Taxi Dancer

            On Thursday morning the heat was on for the first time in at least seven months. I opened all the windows but it was still hotter in my apartment then it had been all summer. At first I was feeling dopey from the excessive warmth. The temperature felt a little more tolerable during song practice and after that the furnace went off.

I took my laptop with me to philosophy class because I’d planned on typing out my English lecture notes but when I got there I realized that I’d left my notes at home. Instead I read some of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. It’s so complicated with all of its references that it’s hard to get a flow going in reading it the way poetry is supposed to be read.

            When the prior class was done I went in and chatted with Ryan. I told him about the pigeon slamming into my face and he said he’d never heard of anything like that happening before. I recounted the story from the 90s of when the face of Fabio the male supermodel had collided with a Canada goose while he was riding a roller coaster. Ryan thinks he would have fallen off his bike if it had happened to him. He said he rides to campus from the Beaches and a trip that long is a new experience for him. He told me he’d taken the TTC that day because it was too cold for him. I informed him that I ride all winter but he responded that he didn’t think he could handle it and is always worried about something life threatening occurring. He confessed that he’s a very anxious person.

            Professor Black began her lecture with the comment that it’s fun to think about how similar the proofs of the soul are in the writings of the Christian philosopher Anselm and the Islamic philosopher Avicenna.

            When the Islamic philosophers began developing their cosmology the best explanation up to then had been that of Ptolemy.

            Avicenna excelled in psychology and metaphysics and his ideas influenced Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza.

            In his philosophical autobiography, Avicenna wrote about having mastered medicine by the age of 16. he taught himself philosophy but he was stumped by Aristotle’s Metaphysics. He claims to have read it 40 times but it wasn’t until he read Al-Farabi’s “The Aims of Aristotle’s Metaphysics” that the veil was lifted.

            Most Islamics saw metaphysics in terms of theology but Avicenna didn’t. For him it was Ontology – the study of Being and its properties. Everything common to all beings is not the study of the divine, but the end of metaphysics is to prove immaterial beings.

            About ten minutes into the lecture I suddenly realized that I’d left my leather jacket draped over the back of a chair outside the classroom. As quietly as possible I got up, edged myself behind two students, carefully opened the door so as not to disturb the class, closed it behind me and found my jacket where I’d left it. I guess I only missed a minute of the lecture.

            Primary concepts

            Existence/Being

            Essence → Reality

  → Quiddity → Whatness

  → Thing (Primary concepts) To claim something can and cannot be at

the same time. No proposition is neither true nor false. There must also be primary concepts.

            The implicit of the understanding of anything is to conceive of the thing and its essence, even of a baby. It’s built into our understanding from the start. It’s primary.

The basic structure of reality.

Modal concepts

Necessary

Possible

Impossible (Not part of any content)

Everything that exists is either necessary or possible.

The world includes two concepts existent or thing, mutually implied, cannot be separated but distinct.

Take random concepts of different essences.

Professor Black confesses that she is addicted to vampire movies.

So compare a horse and a vampire. We can’t tell what kinds of beings these are. Being in reality or in singulars. Singular horses with the essence of horseness. Both vampires and horses exist in the mind. Essences are neutral with respect to existence.

This influenced Thomas Aquinas.

Ryan asked her if Aquinas would have read this directly from Avicenna. She answered that the Jesuits might have gone to the original texts. Jewish scholars of the middle period would have read it as well.

Deborah Black, since she was talking about vampires because of Halloween, suggested that we could dress up as a Phoenix but urged us not to spontaneously combust.

So of the horse and the vampire, the vampire exists in the mind alone.

Defining necessary and possible in terms of one another.

Avicenna offers proof of the divine but decides that it’s not possible to discover the divine in the physical world. He thinks he’s found a metaphysical solution.

Proof: a priori (ontological) or cosmological?

Cosmological – Taking something and arguing that god caused it.

Inference from sensible things based on immersible, intelligible properties. God’s acts → Creation. Didn’t require looking at god’s effects. Existence bears evidence of god. The Kalam is a cosmological argument for the existence of god. Every created thing must have a creator.

Avicenna is more a priori. He starts with the two modal concepts.

The difference between necessity and possibility.

Necessary existence → Non-existence implies a contradiction.

                                 → Has no cause and just exists in virtue of essence

Possible existence    → Like the vampire, neither its existence or non-existence is contradictory.

                                 → Its existence requires a cause. If something exists in essence something else has to be added for it to exist in reality.

Can you have a world of only possible existents?

When horseness is realized in the horse the possible becomes necessary.

Necessary – in itself

Possible – through another

Causality is necessary for existence

Possible made necessary through itself.

Necessary existence or possible existence.

If something is possibly existent it is equally possible that it could exist or not but it would need a cause.

He says that there is no doubt that there is existence.

Professor Black says that is pretty empirical.

He says one cannot doubt primary concepts.

She says that ontological arguments are controversial.

What about the cause itself? Is it possible or necessary. One can’t have a necessary regress of causes. Finding an infinite chain of possible being still won’t bring us to the cause of everything.

On the way home, at around Ossington I saw and stopped to chat with one of my favourite art teachers whom I hadn’t seen in a few years since he retired. I think the last time I saw him was four years ago when he was working one day as a substitute teacher for a class for which I happened to be posing. He was down at Ossington and Queen because he was going to meet his daughter who was staying in a shelter at CAMH. I told him that I was still going to U of T and he was impressed. He thought that the 20^th Century US Lit course I’m taking right now sounded interesting. He said he thinks that he should do something like that to get his 66-year-old brain working.

That night I watched an episode of Mike Hammer that had some interesting elements. Women working as taxi dancers at a nightclub were disappearing and so Hammer came to investigate. It turned out to be a front for a white slavery market headed by a stern looking but not unattractive middle-aged woman who referred to the girls as her “stock”.