Ad hominem

, not every ad hominem attack -- an attack “against the man” or person -- involves a fallacious ad hominem.  “Attacking the man” can be entirely legitimate and sometimes even called for, even in an argumentative context, when it is precisely the man himself who is the problem.{ I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion }, blogspot.com
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We live in the golden age of ad hominem. Today, even professional intellectuals find it normal to judge ideas by judging the human beings who think or have thought them.This label, ad hominem, has an inherent poetic ambiguity. Once we judge ideas by the people who think them, it’s natural to punish ideas by punishing the people who think them. Coupled with a dominant-inferiority illusion in which the strong present as the weak, ad hominem is an ethical equation that can endorse an arbitrary level of tyranny.— "Curtis Yarvin, Jul 19 [2020]"Email from a newsletter subscription. R. 19. Jul, 2020. By Collegatus, from Iceland. Gmail gives sender as "graymirror@substack.com".‘Ad hominem,’ or ‘pros ton anthropon’«Why there is no argumentum ad hominem fallacy» by David Hitchcock. McMaster University. in Greek, is Latin for ‘towards the man,’ a term most often incorrectly used in reference to a fallacious argument involving someone's personhood. It is used incorrectly when the reference to a person's personhood isn't actually fallacious.
HistoryAristotle in his discussion of the principle of non-contradiction distinguishes “absolute proof” (haplÇs apodeixis) from “proof relative to this person” (pros tonde apodeixis, Metaphysics XI.5.1062a3). In his influential 13th century commentary on this work (Lectio V. n. 2213, 2219, 2222; cited in Nuchelmans [1993: 40, n. 9]), Thomas Aquinas uses the corresponding Latin phrase demonstratio ad hominem for relative proofs of first principles. By the 17th century, logic textbooks were using the phrases “argumentum ad hominem” and “argumentatio ad hominem” quite generally for arguing about any subject-matter at all from the concessions of one’s interlocutor, a usage attested as a scholastic commonplace (Nuchelmans 1993: 41); in the same century, Galileo uses the expression “ad hominem” for an argument whose author derives a conclusion not acceptable to an opponent from premisses accepted or acceptable by the opponent but not the arguer (Finocchiaro 1973-74).
----There's come into currency basically quasi-intellectuals which are using watered down versions of fallacy concepts, and that's bleeding into Wikipedia and sites like that. the most common case of that is when people are using ‘ad hominem fallacy’ incorrectly, but i can understand why that bled into Wikipedia. i mean, ‘ad hominem’ *does* mean ‘against [towards] the man’ and "name-calling" is 1) against the man and 2) in a sense not a strong argument. but it's not necessarily fallacious (erroneous) either, since the name used for a person can be accurate and strong as an argument.
i've literally seen the case of the category which would be illustrated by this happen:
1. person is creepy
2. gets called a creep
3. complains "ad hominem,"
folks, that is *not* the way to use the term ad hominem. if you get called an idiot, it may actually be because you were behaving idiotically and ‘idiot’ is a word that matches you at that time. there's nothing fallacious inherently about that.
weirdly enough, the in many ways ultra-trash website RationalWiki gets this one right: ▬»
an informal logical fallacy that occurs when someone attempts to refute an argument by attacking the claim-maker, rather than engaging in an argument or factual refutation of the claim. There are many subsets of ad hominem, all of them attacking the source of the claim rather than attacking the claim or attempting to counter arguments. They are a type of fallacy of relevance.
The fallacy is a subset of the genetic fallacy, as it focuses on the source of the argument, at the expense of focusing on the truth or falsity of the actual argument itself.
An ad hominem should not be confused with an insult, which admittedly attacks a person, but does not seek to rebut that person's arguments by doing so — that type of rhetoric is better termed as poisoning the well. »
‘Ad hominem’ is just Latin which means ‘(appeal) to the man,’ and speaking against the man or appealing to his character is by itself not necessarily erroneous, for example when deciding on if you want to hire a person guilty of repeated medical malpractice to do work at a biotech firm or not. Strictly, a mere ad hominem and an ad hominem fallacy are not the same thing, since arguing ad hominem is only fallacious when it's done in a certain way.
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Media
*https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_hominem
*https://www.txstate.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/Ad-Hominem.html
==Rhizomata==
*Argument; Concept; Correct; Incorrect; Fallacy
*Discourse; Degenerated discourse; Reason; Reasoning
==References==