Our Lord and Master speaks

There's full video of Saul Kripke's recent talk, (and some video of post-talk comments and questions) on the first person here.

True believers in the causal theory of reference, unite! You have nothing to lose but your senses...

Aristotle as he was

A bust of Aristotle found beneath the Acropolis in Athens is the first to show the Greek philosopher with a hooked nose.

Archaeologists said that the 46cm (18in) marble bust, which dates from the 1st century AD, about 400 years after Aristotle lived, was “the best-preserved likeness ever found”. Alkestis Horemi, who supervises digs at the Acropolis, said: “This is the only bust portraying the philosopher with a hooked nose in line with ancient descriptions.” (AFP)

Times, October 25 2006.

Exceptionally good news

The National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) will henceforth pay the full cost of members’ inpatient bills.

And this comes at no extra cost to contributors of the medical insurance scheme.

The programme will be implemented in some 380 accredited hospitals, it has been announced. Further, the fund announced it would also offer comprehensive cover for expectant mothers who deliver by caesarean section.

More here.

Pigs glide lazily across the sky...

In a statement issued after the meeting, Rev Paisley said his party had had a very good and useful exchange of views with the Northern Ireland Catholic Council for Social Affairs delegation across a range of issues.

More here.

LRB symposium on the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, and other things

Lots of clever people sit down and chat about something important. Here.

Averroës was the subject of this week's In our Time. Good stuff; listening to Kenny is a bonus. (via Philobiblion)

Confucius he say, 'Name go in book'.

the Monty Python Philosophy Foootball Sketch, via cosmic variance.

Nonsubstantial weirdness

Creationists protest the hominid display at the National Museum of Kenya. (via the Sanity Inspector)

The Great Stemwedel Nerd-Off.

B16's noble Humility

B16 is apparently wrong about the age of the Surah in question, the Western philosophical tradition is not short of proponents of absolute omnipotence (Descartes,) or deniers of various foundational bits of Aristotelian logic (such as Aristotle himself), and sometimes both together (d’Autrecourt),

But:
1. The Palaiologos passage has clearly been taken out of context; B16 did say that Manuel was brusque, and it should be obvious that the emperor wasn't in an ideal position for rational debate.
2. There is such a thing as freedom of speech after all; B16 was well within his rights to make the case against the narrow concept of reason now regnant.
3. That Catholics haven't always lived up to their obligations to reason in the past doesn't disqualify them from making their case now.
4. Anyway, B16 has, nobly, twice apologised, each time specifically disavowing what'll no doubt come to be known as the Palaiologos position.

B16's just not the bad guy here.

Tariq Ramadan has a response to B16 here, and again, here.

Darfur

Science has an authoritative estimate of deaths in Darfur. It's between 170 and 250, 000. (via the BBC)

Tomorrow, September 17th, is the international day for darfur. Please consider getting involved; you might want to read up on things here, here, and here. Check out Daniel Davies' slightly contrarian take on things here and here. And these two articles by Alex de Waal are lucid and informative, if a little old.

Reason # 310976887 to not buy the Times, ever (or: Property rights, but only for whites)

William Rees-Mogg examined South Africa’s land issue in yesterday’s Times. The column was poor stuff.

Rees-Mogg failed to distinguish the restitution and redistribution programmes. The restitution programme is intended to return land to those who can prove it was taken from them or their relatives following the 1913 Land Act. The redistribution programme is intended to widen land ownership. Rees-Mogg runs together both programmes.

Black South Africans do not ‘believe’ that their land was stolen from them – they know it. The theft was expressly legislated for, starting with the The Natives Land Act, No 27 of 1913, which confined blacks to less than 8 percent of South African land.

The South African government is doing what any reasonable government ought to do – protecting the property rights of the majority of its people by forcing the beneficiaries of stolen possessions to return them to their rightful owners when the rightful owners can be identified. The Constitution of South Africa grants it that power, so it is acting within its mandate. Governments the world over have the power of compulsory purchase, and often exercise it; similar policies have been carried out in the ex-Communist countries.

White large-scale farming was more productive because apartheid governments forbade African competition, and guaranteed, by force, a cheap labour supply. White farmers have had the opportunity to make good the injustices of the past, too few have taken it. If it is true that greater efficiency in the use of some resource grants one the right to own that resource, why hasn’t Rees-Mogg handed all his property over to some German? (racial stereotyping for brevity and vividness only, honest!)

It's extremely naïve to hope that, in a democracy, a minority landowning class which achieved its position by racially-motivated violence and fraud can continue to hold onto that land. And it's instructive to see what value the overseas defenders of property rights place on the property rights of black Africans.

Owen Barder, who's well worth several minutes of your time by the way, has a nice post about this.

Hits, not Homework.

• Jonathan Rée's new blog is here. (BBC)
• Jason Stanley has a nice report on Kenya in the news here. (Leiter)
• Obama in Kenya, here and here (Youtube).
• A university degree is still a good investment after all. (Guardian Education)
• Scary stuff; China is supplying surveillance technology to Zimbabwe. (BBC)
• Martin Amis turns into his Dad. (Observer)
• More Brits take out Irish citizenship. (Guardian)
• Koigi wa Wamwere on self-hatred. (Standard)
• World fails to end. General disappointment. (BBC)

Ramin Jahanbegloo II

Ramin Jahanbegloo is out of jail, thank God. (Al Jazeera, NYT, Google)

Apparently he was released yesterday on bail, and the Iranian authorities refuse to confirm that he won't be re-arrested. Canadian diplomats, and Michael Ignatieff, seem to have done their bit.

Omniscience and self-knowledge

Reposted from comments here.

a. Bits of knowledge are differentiated at the level of sense (or description if you like), while objects of knowledge are differentiated at the level of reference. There's a nice bit in Aquinas (at least, I think its Aquinas) where he points out that knowledge of the road from Thebes to Athens is different from knowledge of the road from Athens to Thebes, even though the object of knowledge is, of course, identical to itself.

b. There are bits of knowledge that can be known only by their knower. Consider the sentence I am married to N, where N is some proper name. The only person who can truthfully assent to the statement usually expressed by that sentence is the spouse of the person named by N. Probably, God knows this as So-and-so is married to N. Plainly, the two bits of knowledge have the same object (the marriage relation between So-and-so and the referent of N). Equally plainly, they're distinct bits of knowledge. That's basically all that's required to get the case off the ground. It's easy to produce a bit of self-knowledge that a knower once had which he now lacks and can't regain.

To borrow John Perry’s example, suppose I’m walking around a supermarket shelf following a sugar trail, when suddenly I realise that the sugar-trail I’m following is my sugar trail. The truth that it is my sugar trail I’m following is a truth that only I can know. (everyone else knows something like: Cirdan is following his sugar trail.) If I then became amnesiac, then for as long as I was an amnesiac, there would be a truth nobody could know.

If that case, or a similar one, survives, then there are unknowable truths in a strongr-than-usual sense. This is not particularly a problem for omniscience, for omniscience is knowledege of everything that can be known - if it's impossible to know something, then omniscience doesn't require that it be known.

How not to give in to despair.

Jonathan Edelstein:

The next task in the Middle East is to rebuild what has been destroyed and to headl what can't be rebuilt: to restore the houses and the roads, to comfort and provide for the bereaved families. Rebuilding northern Israel is an urgent priority, reconstructing southern Lebanon much more so. Lebanon sustained more damage than Israel - environmental as well as structural - and it has fewer resources to rebuild. Lebanon, has also been under a blockade for the past month and is running short on humanitarian supplies in addition to its longer-term needs.

Some, Shimon Peres included, have proposed a massive international effort to rebuild Lebanon - a Marshall Plan of sorts. It's important, for both political and moral reasons, that this happen and that Israel take part in it. Such a program would be both a way to ensure that the south is rebuilt by someone other than Hizbullah, and a chance to make good on the promise that Israel is not at war with the Lebanese people. But aid programs, especially major ones, always take time to plan and implement, and there's a great deal that can't wait for the international community to get its act together.

For this reason, I will match up to US $1250 in reader donations for reconstruction of southern Lebanon and up to US $750 to rebuild northern Israel. I strongly encourage Israeli and Jewish readers to donate to Lebanese charities and vice versa, but that isn't mandatory; I will match all donations to non-extremist-controlled charities up to the stated sum. For those who may not be sure where to contribute, this portal, which links to charities helping both countries, may provide a starting point.

This is a marvellous thing to do, and I'll be giving what little I can in the suggested ratio. Jonathan points to a list of safe charities. Please give whatever you can. It's the right, as well as the self-interested, thing to do.

Hilzoy of Obsidianwings has already run a similar drive.

Notes from all over

Diane Stinton, who teaches at Daystar, has a new book out on African christologies; here's a review. (via Commonweal)

Billmon coins a word, punditburo, that needed coining.

The BBC has a dedicated Pronunciation Research Unit; three full-time pronunciation linguists (orthoeptists, they're called) who maintain and update a 200,000-entry database of pronunciations. More here, greatest hits here. (via languagehat)

Me, sparring with Deogol, over at his.

Google tries to stop people using google as a verb, looks ridiculous. (slashdot, via Yglesias)

We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again...

Indian independence day today; Wikipedia has a decent article* on the Indian independence movement.

*for all I know.

not quite sackcloth and ashes, but good enough.

every whole is smaller than its parts

Either there's an infinite hierarchy of composition for concrete objects, or there isn't. If there are basic parts of concrete objects, themselves without parts, then the basic parts have real magnitude, for if they didn’t, then neither would composite concrete objects.

Now, suppose A is a composite concrete object. A has at least three parts: its proper parts and at least one improper part (A itself). But the improper part is identical to A and hence has the same magnitude as A. However, all the proper parts have real magnitude and are each distinct from the other, as well as the whole and the improper part. Hence, for any composite object built out of basic parts, the sum of the magnitude of its parts is always greater than the magnitude of the object. So, either there is no end to composition, or every composite object has a magnitude smaller than the the combined magnitude of its parts.

Lebanese Christians

Here's a Lebanese-American Christian blog; the writer has family in both places. (via politicaltheory, and this interesting article).

Reason # 310976886 to not buy the Times, ever.

This wonderful editorial.