Belief in God is rational.
Everything has a cause. So unless there is a first cause, then you would have an infinite regress. And then nothing could exist. Therefore there must be a first cause. Therefore God, the first cause, exists. QED.
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14.2.24
The main approach of the communists is to get people to think that they are being abused so a to destroy society and then after all is in ruins to come in and take over and establish their order. Originally that meant the factory workers, but at some point the peasants working at the farms of the owners of the estates got included in what was called the proletariat. That is why the flag of the USSR has both the hammer and the sickle. Obviously the Russians began to realize almost immediately that to run a factory or do any kind of business and especially advancement in the arts and sciences takes "know-how" and that know how got to be valued in the USSR way above the proletariat.
[Why were the factory workers above the peasants in Marx? Because Capitalism was the stage of world history between the Feudal period and Communism.]
If a woman makes an agent to receive her document of divorce, can that agent make another agent in his place? No- in the opinion of Ramban because words are not handed over to a messenger. [Laws of Divorce 1:13][You can not make a messenger to say something. You can make a messenger to do something.] I thought as is was explaining this, and later saw that Rav Shach himself asks the obvious question, "What words?" I imagine this must have been the approach of the Rambam who makes no distinction between messengers. But to the Ramban this seems to be a significant objection. If a messenger to receive a ''get'' can not make another messenger in his place because words are not handed over to a messenger, then why can she make a messenger in the first place?
I like to read original historical documents or archeological evidence because i think later versions are often skewed to reflect some agenda. Thus I have a different point of view about everything in history than anything taught in schools. Examples are numerous. However sometimes that means I have only slight modifications on the accepted views and sometimes I have totally different views. An example is Columbus. The natives begged him to return and save them from the Caribbean tribes who were not nice. Another example is Cortes. He wanted peace, but kept on getting attacked three times. The fourth time was when he sent an interpreter to explain that he just wanted to be left alone; and that interpreter went to all the tribes and organized a vast army to attack Cortes. [They lost, and we still blame Cortes.] Things are never like they teach in school, and especially when you get to talk with people that were involved in an event and then see how it is portrayed in the news. see: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
This is in every group-especially a group with an agenda to portray themselves in a good light. the truth is out there-but it takes digging to find it. All American history is portrayed by those who hate the USA and want to show that everything it has done has been evil. this stems mainly from the Frankfurt school
12.2.24
Marriage is not needed to have children as we see in Chronicles I chapter 2 verses 45-49 concerning the children that Caleb ben Jefuna had with his concubines. Caleb ben Jefuna was a righteous tzadik as we see in the Book of Numbers concerning the spies that Moses sent into the Land of Canaan. Caleb ben Jefuna along with Joshua were the only ones who spoke well of the Land, and God specifically praised Caleb that he "went totally with God" וימלא אחרי השם. This is an argument among rishonim, but Ramban brings that in many texts of the Rambam the prohibition of a concubine is missing. Of course there is the need for a natural body of water for purification after the 7th day of the period. [i.e. it makes no difference if she sees blood for one day or more or the whole seven. After seven, she dips in a natural body of water and is pure. if she sees more than seven that is a zava. If after seven she still sees for 3 days then she needs seven clean days.]
People have had trouble for along time on the question of how to discern between a cult and a religion. to me this is clearly a matter of what Otto called ''numinous'' . That is to say that there is ladder of values and the closer one gets to an area of value that is all content and no form, the more one can be caught up in evil. I do not think there is any antidote to this problem. being secular does not seem like much of a solution either. The best idea I think is the formula of the Middle Ages--to combine faith with reason. [You can see this approach most clearly in the Chovot Levavot and Saadia Gaon.]
There is nothing in Torah about government except the claim of Samuel the Prophet that the fact that Israel asked for a king was extremally evil. [However, there are plenty of laws about the Sanhedrin.]
[The law about kings is a prophet can anoint a king or the Sanhedrin. And the Sanhedrin had nothing to do with the will of the people since it required ordination (semicha from Sinai). But authentic semicha does not exist anymore. It ceased to exist during the middle of Talmudic period. But what are the powers of a king? This is an argument. The things mentioned by Samuel --the amoraim (talmudic sages) disagreed about. Some said they are legitimate powers and some say they are threats.] [anyway the Sanhedrin after the Maccabees took power was controlled by the ''zedukim''--i.e. was not legitimate [since they denied the validity of the Oral LAW].]
To me this seems like a mystery. Government has been a major question in philosophy since Plato --then dropped for about 1600 years until Hobbes and the Enlightenment which took up the question again.
I am not sure how to deal with this issue myself since I tend to agree with John Locke and James Madison and the other founding fathers of the USA. Yet, as my leaning partner David Bronson noted,--there are weak spots that the enemies of the USA have exploited to take over the government. [Gödel also saw some weak spot, but never explained what it is. Einstein stopped him from explaining it in order that Gödel could get American citizenship. (The clerk that was going to give him citizenship mentioned that what happened in Nazi Germany could never happen in the USA. And Gödel was about to explain how that is wrong until Einstein stopped him. Nowadays, I wish Gödel had explained this because it might help to know and correct things. )]
[A lot of my being impressed with the USA is the fact that I saw it before the radical LEFT took over the judiciary and all administrative agencies. Nowadays I would have to admit something is terribly wrong. THE ANSWER is to have all schools teach the BIBLE, THE CONSTITUTION OF THE USA, AND JOHN LOCKE'S TWO TREATIES OF GOVERNMENT.] It is an odd fact that no students of political science in any American university have been assigned to read the Constitution although all have assigned to read the Communistic Manifesto.
Here, I figure out why conceptual analysis failed and what concepts are really like.*
[ *Based on: “The Failure of Analysis and the Nature of Concepts,” pp. 51-76 in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods, ed. Chris Daly (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).]
1. The Failure of Analysis
Philosophy began with attempts to define things. Socrates asked people “What is virtue?”, “What is justice?”, “What is knowledge?” Famously, he never found out.
Two millennia later, a movement arose in the English-speaking philosophical world known as “analytic philosophy”. At its inception, analytic philosophers thought that their main job was to analyze language or concepts. Many very smart, highly-educated people dedicated careers to the project of conceptual analysis in the 20th century. If ever we should have expected that project to bear fruit, it would have been in the 20th century.
What do we have to show for it? Only negative results—we refuted some analyses. We never found a single correct analysis. To speak more cautiously, as far as I can tell, no one—either in the 20th century or any other time—has ever advanced an analysis of any philosophically interesting concept that was widely accepted by philosophers as correct. Nearly all analyses are subject to counter-examples that most philosophers would agree refute the analysis. (Caveat: sometimes you will meet a philosopher who claims to have correctly analyzed some concept. But hardly ever do you meet one who thinks that anyone else has correctly analyzed a concept.)
( *The field of mathematics is an exception to the rule. It contains many precise definitions that are widely accepted by mathematicians. There may also be a few other concepts that can be defined. )
The attempts to define “knowledge” after 1963 are the most instructive case, because that term received particularly intense scrutiny. Philosophers went through dozens of increasingly complicated analyses and counter-examples over several decades, and no consensus emerged. To this day, we don’t know the definition of “knowledge”. Philosophers had similar experiences when they tried to define such things as “good”, “cause”, “if”, “freedom”, and so on.
This raises some questions:
What made people think that we could and should analyze concepts?
Why did it prove so difficult, and what does this tell us about the nature of concepts?
2. The Roots of Conceptual Analysis
a. Empiricism
The project of conceptual analysis was given motivation by the popularity of empiricism, which held that all knowledge must be either analytic or empirical (there is no synthetic a priori knowledge). Once you adopt that theory, you should next wonder what kind of knowledge philosophy itself might be producing. The 20th-century empiricists didn’t want to deny that they were producing knowledge, but they also couldn’t plausibly claim that they were producing empirical results (nor did they want to have to start doing observations and experiments). So they were almost forced to say that philosophy is all about analytic knowledge, which is knowledge that derives from the understanding of concepts, or of the meanings of words. So the job of philosophers must be to analyze concepts or words.
Fortunately, few people think that anymore.
b. The Lockean Theory of Concepts
Here is the important part. The drive for conceptual analysis comes from a very natural way of thinking about concepts and meanings, which is probably the way you’d think about them if no one told you differently. I call it the Lockean Theory of Concepts (but I don’t care whether this was really Locke’s view). It includes three elements:
1. Concepts are directly introspectible mental objects.
2. Most concepts are composed of other concepts.
3. The application of words is governed by definitions, which describe the composition of the concepts that a word expresses.
Notice two implications of this view:
(i) that most concepts should be definable. Apart from a few simple concepts, most concepts will be composed of other concepts. Since we can directly, introspectively observe our concepts, we should be able to describe how they are composed, and that would be to give a definition.
(ii) that definitions are useful, even necessary, to understand most words.
The history of philosophy, however, shows that this theory is wrong. If the Lockean Theory were true, we should have many successful analyses by now. Also, if the Lockean theory were true, the lack of analyses would prevent us from understanding and applying words. But in fact, we have approximately zero successful analyses, and this hasn’t stopped us from understanding and applying words.
3. An Intuitionist Theory of Concepts
Following is a better theory about concepts, which seems vaguely in line with some intuitionist views in ethics.
a. Properties and Natures
Every thing in the universe has a specific nature. This is a maximally specific, comprehensive property (or, the sum of all the properties of the thing). This would include, e.g., the exact shade of color of the object (or the exact distribution of colors throughout the object). The natures of things vary along numerous dimensions. We can imagine a space with those dimensions, the “quality space”: every particular thing occupies a point in the quality space. (You can also include dimensions for spatial locations and relational properties.) There could in principle be more than one thing at that point, but in practice, each ordinary object is the only thing that has its exact nature (other objects may be similar but we never find one exactly the same). The quality space is like the color cone (see image), but with dimensions for all other properties, not just colors.
There are also more general properties, such as redness, roundness, cathood. These are properties that many objects share. These can be thought of as regions in the quality space. Compare how the property redness is a roughly wedge-shaped region in the color cone.
Aside: This is a non-traditional way of thinking about properties. In the traditional view, one treats properties as primary and thinks of the natures of objects as conjunctions of their properties. I treat specific, determinate natures of things as primary, and think of properties as ranges of natures.
b. Concepts
When we form a concept, we are drawing a line (or a hypersurface, to be more pedantic) around a region in the quality space. Everything in that region is what the concept applies to.
How do we draw the boundaries of concepts? Many factors can influence this. We want concepts to be useful for conveying information in the world we live in. Hence, we tend to draw lines that wind up including a lot of things in the world. If there is a cluster of objects in a certain region of the quality space, we draw a line around that cluster. Had objects clustered differently, we would have drawn our conceptual schemes differently.
Example: Pluto used to be considered a “planet” when we thought there were 9 planets in the solar system. It was smaller than the other 8 planets, but that was okay. Later, astronomers discovered that there were 50 other objects in the solar system that were similar to Pluto and different from the other 8 “planets” (in a way similar to how Pluto differed from the other 8 planets). So we redrew our conceptual scheme to make the 8 big planets fit in one category (“planets”), and the 50 smaller things (including Pluto) another category (“planetoids”).
Conceptual boundaries also depend on practical interests. For instance, the category “bachelor” is of interest because humans are interested in who is eligible to marry a woman. That is why most people find the Pope to be, at best, a borderline case of a “bachelor”. He’s an unmarried man, sure, but he’s not quite a bachelor, because he’s not exactly marriageable.
Conceptual boundaries also drift over time. The etymology of most modern words shows them originating in words with completely different meanings. The meanings must have drifted through the quality space.
There are infinitely many regions in the quality space, so there are infinitely many possible concepts, though of course any human mind can only grasp finitely many concepts at a time.
c. Language & concepts
Most of our concepts are tied to language: we are prompted to form a concept by hearing a word in our language. We attempt to imitate how others are using that word, so each use we hear (while we are learning) influences our dispositions to apply that word. To “understand” the word is to have formed the right dispositions – i.e., to have become disposed to apply the word (or at least to sense that its application is appropriate) in approximately the same circumstances that people in your speech community apply it. Your understanding just consists of having those dispositions.
E.g., my grasp of the concept of knowledge consists of my ability to tell when it is appropriate to apply “knows” to someone’s mental state and when it isn’t.
4. Against Locke
Every element of the Lockean theory is deeply mistaken:
1. Concepts are not directly introspectible mental objects.
They are instead dispositional. Thus, the way to limn the contours of a concept is usually not to directly, introspectively examine that concept. The way is to activate your linguistic dispositions by imagining specific scenarios and observing your own disposition to find the application of a certain term appropriate or inappropriate.
2. Most concepts are not composed of other concepts.
They are constituted by dispositions that were formed by distinct sets of experiences. Each concept can have a unique boundary, which need not coincide for any distance with the boundary of any other concept. The boundaries can have complex, idiosyncratic shapes. This is why most concepts are indefinable.
3. The application of words is not governed by definitions.
It is governed by these dispositions that we spontaneously form after hearing others’ word usage and attempting to imitate it. We almost never learn words by hearing definitions; we almost always learn by seeing examples of the correct use of the word. This is why it does not matter that we don’t have definitions for most words; this does not stop us from learning and applying the words.
Wittgenstein might have agreed with some of this.
All this explains (i) why conceptual analysis failed in the 20th century, (ii) why we don’t need definitions, and (iii) why we evaluate definitions using particular examples. About point (iii), consider that we rejected the “justified, true belief” analysis of knowledge based on the Gettier examples, rather than applying the analysis to conclude that the Gettier examples are cases of knowledge. Nearly everyone instinctively found that the correct reaction.
It can still be useful to try to clarify concepts – e.g., by distinguishing a concept from others that it is often confused with, by drawing out some key conceptual relations (one concept implying another, etc.). What we don’t need and shouldn’t expect to do is to identify the exact necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a given concept, using other concepts.
