[gerard.casey]

Dear Chema,

I have a sinking feeling that I’ve lost my grip on whatever was the point of the thread! But let me try to say what I think is the case without, I hope, making matters more complicated than they already are, and thus providing you with another, well-justified, occasion for gently poking some fun at my effort!

If I understand you correctly, you make two claims:

absence of evidence is always evidence of absence; and
absence of evidence is sometimes proof of absence.

You then go on to say that when people say, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (i.e. when they deny no. 1) what they are really doing is to assert “absence of evidence is not proof of absence” ( i.e. they deny no. 2).

Having kicked the ideas around in my head for a few minutes, I am inclined to think that you have a point. If there is no evidence for the existence of phenomenon or event X, then that, just by itself, constitutes some evidence for the non-existence of X, though not necessarily conclusive evidence. (Perhaps we haven’t looked hard enough, or we’ve looked in the wrong places.) However, in certain situations (e.g. the question is whether or not there’s an elephant in the room, and the room is sufficiently small and we’re not talking about some species of microscopic elephant!), then the absence of evidence for the presence of an elephant (e.g. you can’t see it; there’s nowhere for it to hide, etc. etc.) is not only some evidence of the elephant’s absence but conclusive evidence; in your words, proof.

Thank you for clarifying matters.

With every good wish,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Chema,

Six years later! I’m impressed that someone would be determined to go through this old thread to take up the topic again.

I’ve looked over the previous posts and I’m not sure that I can add anything new or illuminating to what I’ve said already.

It may well be that I don’t fully appreciate the point of your post. If that is so (and it is very likely to be so!), if you wanted to summarise the point at issue for me, you could email me directly at gerardcasey68@icloud.com and we can continue the conversation there.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Mrs Gordon,

Many thanks for your posting and for the compliment. I am delighted that your son is enjoying the material so far.

You ask ‘What else should I include to “count” him as having taken a high school level course in logic.” Well, all I can say is that, if he’s studied everything on your list, he’s well ahead of the game. However, I’m sending to you by email my schematic notes on mathematical logic which he may find of some use (as well as some other material). The notes are meant to be self-guiding but if he needs any help, please do get in touch.

Your son is lucky to have the opportunity to study at home. I was completely bored at school. I couldn’t wait to get out, and when that happy day arrived, I felt like a prisoner leaving gaol. I discovered logic at the age of 16 by reading E. J. Lemmon’s book (just then published) and I spent a summer when everyone else was at the beach determined not to let it get the better of me. My notes are based on Lemmon’s system, which I still consider one of the most elegant treatments of mathematical logic.

With every good wish,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello Pacopasa,

Delighted to hear that you managed to plough your way through Freedom’s Progress? You are the only one who has ever commented on the chapter epigraphs, and I really appreciate that.

Thank you so much for letting me know what you thought.

With every good wish,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

I check this site intermittently but if you have any urgent queries, please email me directly at gerardcasey68@icloud.com.

GC

[gerard.casey]

Hello HistrMajr,

Apologies for taking so long to respond.

Any given categorical proposition can be presented in 4 different ways. So,
GAR, which is affirmative is the same proposition as GER (complement), which is negative, which is the same as R (complement)EG, which is negative, which is the same as R(complement)AG(complement), which is affirmative.

A given proposition as it presents itself will be affirmative or negative, and its quality is a function of the copula. A and I = affirmative; E and O = negative.

Ordinary language is often ambiguous. ‘Not all men are fat’ is the denial of a universal affirmative: not(All men are fat) and, as you have or will see on the Square of Opposition, the negation of an A-type proposition is an O-type proposition. Where M: men, and F: fat, the proposition is translated as MOF.

‘All men are not fat’is best translated as being equivalent to ‘Not all men are fat’and so translated as MOF. However, sometimes, speakers use this way of saying things to express a universal negative, i.e. to mean ‘No men are fat’ which is translated as MEF.

If you’re speaking to someone or in correspondence with them, then you can ask them to clarify what they intend to claim. If, however, you’re not able to do this, then the Principle of Charity comes into play. This principle says that in cases of ambiguity, you will assume that your interlocutor is make a particular claim rather than a universal claim, universal claims being harded to defend.

I hope this helps.

Good luck with the studies.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Pacopasa,

Many thanks for your kind words; they are much appreciated. And apologies for taking so long to respond to your post.

Thank you for buying the book – I hope you find it useful to have the written word in front of you. There is some material in the book that is not in the online course, and some of the material that is there has been expanded.

Now, if there were only 5,000 more people like you, I could think about retiring to the Bahamas on the royalties!

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear John,

That’s a huge question and deserves an answer from a specialist in English history, which I, unfortunately, am not. I can say, without fear of much contradiction, that ‘liberal’ is not a concept that attaches itself to English kingship until perhaps the late 19th, early 20th century.

Looking at the course of history, I cannot see any significant moral difference between Protestant and Catholic kings. all of them, with a few honourable exceptions, sought their own aggrandisement and enrichment, all of them engaged in wars that cost their subjects their lives and their property.

Re the Puritans: yes; religion was very much a political matter in the 17th century, and daring to differ from the established Church tended to be viewed by the authorities as incipient, if not actual, rebellion. In England, Catholics were regarded as completely unacceptable, but dissenters (non-Church of England Protestants) came in a close second. See the life and career of John Bunyan!

[gerard.casey]

Dear John,

My knowledge of Mises, such as it is, is largely confined to his theoretical works: Human Action, Socialism, Liberalism, Theory and History etc. I know little beyond the merest outlines of his personal life. The place to find the answer to your question is, I suspect, Professor Hulsmann’s Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, available at https://mises.org/library/mises-last-knight-liberalism-0.

I hope that you can find the answer to your question there.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear John,

It would take a book, perhaps several books, to answer all your questions! What any or all of these systems of thought consist in are matters of scholarly dispute and contention. The chapter on Marx in my Freedom’s Progress? is an attempt to give what I think are the basic elements of his thought. Here are some brief excerpts from that chapter:

*All things considered, one very important fact to keep in mind when considering Marx’s influence on others is the obvious but sometimes neglected fact that Marx was a communist!
*Communism would end all human suffering is the claim that ‘the future communist world would be a post-scarcity world. All economic problems would fade away and there would be no need to address the question of the allocation of scarce means among competing needs.’
*Much of the power of Marxism comes from its being an ersatz religion.
*In this twenty-first century, which succeeds a twentieth century that was dominated in many ways by Marxism in various forms, some strong, some weak, it is salutary to remember that, in his lifetime, Marx was virtually unknown and his writings likewise.
*The two most prominent pieces in the Marxist canon are The Communist Manifesto and Capital. Capital has been described as a ‘massive, rancorous and obscure book’ but ‘less unreadable than its structure and opening chapters would suggest.’ What, if anything, is new in Capital? What will we find there that isn’t already contained in the earlier writings of Marx? Very little, unless it’s the development along economic lines of a pre-reflective moral indignation at the widespread poverty of the nineteenth century, inserted into a theoretical economic frame which, based on a misguided concept of value, simply can’t do the work it’s supposed to do.
*The motive force of Marx’s writing was a deep revulsion at certain aspects of modern life. His passion did not arise from any concern with abstract economics but from a visceral rejection of the exploitation he believed to be the inevitable accompaniment to capitalism. His study of economics was meant to explain this exploitation theoretically and practically to undermine it. It is vitally important to understand that Marx’s objection to capitalism was not that it did not work; on the contrary, it worked all too well! If exploitation was the core topic of Marx’s mature and late work, alienation was the topic of his earliest writings. The works of Marx, then, can be divided into two groups: the early ones dealing with the notion of alienation and the later ones concerning themselves with exploitation. The notion of alienation comes to Marx from Hegel and is relayed by Marx to the twentieth century in the form of the disdain of the Frankfurt School thinkers for the ordinary man and his desires. The idea of exploitation lies at the heart of Marx’s mature work and the explanation of this phenomenon is what Marx’s economic thinking is all about.

I recommend Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism (several volumes) which is a classic in the field. You should be able to find this in a good library or, if you’re lucky (as I was) very inexpensively in a second-hand bookshop.

Communism vs Socialism? Well, to be brief, Socialism is Communism-lite! Instead of just appropriating your property outright, Socialists impose a variety of taxes, as much as they can get away with, which will have much the same practical effect even if the legal regime still permits the ownership of property. So, a super-tax rate of 95%! (The spur for the Beatle’s song, Taxman!), or inheritance taxes, or VAT (which is a tax on the money you have left after they’ve extracted income tax), etc. Both Communism and Socialism are inspired by envy and resentment and differ in the end only inasmuch as one is relatively honest about what it’s doing and the other disguises its purpose for strategic reasons.

Finally, Marx and Hegel. Once again, a very complicated and much-disputed question but, in brief, Marx began his intellectual life as a Hegelian, taking from Hegel the basic idea that dynamic change, not stability, was the nature of social and political reality. He took over Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history and interpreted it in economic terms.

I hope this helps somewhat but there is really no short answer to your excellent questions!

All the best,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear John,

Milton is celebrated for his defence of free speech (within certain limits, of course – Catholics excluded!) and freedom of the press. (See his Areopagitica.)

From the little I know of Sir Francis Bacon (Viscount St Albans), I’m not at all sure what contributions to the liberal tradition can be attributed to him. I have always regarded him as a self-serving time-server and, in his rivalry with Coke, an enemy of the common law and a supporter of the royal prerogative. His scientific/philosophical work is moderately interesting though I believe it to be overrated.

Cato the Younger was a resolute opponent of the new Roman politics that develop in the first century BC. He worked with Cicero to prosecute Cataline and he opposed Caesar and the triumvirate. But, as was the case with Cicero, the drift of Rome from republicanism to embryonic empire was pretty much unstoppable and despite his best efforts, the Caesarean faction, in the person of Augustus, finally won out. Together with Cicero, he is one of my heroes.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello John,

I’ve just come across your posts. I’ll be in touch with you soon.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Hello John,

After the inevitable delays brought on by Christmas madness and some connection problems with Libertyclassroom, I’ve just seen your message. Give me a little while to respond.

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Dear Mr Lewis,

I’ve just come across your contribution of last November (!) and, as no one else has responded, I thought I’d make a few comments.

Like you, I have been fascinated by the idea of a logic which would deal with relationships between classes whose boundaries are less rigid and demarcated than those with which traditional logic, in its various varieties, concerns itself. This has particular application to the Sorites argument which suggests that if you can travel from A to B on a continuum, then there is no real difference between what one can find in the continuum’s extremes.

I think that you are probably right in thinking that the actual economy is characterised by ‘noisy data’ which makes it a prime candidate for a fuzzy logic, if ever there was one.

However, I don’t know of any economists, still less Austrians, taking such an approach.

Your contribution has stimulated me to go back and take a look, once again, at this material.

I wish I could have been more helpful but your comments/questions have reawakened my interest.

Best wishes,

Gerard Casey

[gerard.casey]

Apologies for the delay in responding, John, I’ve been on vacation.

You ask whether Kant could be considered a classical liberal. I think the answer must be – yes, in some respects, no, in others.

If you’re looking for a succinct account of his thought vis-a-vis rights and liberty, I can recommend David Gordon’s lecture. You can find Dr Gordon’s lecture at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOMFS7PcrAU

I didn’t include any podcast/recording on Kant in the LibertyClassroom lectures but when I produced my book, Freedom’s Progress?, my conscience pricked me and I wrote a chapter on Kant for that work.

It must be said that although there’s much that a lover of political liberty can take from Kant’s work, it would be going much too far to portray him as advocating an embryonic form of libertarianism. ‘The libertarian tendency to appeal to both Locke and Kant in support of their arguments betrays a tendency to conflate Locke’s natural right to freedom with Kant’s innate right to freedom,’ writes Katrin Flikschuh. She continues, ‘It is important to distinguish between them. While libertarians are often criticised for departing from question-begging premises, Kant’s conception of innate right to freedom as a right that individuals possess “merely in virtue of their humanity” is grounded in his metaphysics of freedom as a (shared) idea of reason. Whether or not one finds Kant’s account defensible is a separate question—the point is that, given his metaphysical presuppositions, Kant is an unlikely proponent of a libertarian conception of individual freedom as a natural right.’ [Flikschuh, 123-124, n. 25]

On the plus side, this is what of wrote of Kant as a lover of liberty: “In the ‘Introduction’ to the ‘Doctrine of Right’ Kant makes a ringing claim that should warm the heart of every lover of liberty: ‘Freedom,’ he says, (and by ‘freedom’ here he has in mind not some transcendental or noumenal account of freedom but simply the condition of being unconstrained by another’s choice) ‘insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law, is the only original right belonging to every man by virtue of his humanity.’ [Kant 1797, 30] Kant draws a distinction between what we might call negative freedom, the freedom to act without external constraint, and positive freedom, which is the ability of the will to be a law unto itself. Negative freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of positive freedom.

“In his ‘On the Relation of Theory to Practice in the Right of a State,’ Kant denies not only that the welfare of its citizens can provide the basis of state power but he also rejects the idea that the state can legitimately legislate for a specific concept of happiness for its citizens. ‘No one,’ he writes, ‘can coerce me to be happy in his way (as he thinks of the welfare of other human beings); instead, each may seek his happiness in the way that seems good to him, provided he does not infringe upon the freedom of others to strive for a like end which can coexist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a possible universal law (i.e. does not infringe upon this right of another.’ [Kant 1793, 291] He adds, ‘A government established on the principle of benevolence toward the people like that of a father toward his children — that is, a paternalistic government (imperium paternale), in which the subjects, like minor children who cannot distinguish between what is truly useful or harmful to them, are constrained to behave only passively, so as to wait only upon the judgment of the head of state as to how they should be happy and, as for his also willing their happiness, only upon his kindness — is the greatest despotism thinkable (a constitution that abrogates all the freedom of the subjects, who in that case have no rights at all).’ [Kant 1793, 291]”

But this is not the whole story. On the other side of the argument, Kant wrote: “When he came to publish the ‘Doctrine of Right’ some four years later, Kant’s views seem to have shifted significantly towards accepting, even endorsing, state interference in social matters. Now, he says the ruler can impose taxes not just for the defence of the state but ‘to support organizations providing for the poor, foundling homes, and church organizations, usually called charitable or pious institutions.’ Why should those who have more be legally obliged to contribute to the support of those who have less? Because, Kant says, ‘they owe their existence to an act of submitting to [the state’s] protection and care, which they need in order to live.’”

“If freedom is man’s only original right, isn’t this right necessarily infringed upon by the existence and operation of the state? Kant rejects this conclusion. The state indeed employs coercion and that coercion can be taken to be a hindrance to freedom, but the state in using coercion isn’t in fact hindering freedom but merely offering a hindrance to a hindrance to freedom, a hindrance to violence or aggression.”

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