Woe to the downpressors/They'll eat the bread of sorrow !

You'd think that genocide and civil war would satisfy any government's evilness quota. You'd be wrong. The Sudanese govt. is intensifying border clashes with the Chadians as a result of its continuing attempt to cleanse Darfur of the Fur, Zaghawa, et. al. Chad's none too stable, so there's the possibility of an intra-Chadian war...You can read all about it here.

May they eat the bread of sorrow indeed. The sole good thing (maybe) about this is that it's another proof that colonial borders are no longer taken seriously - surely a sign that everyone's overcome their sovereignty fetish?

Against Factivity

Counterexamples to the following principle are invited:

S knows that p only if either p or it is impossible to know that not-p.

Masolo on African Sage Philosophy

DA Masolo's Stanford Encyclopaedia entry on African sage philosophy is now out. It's a good overview of the main positions, and has some interesting things to say about the ethnophilosophy debate.

Philosopher's Carnival

The new Philosopher's Carnival is here.

I especially liked Jonathan Kvanvig's 'indicatives and warranted assertibility', and RadGeek's nice post about the impiety paradox.

Sir Peter Frederick Strawson RIP

Obits at the Times, Guardian, Telegraph; Jason Stanley's appreciation at the Leiter Reports.

aristotle and germany

My Sloth! and the Laodiceans! - a deadly mix ! I've been turning over a potential post in my mind - inspired by one of them, but something seems to get in the way every time. This post for example, which reminded me of Aristotle's bit about contary predications only going through for the same object if the object is not actual (or something like that - I'm too lazy to look it up now) In short, on good metaphysical authority, there's no actual object that instantiates both prussian militarism and austrian cuddliness.

Buchan's bite: A rant

Re: this post of Boeciana's, and reposted from comments there.

"That meant that we had a cool detached view and did even-handed unsympathetic justice "

Not only is Buchan talking rubbish, he was actually closely involved in some of the dodgy goings-on, so he really ought to known better.

First, colonial legal regimes tend to be brutal and stupid. The Brits are no exception.
2 examples, both from Africa:

Kenya first, where legal arrangements were wildly unjust ab origine and remained so throughout the colonial period. Sentences varied according to race (unbelievably, this was actually legislated for - a less stupid regime would have done it by convention), black Africans were routinely subject to extra-legal punishment by whites, etc. All this is quite well documented: see among others: Correspondence Relating to the Flogging of Natives by Certain Europeans in Nairobi around 1907/08, the Report of the Native Labour Commission, 1912-13, and David Anderson’s Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895-1939 which is especially good on the variation in sentencing by race (his phrase is ‘racially determined’), and on the legitimisation of extra-legal punishment.

And Kenya is only one, rather minor, example.

South Africa was much worse, and had been so throughout the previous century, when most of the colonisation and settlement was done. The Making of South African Legal Culture 1902–1936 is good on this, while AA Mawby’s utter monster of a monograph has a nice explanation (in Vol. 1) of the history of, and motives for, the legal situation of non-whites in SA at the beginning of the XX century.

Buchan must have known all this. He had qualified as a lawyer before he went to SA as Lord Milner’s attaché (after the Boer War), and, once in Africa, he travelled widely. Furthermore, he served on Lord Milner’s land board, set up to carry out post-war reconstruction by settling British farmers on rural land stolen (partly) from the Boers (who had only just finished stealing it from the Africans), and partly from SA Africans. The land board, under his direction, did lots of extra-dodgy stuff, such as issuing compulsory purchase orders for less than market value and then seling at a massive profit, selling land to friends and loyalists for peanuts, hiding the identity of buyers from sellers to ensure that Brits got the best land, etc.
(Lord Milner distinguished himself in at least two ways: First, as one of the triumvirate that established concentration camps for Boers and Africans during the Boer War. More than 40,000 Boer and African POWs died in them. Second, in permitting white SA employers to beat their non-white employees, for which he was censured by Parliament. Again, Buchan cannot have been inculpably unaware of this).

Such, then, is the man who would prate about ‘even-handed unsympathetic justice’.I'd suggest that his equanimity about the Anglo-Scotch alliance is not unconnected to the fortunes he made therefrom.

One man he resist

Next week, I shall be outlining my client’s compensation claim.

LADIES AND gentlemen of the jury, the case for the defence can be summed up in three words: Judas was innocent. He was not just misunderstood, he was framed.

Ben MacIntyre makes the case for Judas' rehabilitation.

More here, and here.
(Danny Kruger in the Telegraph is mad - he spots the free-will issue, which hardly anyone else does. On the other hand, he ends by saying nice things about universalism)

The incredible disappearing Queen. (Not original, alas)

The Queen gave her usual Christmas speech at [whatever time this past Christmas]. But that presupposes that the Queen can speak as she did, whereas it is a truism that nobody could possibly speak like the queen. So, in fact, the queen didn’t give her Christmas speech.

Strawson's (delightful) first proof for the existence of cognitive experience.

Proof 1. Life would be fabulously boring if this were not so. Life is not fabulously boring.
(at p. 7 of the pdf, in case you haven't followed the title link.)

All part of an entertaining, enlightening and generally Dennett-inhibiting paper.

SOTD: Adrian, Abbott.

Happy New Year everyone

And so we're told this is the golden age/And gold is the reason for the wars we wage...

"What democracy - they didn't pay us our money!"

Ghaith (via the Guardian) rocks.

Rex quondam, Rexque Futurus.

Nucking Futter

The President of Iran claimed today that the Holocaust was a myth put about by Europeans to justify creating a Jewish state in the heart of the Islamic world.

"He hated the black boys, big and muscular, who beat him up, who scared him."

hat tip Marto.

'I miss the old days when people would say that the reductio of consequentialism was that is could be used to justify torture.'

Update: Title taken from Clayton Littlejohn's comment here.

the appropriately named Krauthammer :

Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it?

Now, on most issues regarding torture, I confess tentativeness and uncertainty. But on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty.

Sullivan's response.

What does it mean to "break" an individual? As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne once commented, and Shakespeare echoed, even the greatest philosophers have difficulty thinking clearly when they have a toothache. These wise men were describing the inescapable frailty of the human experience, mocking the claims of some seers to be above basic human feelings and bodily needs. If that frailty is exposed by a toothache, it is beyond dispute in the case of torture. The infliction of physical pain on a person with no means of defending himself is designed to render that person completely subservient to his torturers. It is designed to extirpate his autonomy as a human being, to render his control as an individual beyond his own reach. That is why the term "break" is instructive. Something broken can be put back together, but it will never regain the status of being unbroken--of having integrity. When you break a human being, you turn him into something subhuman. You enslave him. This is why the Romans reserved torture for slaves, not citizens, and why slavery and torture were inextricably linked in the antebellum South.

heinous

Update: Via RobotWisdom.

Non-Morissetteian irony

There is only one Master, Aristotle, and Kripke is his prophet.

Gyula Klima's Really Interesting Article, which suggests one way the Kripkean revolution should go:

...So it should be clear that, contrary to the apparent practice of "essentialists", to find out what is essential to a given kind of thing is not a matter of personal intuitions, but rather a matter of experience, indeed, of scientific experiments, putting the thing in "abnormal" circumstances, making it interact with other things (after all, as St. Thomas says, the nature of the thing is the principle of its proper operation), precisely the way modern science investigates the nature of things.[38] So modern science in no way needs to undermine Aristotelian essentialism. On the contrary, if we manage to recover the adequate conceptual framework of traditional essentialism in the broadest, formal semantical terms, modern science can in principle just as well be integrated into the project of the traditional metaphysical enterprise, studying the first principles of being qua being, as Aristotelian science could. All in all, it seems that the time is ripe for a radical recovery of our lost metaphysical tradition, yet this is possible only through recovering the language in which it is properly conveyed, uniting the formal rigor of contemporary logical techniques with the metaphysical vigor of the pre-modern tradition.