has been received and held for approval by the blog owner." I'll get an email with your comment and approve it as soon as possible. Comments that don't use such words will not be effected.

Comment Spam Filter

So, a comment that I wrote myself was recently rejected by my spam filter. This seems to have occurred because it contained an excessive number of links. I don't want to turn the filter aggressiveness down because a lot of spam already gets through, so if you post a comment (or a trackback) and it doesn't appear on the page within a few minutes (it's normally pretty much instantaneous), please email me at kenny@kennypearce.net so I can retrieve it from the junk bin. Thanks!

Philosophers' Carnival 31 Coming to blog.kennypearce.net!

It's official! Philosophers' Carnival 31 will be hosted right here at blog.kennypearce.net on June 5, 2006. The philosophers' carnival occurs about every three weeks and showcases philosophy posts from many different blogs, in order to help small blogs gain exposure and help facilitate blog discussions about philosophy. The next carnival will be on April 3 at The University of Nowhere. You can submit your entries here.

Upgrade to MovableType 3.2

Apologies for the brief outage earlier this evening. I should now be up and running correctly following my upgrade to MovableType 3.2. Please report any errors or difficulties you have with this blog to me by email, kenny@kennypearce.net. Thanks.

Funny Story...

I was checking my blog status on technorati and found a link to my post on Transliteration vs. Translation from a site in a language I couldn't even identify! It looked Germanic to me (but what do I know), so I tried to plug it into the Google translator for German to English and it didn't work. According to the author's blogger profile, he is a theology student in Sweden, so I guess the blog must be in Swedish. How fun! Only I can't read it, and I can't find a web-site with automated translation from Swedish. Amazing how the internet spreads ideas even to people in other countries with languages I can't understand. Just for the sake of my curiosity, can anyone tell me what he's saying about me?

Comments/Trackbacks

It has come to my attention that comments (and probably also trackbacks) on this site have not been working (probably for a long time). They should be fixed now. If you encounter any problems, please let me know by email. Thanks.

Online on New Server

I'm up and running on the new server, and as far as I can tell everything is in good working order. Please report any problems, and remember to change links and bookmarks with port numbers (e.g., for this blog, links that begin with kennypearce.net:8084 should be changed to blog.kennypearce.net). Thanks.

Real Hosting!

I ordered real hosting for this site and my domain today (in case you didn't know, as of this moment it is running off the linux workstation on my desk, which doesn't work very well due to (a) my domain registrar not supporting dyndns, and (b) Verizon home DSL blocking all kinds of important ports, including most notably port 80, the HTTP port). This will result in a number of changes, the vast majority of which are, in my view, positive.

1. The port numbers that appear in the URLs will go away. At present, www.kennypearce.net translates into kennypearce.net:8080, hacking.kennypearce.net into kennypearce.net:8081, writings.kennypearce.net into kennypearce.net:8082, etc. This is bad. It will go away. If you have any links or bookmarks with these port numbers in them please change them as once I get fully set up (not sure how long that will take...) they will no longer work.
2. The email address kenny@kenny.homelinux.org will go away. At present, my DNS record is invalid (it has a CNAME as the root and then other records under it), and as a result the behavior of DNS resolvers is "undefined" with regard to it. As you may have noticed, it works fine for web browsers. However, many SMTP (outgoing email) servers don't like it, and translate my address, kenny@kennypearce.net, into kenny@kenny.homelinux.org, kenny.homelinux.org being the dyndns domain for my computer. Please do not send any more email to kenny@kenny.homelinux.org, as it will start bouncing shortly (and that address never existed for any reason other than technical difficulties).
3. This site will not go down any more. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but this company ODSOL has hosted the Underground Shakespeare web-site for the couple of years that I've been maintaining it, and I am not aware of any downtime to date.
4. I won't have to worry about making sure my computer is running and connected to the internet all the time any more. At present, whenever my desktop PC is disconnected from the internet, the site goes down. Oops.
5. And the downside: This site now costs about $95/year for me to run. Yes, I'm paying to provide you with free content. This is perfectly acceptable to me because I enjoy the existence of this site. However, for those of you who also enjoy the existence of this site, I expect to be accepting donations soon. Up to this point, this site has required nothing but time from me, and now it is going to be requiring money as well, so help will be appreciated.

   This has been your administrative miscellany for the day. Tune in next time when we'll be discussing a far more thrilling topic, <insert witticism here>.

   Posted by kpearce at 06:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I'm Back!

Regular visitors to this site (the existence of such individuals is disputed, but I believe you are out there somewhere!) may have noticed a substantial outage recently, lasting approximately from the afternoon of Sunday the 26th until yesterday afternoon. This was due to a major administrative debacle at Verizon. As you can see, I am back online now. I'm sure I've missed a lot the last few weeks (Sandra Day O'Connor, London, etc.), but I'm not going to try to catch up. Let's just pretend I already blogged all of that and I'll start up again in the middle. Look for new material in the very near future. Sorry for the downtime, and thank you for sticking with me. I plan to get real hosting soon, and hopefully this won't happen any more.

The Future of This Blog

In case you hadn't noticed, this blog has been awefully sparse for the past few months. I had an extremely busy semester and not much time for blogging. It is now summer (that is, the spring semester of school is over), and working 40 hours a week and having Saturdays and Sundays off and not taking work home in the evenings is sounding restful. So, in this post I'd like to give some idea on what sorts of things will be influencing my topics over the course of the summer, and then comment briefly on a few issues I missed.

• This summer I'm going to try to dive back in to some serious intellectual Bible study. I'm currently in the middle of studies on Isaiah and John the Beloved (covering his life and the four books that bear his name, but probably not the Revelation), so I'll be working (and perhaps blogging) on those.
• I'm going to try to read as much of the New Testament in Greek as I can. I've gotten through about 4/5 of Matthew already (over the course of the last year), and I'm hoping (optimistically) to make it to the end of the gospels by the end of the summer.
• At present, I have a list of philosophers whom I dislike without ever having read. This is bad. I'm going to try to eleminate it by reading them all. The names on the list are Wittgenstein and Hegel (for whom I have a mild distaste) and also Nietzsche (whom I rather despise). So I will be reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, and probably also something by Hegel (haven't determined what as yet).
• I'm also going to try to eliminate what I see as some important holes in my knowledge of philosophy by reading Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and Locke's Second Treatise on Government (and probably the first while I'm at it).

I may be blogging on any or all (or none) of these things over the course of the summer. Now, here (as promised) are the important issues I missed:

• Terri Schiavo: This was a complicated issue; I don't think it was nearly as cut and dried as most of the Evangelical bloggers I read seemed to. We can't keep people alive on life support forever, it just doesn't make sense. If they are really gone, we have to let them go. On the other hand, removing a feeding tube is much different than turning off a heart and lung machine. The big issue, I thought, was that her "husband" fathered children by another woman while she was in the hospital. This, I think, should have invalidated the marriage leaving her in the custody of her parents. I don't believe that the ends ever justify the means - I am a non-consequentialist - and so I must condemn the actions of the Republicans in Congress on this issue as they flagrantly disregarded the Constitution.

• Pope Benedict XVI: What a great guy. I'm enthusiastic about the new Pope. He seems solid. From what I can tell, he takes Scripture seriously and views the Church councils as a tradition of Biblical interpretation rather than an independent authority. Good stuff.

• Beth Stroud (momentarily) Reinstated: (See the great interview at WesleyBlog). What a mess. I can't understand why there is any question about this. If an individual who claims to be a Christian and is a member of the church is unrepentant about sexual practices that do not conform to Biblical standards we are required by Scripture to excommunicate him (see 1 Corinthians 5). In fact, this is one of only two cases where the New Testament contains explicit instructions to excommunicate an individual (the other being Titus 3:10-11, "Reject a divisive man after the first and second admonition, knowing that such a person is warped and sinning, being self-condemned.") This is a paradigm case for Scriptural excommunication. Note, however, that excommunication is rarely, if ever, practiced properly. Jesus views it as a way of motivating people to repent, not as unlovingly excluding them (Matthew 18:15-20). The point is for the Church to show quite clearly that it does not condone the individual's actions, and in so doing to hopefully motivate the individual to repent, at which time he is to be admitted back into the Church, preferably to a celebration along the lines of the Prodigal Son. Why is this not being practised? a) People don't read the Bible, and b) people don't believe the Bible. The Church needs to start taking Scripture seriously again and practicing what it says.

I think those are all the critical things I've missed. Hopefully I can keep up on events as they happen from now on (at least for the rest of the summer)!

"A Philosophical Discussion of the Christian Doctrines of the Fall of Man and the Regeneration of the Holy Spirit"

I've just posted a new paper to my writings section. The name of the paper is "A Philosophical Discussion of the Christian Doctrines of the Fall of Man and the Regeneration of the Holy Spirit". This is a first first first draft (not yet seen by anyone but me) so any input would be much appreciated and can be posted here or e-mailed to me. That goes for any kind of feedback, whether on form or content. As before, I'll post my responses here and if I alter the paper in any way I will make note of that here. Check it out here (PDF format).

Major influences of this paper: The basic idea that all human desires are basically good and implanted by God but have been twisted onto improper targets as a result of the Fall has probably been around for a while, but I got it from John Eldredge. I have read and highly reccomend his Wild at Heart and Waking the Dead. He has also written at least two other books I have not read, The Journey of Desire and The Sacred Romance

The idea that the irrational components of the human mind are productive and even essential if and only if they are in complete submission to the rational mind originates from Plato, and especially the Republic. I make no apology as a Christian for the influence of Plato upon my thinking as Platonic thought also seems to have influenced the New Testament's use of langauge. Notably, the Platonists were the first to associate the Greek word λογος (logos) with God.

Other than that I hope that the paper pretty much speaks for itself. Hope someone somewhere is crazy enough to enjoy it!

Outages and Such

"For he would rather have at his bed's head
Some twenty books, all bound in black and red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Yet, and for all he was philosopher,
He had but little gold within his coffer;
But all that he might borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would swiftly spend,
And then he'd pray right busily for the souls
Of those who gave him wherewithal for schools.
Of study took he utmost care and heed.
Not one word spoke he more than was his need;
And that was said in fullest reverence
And short and quick and full of high good sense.
Pregnant of moral virtue was his speech;
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach."
- Geoffrey Chaucer, describing me - I mean the Oxford Cleric - in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales.

So here's the thing: You may have noticed that there have been a lot of outages on this site lately. This has to do with being behind a firewall and on Verizon DSL. My current setup for this site has a lot of problems. This port forwarding thing is ugly (that's the silly numbers after the : in the URL), and it turns out that my DNS record is technically invalid (but it works anyway). What I really need is to actually pay for hosting. The cheapest hosting that will do what I need costs around $8/month, which will bring the cost of running this site, including the domain name, up to just over $100/year. The problem is that "I have but little gold within my coffer; / But all that I might borrow from a friend / On books and learning I would quickly spend." So I know there are at least a handful of people who actually look at this site regularly, and I know there are a lot more who find it on google (I get hits from several hundred unique IPs each month), and my question for you is, if I asked for donations to pay for real hosting, would it be worth it to you? Do you think it's worth paying money to have this site up and running all the time rather than going down all the time? If you have an oppinion or suggestion, please either leave a comment on this entry or contact me by some other means. $100/year is definitely not very much money divided several ways. Thank you.

Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Foundations for an Absolutist Theory of Beauty

My writings page has just been reorganized. There are now separate pages for older and newer documents. The first thing to go up on the new documents page is the paper "Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Foundations for an Absolutist Theory of Beauty." This is an edited and slightly expanded version of my term paper for aesthetics class this past semester (spring of 2004). Special thanks to Serena Halley whose comments made the first revision possible, and Michael Rohlf whose comments did the same for the second. Click here to take a look at it (PDF format).

Back Online After Outage

This site is now back online after an outage which lasted approximately two days. The outage was due to the move from on-campus housing to the Crusade house off campus, and then the realization, only after I had flown to the other side of the country, that Verizon was blocking port 80 and so the site was not viewable from outside the house. You may notice a change: the URLs you used before now forward to URLs with ugly port numbers at the end of the domain. Something else you might notice is that the URL http://kennypearce.net (without the www) will no longer work. This is because Verizon sucks. I'll be looking into using a different ISP, and perhaps we'll even be able to save some money since the only reason we even have phone service (we all use cell phones) is that we have to in order to get DSL through Verizon, so if there was some other broadband solution (preferably one that didn't block ports) that might end up being cheaper. So, anyway, I'm back online now, hope you didn't miss me too much!

GPG Key Up

I posted my GPG (OpenPGP compatible) public key on my contact page today. You should use it if you plan on saying important things to me via e-mail. You should get your own if you want people to be able to say important things to you without announcing them to the world. Go here to get my public key, and more ranting from me about why you should use it. Go here for info on GPG, or here for general info on OpenPGP.

Site Downtime/College/etc.

This site is going to go down sometime soon, probably Friday, and it may not come back up for a while. I am leaving next Tuesday (August 26th) for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where I hope to enter the Computer and Cognitive Science program, through which I would get a degree from the School of Engineering and Applied Science in computer science and a degree in philosophy from "The College" (the arts and sciences school). I'm getting a new (much faster) computer when I get there, and it may be a little while before I get everything transferred. I'll move in and get my computer and stuff on the 28th, so look for the site to be available again any time after that. Hopefully it won't be too long.

As for the move, I could sure use some prayer. As I'm going off to college on the other side of the nation, I will, right at the same time, be removed from everything that's familiar, be temporarily without a church or any kind of accountability structure, and exposed to new temptations. Please pray that I can, as all of the Church should, influence the world around me more than I am influenced by it. The Church must infiltrate the world, rather than the world infiltrating the Church. I want my life to be true to this. Your prayers are appreciated.