An alleged fallacy

I’ve been enjoying Part One (“Ancient Philosophy”) of Anthony Kenny’s four-part New History of Philosophy. The selection and arrangement of themes is pretty tidy, and in one passage – the conclusion of the epistemological chapter – it’s almost breathtaking how the dominoes topple over.

The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view.

However, ancient epistemology is bedevilled by two different but related fallacies. Both of them are generated by a misunderstanding of the truth that whatever is knowledge must be true. One of the fallacies haunts classical epistemology, up to the time of Aristotle; the other fallacy haunts Hellenistic and imperial epistemology.

The first fallacy is this. “Whatever is knowledge must be true” may be interpreted in two ways:

(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true

or

(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.

(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. Plato and Aristotle, over and over again, seem to regard (2) as indistinguishable from (1). Given the necessary connection between knowledge and truth, they seem to think, only what is necessary can be known. From the acceptance of (2) there flows the construction of the theory of eternal and immutable Ideas, and there flows the impossible ideal of Aristotelian science.

If whatever is knowledge must be true, then it may seem that knowledge must be the exercise of a faculty that cannot err. This is the form that the fallacy takes in Hellenistic times. The Epicureans and Stoics, unlike Plato and Aristotle, are prepared to countenance knowledge not just of eternal truths, but of mundane contingencies such as that Dion is now walking. But this, they claim, is possible only if we have faculties – whether sense or reason – that are capable of infallible operation. The Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that

It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.

But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,

If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong.

The epistemological fallacy, both in its classical and in its Hellenistic form, would cast long shadows through philosophy’s history.

If Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and (presumably, for centuries) their descendents all really were confused on this point, then: Oof.

I raise my sons

Little Abel has been feverish; his napping has been so fitful, he hasn’t remained asleep when I’ve tried to separate my body from his. Today he was less ill but just as unwilling to be parted from me. The household chores have suffered; my reading and writing “projects” have suffered; Abel’s napping “schedule,” insofar as one exists, has suffered. In the afternoons, I’ve had to haul him, at his groggiest, down the block to retrieve Samuel from the bus.

Samuel has brought home a workbook of optional math exercises. Most days, I force him to complete a few pages. He screams bloody murder but then settles down and does them easily enough.

Daniel, the middle child, finds ways to claim attention. He and I discuss the English and Spanish alphabets. He firmly believes in che, elle, and erre, although the Real Academia Española disavowed those letters in the mid-1990s. Alas, Daniel follows YouTube, not his father. His Spanish is therefore overcomplicated. His approach to reading in either language is downright glacial. He can sound out syllables but has to pause to lecture me about every letter. I tell him it’s no way to form words, let alone whole sentences. What would really suit him is a language of pictographs and ideographs. His calligraphy is rather good; he might learn to design type before he can read it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Most days, Abel and Daniel are good friends. They play and bathe together. Daniel has given them superhero bathing names: “Soap Man” and “Bubble Man.” Abel likes to pour water out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor.

When Abel is old enough, I’ll take them all outside and force them to run around the track next to the school down the street. The two younger boys, especially Daniel, already like to run around the shed in our yard. They didn’t like to before, but I persuaded them with reverse psychology or some such trick.

Following a tumultuous afternoon: a conversation with my chastened first-grader

Samuel: “Look at what I’m drawing, Dad.”

He shows me his LCD drawing tablet.

John-Paul: “Is that a ‘peace’ sign?”

Samuel: “Yes. Today is International Peace Day.”

John-Paul: “So it is. Did you learn that at school?”

Samuel: “Yes.”

I briefly reflect on this country’s warring. I decide to let it pass.

John-Paul: “That’s good.”

Samuel: “I’m drawing this ‘peace’ sign to calm myself.”

He’s banned from TV this evening.

Samuel: “Now I’m turning the ‘peace’ sign into a crying emoji.”

He does.

He presses the button to clear the screen.

Samuel: “I’m writing with a colored pencil because I’ve lost the stylus.”

I hadn’t known, or had forgotten, that the instrument is called a stylus.

He shows me the screen. He has written:

peace = calm

Return to me!

Every day this week, Samuel has come home from school expecting to have received the latest issue of his (free) Lego magazine. No luck. I share in his disappointment.

Today, then, we were happy to find a magazine in our mailbox.

But it wasn’t the Lego magazine. It was an unexpected, free issue of Harper’s.

Eveloping the regular cover was an outer cover, on which was printed this enticement:

Dear Former Subscriber:

Remember the story of the prodigal son? How his father put on a feast and welcomed him back with open arms?

Well, that’s what we at Harper’s want to do for you.

Instead of setting a sumptuous table, we’ve come up with something far more satisfying: a money-saving opportunity to subscribe to Harper’s at the lowest available rate!

Restart your subscription today and get a full year of Harper’s (12 issues) for only $14.97 – that’s 86% off the annual newsstand price. You save $92.91 just by saying YES!

And so on.

I have to say, I’m put off. Harper’s Magazine is not my Heavenly Father.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. Even so: In the pretentious field of long-form journalism, Harper’s achieves a kind of modesty by going out of the way to pose as what, in Peppa Pig, is referred to as a “clever-clogs.” (The “clever-clogs” in Peppa Pig is Edmund Elephant.) The Harper’s style is to dress up serious reportage or reflection in snark.

Harper’s plays the wise fool.

The quintessential Harper’s article is Bertrand Russell’s “In Praise of Idleness” (1932).

Articles mentioned on this issue’s cover:

“Revolt in the Heartland: Can Old-Time Populism Save the Country?”

“Ghost Towns of the Darién Gap”

“On the Front Lines of Canada’s Ostrich War” (didn’t the Australians have an ostrich war? No, they fought the emus)

That I’ve been a more faithful subscriber of Harper’s than of, say, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books surely reflects my own penchant for off-the-wall self-effacement.

Or that I’m a cheapskate. Those other mags are pricey.

Now that I’m old

Three books by Tim Mulgan, a future-minded philosopher before “longtermism” was in vogue:

(1) Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations (2006)

(2) Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (2011)

(3) Philosophy for an Ending World (2024)

The trajectory is not encouraging.

About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral-and-political philosophy, delivered to university students in the (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems naïvely optimistic. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

E. H. Carr, in What Is History?, says:

The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.