Habemus Papam.

BENEDICTUM XVI

19 April 2005

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum;
habemus Papam:

Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum,
Dominum Josephum
Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Ratzinger
qui sibi nomen imposuit Benedictum XVI

a somewhat incongruous successor.

cross-posted here.

Rob Jubb has handed me the baton.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?
One of:
- Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savanna, ('worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass ...')
- Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.
- Owen Chadwick's translation of Augustine's Confessions.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
Definitely. Longest lasting: Julia from 1984, and Ihuoma from Elechi Amadi's The Concubine.

The last book you bought is:
David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind.

The last book you read is:
I'm still reading Alvin Plantinga's The Nature of Necessity.

Five books you would take to a desert island:
Descartes' Discourse on Method, Kripke's Naming and Necessity, Orwell's 1984, the Philosophical Investigations, the Douay-Rheims Bible, and Summa Contra Gentiles.
And yes, I've noticed that's one more than I'm allowed.

What are you currently reading?
David Braine's paper 'Aquinas, God and Being' and Anthony Kenny's Five Ways.

Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?
The Exlaodicea crew, seeing as they're all massively erudite. Everyone at the Kenyan blog ring, now KenyaUnlimited. Ory Okolloh at Kenyan Pundit, as she's sensible, and Bee at things that go bump in the night because I can.

Karol Josef Wojtyla, lately Pope John Paul II.

May 18 1920 - April 2 2005

Official press release.

Obituaries and Memorials.
Guardian.BBC. NYT. Globe and Mail [Ca]. National Catholic Reporter . Times. Telegraph. Tablet. Vatican memorial. Archbishop Ndingi's tribute. Sandro Magister (via berenike). Commonweal. George Weigel. Times again. Economist.

Information.
Vatican. Zenit. Catholicnews. the Popeblog. Wikipedia.

There will be a requiem Mass in St. Mary's Cathedral in Aberdeen on Wednesday 6th April at 7pm.

feet of clay.

Over at Crooked timber, there's an interesting post marking the 25th anniversary of the St. Paul's riots. There's a link in the post to this paper [pdf!], which discusses race and policing in urban areas. The author of the paper gives, in illustration, Lord Denning's infamous quote from What next in the Law, which I'd quite forgotten about. My Dad thought Denning instantiated the ideal of the liberal judge, and bought every book of his that he could find. This hero-worship passed naturally to me, and so it was quite disappointing, when I came to England, to discover that Denning was capable of saying, publicly, such rubbish. Ah well.

il Papa

JPII
It would seem that the end is near. Please pray that he might have a 'quiet night and a perfect end'.
Here's a nice little picture from his first vist to Kenya. [from the Archdiocese of Sydney website]

housekeeping.

THEODOLUS is the saint of the day.

Ok, here's the plan. From now on, my philosophical posts will go there. Everything else will be put up here. I look forward to seeing you at philosophical investigations.

skeptical slumber over.

Sorry everyone, I've been away far too long. My dissertation is just about ready for despatch, so normal service ought to resume shortly.

Yes, the dialetheism post is still on its way...

suitably paschal. 

Prof. Elkins on tour

ELKINS gave a lecture yesterday at UoN, describing the methods used by the colonial administration to suppress MauMau. The Standard report is here.

Locke in the style of Immortal Technique

Crooked Timber called for hiphop renderings of philosophers; Lenin (duly added to the blogroll) responded with an absolute stonker- Locke in the style of Immortal Technique:

You betta watch what tha fuck flies outa ya mouth
Or I'ma burn your house down with ya tied to ya couch
Cos reward and punishment’s the only rational way
To make a fuckin man do whatever the fuck I say
I gotta viewa human nature that’s tabula rasa
Cos you don’t know shit til I make you my masta.

Separation a powers, got my checks and balances
And the Glorious Revolution got me in the palaces
And you mystical muthafuckas just look like some phalluses
Locke down and cold, murdering all yo fallacies.

Empirical truth, mutha, don’t ever try to diss me
Cos I got rhymes that’s colder than Walt Disney
My lyrics are like syphallus but harder to catch
An if you don’t obey my law, then you gettin yo ass capped
You gettin locked in the pen fo ten to fifty
Monopoly a violence boy, cos you lookin shifty.

You Hobbesian people swallow like Bambi Woods
And you’d never live a day in the projects or the hoods
Cos you ignorant about what keeps men from they selfish ways
Private property, boy, helps the people get paid.

Etc etc etc.

form is temporary, class is permanent.

STAREHE, again.

PETER BENENSON. Requiescat in pace. More here, and here.

an absent-minded imperialist comes round

BERNARD PORTER has a surprisingly humane review of the Elkins and Anderson books in the LRB.

Dialetheism post will be up shortly.

dialetheism

I'lll put up a monster post about this shortly.

some contradictions are true...

SAINT of the day (some days ago) is Onesimus, ex-slave of Philemon.

CONTRADICTIONS. I can't believe I haven't seen any of Graham Priest's stuff before, well, except for his Logic: A Very Short Introduction. Only recently, I discovered his 'What's So Bad About Contradictions?’ (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 95, No. 8, Aug. 1998), a sustained and substantial brutalization of the Law of NonContradiction (LNC).

These are my reading notes thereof.

There are five reasons to abhor contradictions:
(1) Contradictions entail everything.
(2) Contradictions cannot be true.
(3) Contradictions cannot be believed rationally.
(4) If contradictions were acceptable, no one could ever be rationally criticized.
(5) If contradictions were acceptable, no one could deny anything.

GP considers (2) to boil down to an appeal to the Law of Noncontradiction (LNC).
G.P. accuses Aristotle of equivocation – (E) the slide between some contradictions are false and all contradictions are false. There's some further discussion of the problems with the Aristotelian arguments here.

Now there are 4 further arguments for (2),

A - Contradictions lack meaning.
1. Contradictions have no content, because they have no meaning.
2. therefore they have no true content.
Note that the classical logician is unable to support this argument; he believes that a contradiction implies everything, rather than nothing. So the contradiction has ‘total’ content.

But contradictions are meaningful utterances, else how could they be seen to be contradictions (and so, supposedly, always false) at all?

B - If contradictions are true, nothing could be meaningful.
1. Some claim is meaningful only if it rules out some other claim.
2. If A doesn’t rule out not-A, then A isn’t meaningful. (The minimum condition that A has to fulfill to be meaningful is to rule out not-A)
So, if claims of the form [A & not-A] are admitted to be meaningful, nothing at all is meaningful.

This suffers from the same fault pointed out in (E) above, viz. sliding between some X and all X.
The LNC requires only that some statements do not rule out their negations. Consider: the negation of 'nothing can be asserted to be and not to be at the same time and in the same repect' is 'something can be asserted to be and not to be at the same time and in the same repect'. However, It seems to be widely held that the proper negation is 'everything can be asserted to be ...etc.'

Also, the argument above relies on the claim that all statements rule out their own negations.
But then consider also: ‘Everything is true’. This rules nothing out and is clearly meaningful. Its negation, ‘something is false’, is also true.

There's more to follow, but this looks very interesting.

the EXPERIENTIALIST is back. Here.

the ENGAGEMENT is announced of a dear, loud, and quite mad friend. Congratulations!

sugarmoney

ANTHONY KAULEAS, 829, Patriarch of Constantinople, is the Saint of the day.

THE KENYAN HIERARCHY issue a statement calling on the president to sack corrupt officials. It seems all 29 of them signed.

ABOLITION Adams Hochschild's Bury the Chains apparently deals quite well with the British abolition movement, but if reports are to be believed, not so well with the economic consequences of slavery and abolition. Joseph inikori has a big, fat book on the subject...Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery is also worth reading.

THE PRINCE OF WALES finally makes a (semi) - honest woman of Camilla. Steve Bell draws it best.

Githongo resigns

JOHN GITHONGO, P.S. in charge of ethics and governance in the Office of the President has resigned. Resignation apparently tendered earlier today. More to follow.

Ball and the Cross - style

St. BRIGID, abbess, patron of Ireland, is the saint of the day.

POVERTY reduction by reducing the number of poor people. Berenike explains.

The KENYATTA - MOI dynasty entrenches itself further.

WSF ends. Another world is possible...

it's friendly up north

St. APOLLO is today's friendly canonizee. Floreat 395ish, hermit and founder of a monastery.

MBEKI. The Economist dishes out an entertaining going-over.

AFRICA REMIX. It's the giant new exhibition of contemporary African art at the Hayward Gallery. More here. And here. The Hayward Gallery says it's the biggest exhibition of modern African art ever to hit Europe...All the big name(s) (at least the ones I've heard of) are represented. It's on from February 10th to April 17th. Go!

ICELANDERS! OK, let's try another way of putting it. Could you ever use a proper name without a link, direct or indirect, to its causal chain?
Well, apparently, relative to its population, Iceland has a quite small pool of surnames. And first names. And quite rigid rules about how to derive children's names from parents'. So, it seems that given knowledge that your new acquaintance was Icelandic, and a little knowledge of relevant naming rules , you'd have a not-zero chance of guessing their proper name. Hmm

postcards from the occupation

HER parents were shot in front of her. More pictures here. [they will trouble you]

that old anglo-saxon instinct for fair play ...

THIS is the first flat-out stupid review of the Elkins and Anderson books. He sets the scene with a loving description of the mobile gallows, tries to spread the muck around evenly, trivialises the seriousness of the charges and then says some unpleasant things about Elkins' style. Best then closes with an appeal to incredulity, and not to his, but that of the colonial professional classes!
I've just got my copy of the Anderson book and I have to say it's just as good as promised. Gulag (the Elkins one) will be here soon.
The L.A. Times Review is here. Meisler is sympathetic and well-informed. These two paras should serve:

In "Histories of the Hanged," Anderson tells the full story of the rise of Mau Mau and the brutal British suppression that followed. He insists that "no one in authority" — from the prime minister in London to the district officers in Kenya — "could claim that they didn't know" about the British abuses, including torture and wanton killing of detainees. "Their reaction," he writes, " … was to deflect and deny, disparaging the accusers or making light of the accusations." Anderson's narrative — bolstered by realistic descriptions of life in Kenya and informed analysis of the causes of the Mau Mau insurrection — is ample, judicious and elegant.

Elkins' "Imperial Reckoning" complements Anderson's book. Although she includes an analysis of the causes and politics of the insurgency, she is more concerned with documenting the full extent of the British brutality. Writing with white heat, she details the unsavory story of summary executions, rapes, sodomy with bottles, castration, flogging with chains and rhino whips, attacks by dogs, humiliation by nakedness and a host of torture techniques including electric shock, near drowning and sleep deprivation. The detail is sometimes numbing but always vital. Her thorough documentation is necessary to prove her case that the British, while suppressing the Mau Mau, were guilty of "creating one of the most restrictive police states in the history of the empire and deploying unspeakable terror and violence."