Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Dennis Kucinich lost the primary this spring. He won't be on the ballot in November. He was seeking the Democratic Party nomination for the Governor of Ohio. He was defeated, soundly, by Richard Cordray, whose chief qualification for high office is his tenure under President Obama as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. So Cordray will take on the Republican nominee, Ohio AG Mike DeWine. But my focus today is on Kucinich, pictured here, who has been a big part of Ohio politics, and a somewhat peripheral but often amusing, part of the national political scene, for a long time. He has been around since his election to the Cleveland City Council in 1969. He may finally be fading from the picture. Even his true-believer base has moved on. So why bother discussing him? Well ... a few days ago I incidentally mentioned the chemtrail conspiracy theory in this blog. So I think it fair, building on that, to point out that the Fading One, DK, helped give this theory what...

Which is good, because I much prefer Laurel & Hardy comedy over Yanni's music. Is this like the duck that turns into a rabbit, the vase that turns into two facial profiles? or the old lady/young lady? That is, can you train yourself to hear the one you don't initially hear? And over time flip the perceptions easily back and forth? Just idly curious....

I dislike discussing anyone's "identity" other than my own, and usually not even that. So the matters referenced in the headline of this post are in a terrain rarely compassed in this blog. But I make an exception for these two links. First, here is something I've recently written on this subject in the line of duty, in my day job. It draws no conclusions because the format requires I draw no conclusions in these left/right pieces. Still, I think my observation about the significance of the year 2015 may hold up. It may be seen as a watershed in these matters as we pull away from it: Inside the Nation The second link is to a piece written by a British philosopher, "Academic Philosophy and the UK Gender Recognition Act." I learned of it from Brian Leiter's blog, but here's the direct link: Kathleen Stock

A somewhat novel reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is offered us by Ahmet Suner, a professor at Yasar University in Turkey. I confess that I had never heard of Yasar University, and it even came as something of a surprise to me that a close reading of the early Wittgenstein can be found in the work of a Turkish scholar -- but that is a righteous rebuke to my provincialism. https://www.academia.edu/36457027/The_Ambiguous_Pictures_in_the_Theory_of_Language_in_Wittgensteins_Tractatus?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest The western world has no business hogging Wittgenstein to ourselves, after all.

Returning to the issue of the interface of copyright and design patents, which I discussed here on May 12: In the course of my research for an upcoming book review, I've gone as I sometimes do beyond the 'four corners' of the book and have read the following blog post, from Pamela Samuelson: https://patentlyo.com/patent/2017/05/overlapping-protecting-innovations.html That entry, posted almost precisely a year ago now, contends that in the specific field of application program interface (API) there isn't any significant overlap between the two sorts of IP protection. That position puts Ms Samuelson (portrayed here, a professor at Berkeley Law) at odds with the Federal Circuit, which recently (in ORACLE v. GOOGLE) said precisely the opposite.

A very wise man once wrote, "I would have written you a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." Having said that, I dare not ramble on. Enjoy the rest of May.

This is fun. It comes from 2014 but, heck, in the history of philosophy, what's four years? Flavorwire compiled a list of the harshest philosopher-on-philosopher insults in history. Here's the link: http://flavorwire.com/469065/the-30-harshest-philosopher-on-philosopher-insults-in-history Their number #1 was Schopenhauer on Hegel: "Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.” My personal favorite on the list is another dig at Hegel, coming though from Bertrand Russell: "Hegel’s philosophy is so odd that one would not have expected him to be able to get sane men to accept it, but he did. He set it out with so much obscurity that people thought it must be profound. It can quite easily be expounded lucidly in words of one syllable, but then its ab...

I saw a video recently by a flat Earther. (Never mind for now how it came about that I was watching such a thing -- largely by accident.) What was odd was the bit where the flat Earther earnestly tells us that he doesn't want to be a flat Earther. It is, after all, a pain in the ass being an 'out' flat earther. It involves expounding on a conspiracy involving NASA and the analogous agencies of several other governments, lots of other people and institutions, etc., and it involves trying to dislodge everybody else's prejudice in favor of stuff that they have been taught since first grade. He doesn't want to be entangled in all this, our video host assures us. Because he'd much rather be about his day job. What's the day job? Warning people about chemtrails. I kid you not. Personally, I know how he feels. I'd much rather not blog about the faeries who threaten vengeance upon us as a species for the cancellation of Sabrina the Teen-Aged Witch.  ...

William Lane Craig seems to have become the go-to guy for a certain sort of public function. He's the credentialed theistic philosopher who is up for a debate with the most prominent atheists of our day. Credentialed? Yes -- he has two PhDs, one in philosophy, one in theology, respectively from the University of Birmingham (1977) and the University of Munich (1984). Up for debating? Yes: as a high school student he was actually in the all-state (Iowa) debate team and he seems to have honed that craft since. [Is a debate team as an extracurricular activity a midwestern thing? I don't think it's big in the northeast.] The go-to guy? Yes, he has debated the late Christopher Hitchens as well as the very much with us Sam Harris and Lawrence M. Krauss. On an internet bulletin board to which I make occasional contributions, someone recently asked what Craig thinks of Immanuel Kant. I was happy to provide the answer. Not very highly. After all: it was Kant's posi...

Here, as promised earlier this week, is a link to Ernst Sosa's 1980 essay on coherence versus foundationalism, "The Raft and the Pyramid." https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/epistclass/Sosa%20-%20Raft%20and%20Pyramid.pdf  The basic dichotomy of the title is taken as self-explanatory, and the "raft" image in particular is attributed to Otto Neurath, a positivist of the famed 'Vienna Circle' between the wars. What is distinctive about Sosa's essay is the effort to show that coherentism itself is in danger of turning into a meta-foundationalism, with the notion of coherence itself serving as foundation "provide only that the concept of coherence is itself both simple enough and free of any normative or evaluative admixture." 

I recently had Cambridge University Press send me a reviewer's copy of THE COPYRIGHT/DESIGN INTERFACE, edited by Estelle Derclaye.  Some background (I recently wrote an email to a friend outlining this, so I'm stealing from myself and saving some effort by re-using the material here): in the US the designer of an industrial product -- like a lamp -- does not create anything with copyright protection. It may be aesthetic (as in a certain Christmas movie, where the 'old man' wins a curvaceous lamp as a 'major award'), but insofar as the design feature is deemed inseparable from its utility as a lamp, it isn't a copyright matter. The designer (an Italian named Fragile?) would h ave to seek a design patent to have IP.   This is unfortunate for our Italian because a patent application, which brings with it the necessity of a prior work search, is a difficult labor-intensive process, and because copyright generally lasts a lot longer than patents. So ...