The Logical Atheist

My heart sinks with the news of Oct. 16 that a Muslim fanatic murdered and beheaded a French teacher,  Samuel Paty , 47, who had showed his students cartoon drawings of Muhammad during a class on free expression in suburban Paris. Police later shot Paty's 18-year-old killer dead. Six others were charged with complicity in the murder. According to the BBC,  Two teenage students, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were allegedly paid around €300 (£270; $355) by the killer to identify Mr Paty outside the school. The teenagers are alleged to have described the teacher to [to the suspected killer] and stayed with him for more than two hours until Mr Paty appeared.  A man named only as Brahim C, a parent of one of Mr Paty's pupils, is also under investigation. The 48-year-old is accused of orchestrating a hate campaign against Mr Paty and exchanging text messages with the killer before the attack. On Wednesday, [France's chief anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François] R...

People look to religion for comfort. Perhaps they look in the wrong place. I prefer Spinoza ( The Ethics , part 5). What gives one comfort ("blessedness") is reason, thought, understanding, clarity, activeness, freedom. These tame and eliminate destructive emotions (hatred, anger, envy, resentment, fear) and substitute constructive ones (love, joy, high-mindedness). Thus, Spinoza wrote, he who would govern his emotions and appetite solely by the love of freedom strives, as far as he can, to gain a knowledge of the virtues and their causes, and to fill his spirit with the joy which arises from the true knowledge of them: he will in no wise desire to dwell on men's faults, or to carp at his fellows, or to revel in a false show of freedom. Whosoever will diligently observe and practise these precepts (which indeed are not difficult) will verily, in a short space of time, be able, for the most part, to direct his actions according to the commandments of reason.

Implicit in being oneself is the commitment to oneself. One pursues one's life. One doesn't need a reason to pursue it. One pursues it, quite obsessively, because it's one's life. Who else's life is one supposed to pursue anyway? There is an absurdity in even asking for a reason as to why we should care about ourselves. Identity itself explains the self-concern. We don't require any persuasion in taking a special interest in what will befall us. The persuasion we require is to take an interest in others as well. That's the business of ethics, and the business, too of [Spinoza's] The Ethics . Spinoza tries to capture this fundamental fact -- that our commitment to ourselves is unlike the commitment to anything else, since it is tantamount to simply being  oneself -- in his concept of conatus . Conatus  is simply a thing's special commitment to itself....: "The endeavor, wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing else b...

A popular skeptical atheist celebrity often cites Carl Sagan's maxim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think that's right. But our skeptical atheist goes on to show that he's far from a true skeptic. (No true skeptic....) So this person offers this example: if someone tells him that he owns a dog, he's willing to believe this ordinary claim because the skeptic knows that people and dogs exist; he knows that people own dogs; and so on. The purported dog owner might show his interlocutor a dog collar and some doggie treats, which our skeptic is willing to accept as evidence. That's fine, of course. But it shouldn't be fine for a true skeptic. A true skeptic would challenge every piece of evidence for the person's owning a dog. Why? Maybe the person is a liar. Maybe the person is a hologram. Maybe the skeptic is hallucinating. Maybe the skeptic is just a brain in a vat. As W. S. Gilbert has a character sing in H.M.S. Pinafo...

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. --John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

To think of logic as constraining something is to imagine, or try to imagine, how things would be without the constraint. Since neither talk of an illogical world nor talk of illogical thought can be made sense of, the whole question cannot be meaningfully asked and so may be dismissed in good conscience: "in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable.... We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either" (Wittgenstein).... It is a sign of confusion to say either that the logicality of the world has its source in the structure of thought or that the logicality of thought has its source in the structure of the world—as though the logicality of thought and the logicality of the world were two different facts that need to be hooked together, rather than being two sides of the same fact. We cannot justify our language by pointing to its reflection of extralinguistic reality, because it is ...

Using a concept involves applying it to the real world. Since possessing a concept involves being able to use it, it follows that the possession of a concept commits us to applying that concept in various ways, and that these applications must be generally reliable and accurate in order for us to possess the concept at all. And from this it follows that one must assent to certain factual propositions employing the concept in order to count as possessing it in the first place, so that no "analytic' use of a concept is intelligible unless it is embedded in a network of "synthetic" uses of that same concept. Hence "propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)” (Wittgenstein). But in this case it no longer makes sense to ask whether conceptual truths are "analytic" or "synthetic." The analytic/synthetic distinction itself presupposes a se...