Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Boberooni has implied that I got a man crush on Scott Adams. I will admit that I have learned a lot from Adams about persuasion. But I'm not in love, no no ! Adams, is, for instance, a terrible philosopher. Consider this gem : "As a companion to what I said on the Rubin Report, here is more scientific evidence that we are not rational beings. We are beings who rationalize after the fact." The problem with this position ought to be obvious... but it isn't, I guess, if you are a terrible philosopher. If "we," taken as a blanket statement, are not rational beings, then who cares what the "scientific evidence" says: it is just more rationalization after the fact done by a bunch of irrational beings who happen to (irrationally) have gained the title of scientist. Or are scientists magical aliens who are somehow immune to the laws that rule the rest of our "dumb human brains" for which "data and logic just don't exist"...

It is extremely easy muddle together the scientific concepts of atoms and elementary particles, and the philosophical idea of atomism, and speak wrongly as a result. The worst example I've ever seen of this, which appears frequently in science textbooks (and which I have mentioned here before), runs something like: "The ancient Greeks incorrectly thought that the atom was an indivisible entity. But modern science has shown that the atom can be further sub-divided." This is such a crass error that it is almost unbelievable that it appears in so many textbooks. To understand what has gone wrong, consider the following analogy: Joe moves to Brooklyn. He has heard reports of "the best bar in Brooklyn," one that has the best drinks at the best prices, served by the best bartenders. He spends a few weeks exploring, after which he dubs Bar X "the best bar in Brooklyn." But couple of months later, he stumbles upon another bar, Bar Y, which has even...

I didn't have a book to bring to the gym at work today, so I scanned the shelves of my (shared) office and plucked from them Lionel Robbins' A History of Economic Thought . Now mind you, I have no axe to grind with Robbins, and the remarks of his I will highlight below have little bearing on any practical current debate. I only note them to show how very wrong even major thinkers often are when they wander outside their area of expertise. I started with Robbins' second lecture, on Plato and Aristotle. The first sign of trouble was when Robbins says that in The Laws , Plato has a "fascist conception" of the best society, rather than a communist one as in The Republic . So Robbins is trying to line thinkers of 2400 years ago with the political parties of his day, a completely hopeless task that falsifies the past. Next up: "Before the Renaissance Plato was not at all well know, whereas " the Philosopher" (Aristotle) was appealed to by most of th...

Edward Feser here argues against certain philosophical ideas because they "lead to" certain other ideas. In particular, he rejects a Platonic view of form and occasionalism as a way of understanding efficient causation. In arguing against them, he resorts to this sort of thing: "So, avoiding occasionalism and thus pantheism also requires affirmation of immanent causal power and immanent teleology -- again, Aristotelian efficient and final causes." But if occasionalism or the Platonic theory of forms are, in fact, true, it is no argument against them to say that they lead to pantheism: that would just mean pantheism is true as well! And in any case, there is no inevitable slide from such views into pantheism. For instance, Berkeley 's understanding that the world is God's ideas is not pantheistic: God's ideas are not God! This blog post is my idea, but you can't kill me by shooting it on the server where it resides. As Collingwood noted in Th...

"Medieval Scholastics did not mindlessly worship Aristotle nor did they mindlessly accept everything Averroes said." -- Philip Daileader, The High Middle Ages In fact, there were multiple condemnations of Aristotle's work during the Middle Ages, culminating in a list of two hundred and nineteen Aristotelean ideas that were declared false. This is hardly the attitude of thinkers who "slavishly followed" Aristotle, a claim that is slavishly repeated by those seeking to sully the reputation of that time.

Says physicist Carlo Rovelli : "I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and nonintuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids) in the same technical sense in which Newton's theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good, empirically grounded theory. This observation suggests some general considerations on intertheoretical relationships.

I believe I was the first person to note in print just how Aristotelian Oakeshott's analysis of rationalism is, although I must credit Noel O'Sullivan for dropping the hint that got me going in that direction. Here is the kind of thing I was getting at: "At the start of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle observes that moral action does not arise from deliberation. In order to think clearly about virtue, one must first already have a virtuous disposition formed by good habits. Aristotle drily remarks that the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing. You become virtuous – and thus able to understand virtue – by acting virtuously. Nobody ever reasoned their way into right living." "...the endless ethical debate of some philosophers is really just a sophisticated way of doing nothing": Peter Singer springs instantly into my mind!

Livio Di Matteo has a nice discussion of the history of supply-and-demand analysis here . Along the way, the idea of a "just price" arises, and is regarded, both by Di Matteo and commenter Bob Murphy (probably no relation to the Murphy we know and love) as an antiquated idea, incompatible with modern price theory. But perhaps just price theories are not incompatible with supply-and-demand analysis. My reading of Aristotle (from whom Aquinas would have drawn his basic notions) suggests to me that what he was looking at (without having the terms, of course!) was producer and consumer surplus, and the "equality" that had to hold was between these surpluses, so that if I would buy at any price under $2, and Murphy would sell at any price above $1, the just price should be around $1.50. "Unjust" prices would come about when one of us has far greater bargaining power, and "forces" the price to $1.01 or $1.99. To consider this in more concrete term...

" It is clear then from what has been said that  there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible  things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude,  but is without parts and indivisible (for it produces movement through  infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power; and, while every  magnitude is either infinite or finite, it cannot, for the above reason,  have finite magnitude, and it cannot have infinite magnitude because there  is no infinite magnitude at all). But it has also been shown that it is  impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change  of place." --   Metaphysics , Book XII

"ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this  is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness  they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.  For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do  anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason  is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light  many differences between things." -- Metaphysics , Book I I am always stunned by academics who demand a "point," some practical guidance to action, from any and all research. Do they not have a sense of curiosity that wants to be satisfied even if there is nothing to "do" with what one discovers?

"In the classic experience of noetic existence man is free either to engage in the action of 'immortalizing' by following the pull of the divine Nous, or to choose death by following the counter pull of the passions. The psyche of man is the battleground between the forces of life and death. Life is not given; the God of the Laws [by Plato] can only offer it to the revelation of his presence; life to be gained requires the cooperation of man." -- Eric Voegelin, describing Plato's and Aristotle's understanding of immortality, "Reason," The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin , Vol. XII, p. 281 "For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace" -- Romans 8:6-11

You must've seen this a number of times: some libertarian dismisses complaints about inequality by saying, "What does it matter if inequality is growing, so long as the poor are getting wealthier in an absolute sense? To worry about one's relative wealth, to resent another for doing even better than one is doing oneself, is simply envy." There are two things to note here: first of all, not all worry about increasing inequality is based on envy. Republican theorists throughout the centuries worried about great economic inequality because they felt it made republican politics impossible: the very rich could easily buy the allegiance and votes of the very poor, who would not act as independent republican citizens, but as clients of their wealthy patrons. But let us grant that some of the worry about inequality is based on end. That does not mean we can dismiss it lightly! Here is Aristotle on the issue: "Inequality is everywhere at the bottom of faction, for i...

Noah Millman, who typically seems to be an intelligent fellow, forwards two surprisingly fatuous contentions in this post . 1) "we can’t rely naively on an Aristotelean teleology which we now know has no empirical basis" Ah, someone must've had their final-cause-detection meter set on high, and still have failed to find any teleology! Because what else can Millman mean here? Four hundred years ago, the founders of modern science made a methodological choice: they would only look for efficient causes, and they would only consider efficient causation in their explanations. Final causation was excluded not because of any evidence that it does not exist, but because explanations in terms of final causes were thought to be unenlightening. That an enterprise which has deliberately excluded teleology from its explanations does not reveal to us any final causes is hardly surprising. 2) Millman next suggests that the hole created in Aristotelian ethics by removing teleology (which...

A little while ago, I asked , "Would Aristotle have thought other-directed wage workers to be slaves?" Well, I still am not sure of the answer to that; but now I am sure that Cicero so thought them: "Vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill ; for in their case the very wages they receive is a pledge of their slavery." --  De Officiis The key thing here is not what contractual basis the works takes place under -- whether I own you or I pay you -- it is whether you work (almost) entirely under my direction, or you have active control over some non-minor part of your labor. The artistically skilled craftsman accepts wages, but is not a slave because he directs -- indeed, must direct, in that his employer does not have his skill -- a large part of his own labor. The slave is not a slave because he is owned (although he may be), but because he does not own his own time . I think this i...

Aristotle (in)famously held that certain people are natural slaves. But we must look closely at what he meant by that. My recollection is that he focused on those people's inability to direct their own efforts successfully. My question: Would Aristotle have considered employment as an underling in a modern corporation simply an ingenious way of managing natural slaves so that they don't feel the yoke of their slavery as much? It seems to me that the key thing for him was not their being owned, but their being other-directed in their work. If that is so, than he might look at the position of a line cook at McDonald's and think, "Yes, just as I thought: some people can only work successfully when someone else plans all of their work for them." I'm not wondering if you agree with that, I'm wondering is that what Aristotle would think today?

Something that sometimes happens is that libertarians think I must no longer understand the pitfalls of politics that I once understood. Not so! Coming to appreciate the pitfalls of trying to ignore or do away with politics does not imply having forgotten the pitfalls of politics itself. One serious problem is that the government officials, who are supposed to be attending to the common weal, come to treat their offices as merely ways to feather their own nests. (Those who would say that that is all that government officials ever do are being absurd: all I can say is get out of your parent's basement and meet a variety of people in government posts: most of them are genuinely concerned, to some extent or other , with actually doing good at their job, even if they are also concerned with doing well themselves. I'd say, in fact, it's much like at any private company for which I've worked: some people are devoted to the company, some care enough to get promotions, som...

Ed responds to a blog post of mine here . In a seemingly common move by modern Aristotelians, he first plays the "but he doesn't really understand what we are saying" card. Well, no, Ed, I understood perfectly well that the issue was about qualia, about whether there is something it is like to be a plant. That being cleared up, let's get down to the empirical issues that we might use to judge whether there is something it is like to be a plant. Here, I believe the key issue is that much of the activity of plants does not look like activity to us, so that only careful scientific investigation reveals how active they actually are. For instance, Ed says: "Hence, imagine that dry grass could feel the oppressive heat of the sun or experience thirst and the craving for water. What would be the point? It would not be able to do anything about its circumstances and would thus, unlike an animal, suffer without being able even in principle to remedy the circumstan...

Contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to each other , with sounds among other methods. This certainly does not invalidate all of Aristotle's metaphysics. But it certainly does mean neo-Aristotelians ought to drop the idea that plants lack sensations. Whether anything at all has a "vegetative soul" is an interesting question -- I doubt it -- but if anything does, it ain't plants. And, of course, Aristotle would have thought of mushrooms as a sort of plant, and would have had no idea that the mushroom is only the visible tip of a much vaster organism 1 , and one that lives in a totally different way to plants. Having made the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian natural science once before (at the time of the Scientific Revolution), do neo-Aristotelians really want to do that twice? 1 -The largest known fungal organism in the world stretches out over 2200 acres, is 2400 years old, and weighs perhaps 600 tons.