Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Bloomberg recently reported on the division within Merkel's cabinet on what to do about global warming.   The underlying idea under the Paris Agreement is that countries are supposed to define for themselves what they believe they can do by way of carbon emissions, (in recognition, yes, of national sovereignty) but that they should then be detailed and clear about how they go about doing it, so this can all be monitored globally. Germany's pledge was to reduce its emissions 40% by 2020. They are on a path to achieve 32% -- a considerable accomplishment, but still a "miss" on their pledge. The Merkel administration seems to have given up on doing better for 2020, but it is looking further down the road to whether it can make its 2030  target and, if so, how.  One body of opinion says the carbon pollution coming from vehicles on Germany’s roads is the place where emission cuts can and should be made. The emissions from cars and trucks (not counting those of th...

Pre-Socratic philosophy scholars will love the following joke. I've got to throw in some words here so you'll have to click to keep reading, because this joke (once we get going with it) will be kind of short. Okay: have I babbled on for long enough? The joke follows: Heraclitus walks into a bar. Unfortunately, the bartender is Zeno who proves that this is impossible.  [Laugh now.]

Psychologists and philosophers continue the study of cognitive development: discussion didn't freeze with Piaget's work. Though I'm afraid that realization would have made him frown, as pictured here. And it appears that some new acronyms have come into vogue in the field. There are three zones of conceivably-accomplishable tasks.  There are things a growing child at a particular moment just cannot do yet, things the child could do, with a little help from his friends, more knowledgeable others, and things he can do solo. The as-yet-undoable tasks don't appear to have an acronym. The more knowledgeable others are, unsurprisingly, called MKOs. The things the kid can do solo represent together his "actual development level" (ADL). The things he can do if assisted by an MKO are his "zone of proximal development (ZPD)." So says Bekah's Blog, here: https://bekahbblade.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/vygotsky-and-learning/

Some possible answers to this occurred to him.  One was simply, "Yes." Or, more broadly, "Yes, I hear you." After all, the only actual question he had been asked was whether he had heard the insinuating statement about the handwriting. He had heard it, so strictly a "yes" was a full and fair answer. But "yes" alone could be interpreted as meaning "yes, I wrote that." Even "yes, I hear you" without more could be interpreted as something like, "yes, I wrote it and I'm glad you appear to have enjoyed the wit of it." That would never do. He also thought quite briefly of a response that would be suitable for a math class. He could go to the blackboard, grab a piece of chalk, and draw two circles, labeling them A and B. They would NOT intersect. He could then explain to her and to the whole class that set A consisted of everything he had ever done or contributed to in any way whatsoever, and set B consisted of al...

The old man thought, looking back on his life, that there had only been five moments when he had managed to say just the right thing, just the thing that needed to be said just when it was, in a cogent and concise way. Only five. What was of course far more common were memories of the many times when he had said the wrong thing and lived to regret it. Or when he had said the sort-of right thing, but in an unnecessarily verbose or ambiguous way. Or when he hadn't really said anything: when he had stammered or sat or stood in silence until the moment passed. But there were at least those five times. That was something. The first of them came when he was in a geometry class in high school. Way back in a decade well into the previous century, even well into the previous millennium. His teacher had something she wanted to say to everyone [or maybe not, but everyone should be there as a witness to it] that had nothing to do with conveying the genius of the Pythagorean theorem....

Am I again the last person on the planet to learn about something big? It's all right -- it isn't as if this would be the first time (or one or the first several times) that has happened. Then I become the last blogger in the world to write about it, which is where we are. What I'm on about is the recent wave of debunking articles about the Stanford Prison Experiment. This was the famous/notorious 1971 experiment in which (as the usual account goes) some young male volunteers were arbitrarily assigned the roles of "guard" or "prisoner" in a simulated prison environment. The role playing exercise turned shockingly real, and the "guards" took to torturing their "prisoners." The experiment was supposed to last for two weeks, but it was stopped after only six days for fear of irreversible injuries should it continue. That is the usual account, anyway. It is nowadays often taught in undergraduate level on social psychology, and...

Baruch Brody has passed away. He was a distinguished philosopher, affiliated with Rice University since 1975. Made great contributions to bioethics. He argued passionately and analytically that there is a fundamental distinction between active and passive euthanasia, between Dr Kevorkian on the one hand and a DNR order on the other. On such matters, see his book, TAKING ISSUE (2004). That distinction is now not especially controversial, among laypeople anyways, (among moral philosophers everything is controversial, 'cause that's their racket). Particulars here: http://news.rice.edu/2018/06/01/rice-mourns-professor-emeritus-baruch-brody-former-chair-of-philosophy-dept/

I have never read anything by Renan and it isn't a project I'm likely to launch for myself any time soon. So I can only know what the fuss was about second or third hand. Here is a passage referencing Renan in William James' VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. James is discussing the I-don't-care or nothing-matters-anyway state of mind. He says that the phrase "all is vanity" is "the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite genius Renan took pleasure, in his later years of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the 'all is vanity' state of mind." I'd be curious to know if any reader knows Renan well enough to recognize this description as apt or to quarrel with it as not.

I remember years ago reading a book about cave paintings.  It was an unusual book. I can't remember the title and am not going to work too hard on recovering information about it, but I'll just write down here what I can remember, for fun. The writer seemed to be a Marxist, though of a specifically unorthodox kind. He disbelieved in the traditional Marxist notion of "primitive communism," that is, the quasi-Rousseauist idea that there was a time in human history before private property, surplus value, or class conflict. The rise of the ancient slave societies (on this trad-Marxist view) was over the dead body of those more primitive communities. But the book I was reading said that Marx was wrong in this, that there was a class conflict underway even among the cave dwellers, and that the famous admired cave paintings are evidence of it.  I don't remember the particulars of the argument, but IIRC at all, the author was telling us we shouldn...

I admire Niall Ferguson, as I believe I've indicated in this blog in the past. I reviewed the first volume of his two-volume work on the life of Henry Kissinger three years back. In understand the second volume is expected to make an appearance at the end of this year and I look forward to it. This, however, looks bad for him: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/148653/niall-ferguson-wanted-opposition-research-student

I saw a 1990s vintage movie recently with a neat trial scene. The lawyer protagonist was defending a client charged with murder. The case turned chiefly on a woman eyewitness who saw the crime as she was coming out of a convenience store with newly purchased diapers in her hands. Defense counsel seemed to be fishing for some way to shake her testimony. Her asked why she had needed the diapers so suddenly so late at night. Prosecutor: "Objection. Your honor, does counsel not know why a mother needs to buy diapers?"  The judge admonishes the defense counsel on his fishing, counsel promises he's getting to the point.  "Don't you usually buy diapers before you need them?" "Well yes, of course, we usually keep a supply in the hallway closet. I was sure I had just seen a bag of them...." Ah ha! Counsel's eyes light up as he bores in to make a point about the unreliability of memories of what one's eyes had seen.  ...

It is a journalistic staple, the "woman who broke the glass ceiling in field X" story. It can feel a bit forced. Recently Republicans have been telling us that we ought to celebrate the first woman to head the CIA, and we ought to recognize President Trump as her enabler. Sorry: I'm not big on celebrating torturers and evidence destroyers. And that particular ceiling might have remained intact without any harm to womankind. I recently tried and failed to sell an unusual glass ceiling sort of story myself. It didn't have to do with torture.  It involved yachts, motorboats, and boating. It involved in particular the sort of journalism that addresses those matters. I didn't make the sale, so I'll use that material here. It began as an obituary.... ------------------- Bonnie Jean O’Boyle passed away on March 18, 2018. She was the first woman ever to serve as the editor-in-chief of a boating magazine.  She co-founded Power and Motoryacht (PMY) in 1...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/trumps-saturday-of-lies-president-says-official-who-briefed-reporters-doesnt-exist.html What does this mysterious hypothetical existent look like? If he existed, he would look a lot like the smiling fellow above. The Orange One's lies get more bizarre as his office and its trappings go to his discolored head. On May 26  The New York Times reported (accurately, the videotape backs them up on this) that senior White House official had said that there wasn't enough time to hold the North Korean summit on the originally scheduled date of June 12. Almost immediately, POTUS -- who seems to have convinced himself that his cancellation of that meeting is a matter of no consequence, that he is still making up his regal mind whether to attend the already-cancelled meeting -- tweeted that the Times was lying, that nobody said that, and in fact that the senior administration official in question "doesn't exist." This ...

I have found this line online, attributed to Voltaire. "It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence." Now: Voltaire is one of those figures to whom things  (passive voice) get attributed . Or, as I believe Benjamin Franklin wisely put it, "You can't believe all quotations you find on the internet." The inequality/dependence line seems as if it might have been created by someone intent on arguing against the New Deal, or some subsequent welfare-state sort of development, and backdated to Voltaire to give it some Enlightenment cred. Not that that's a bad cause. Regular readers of this blog know my sympathies. But deception mars every cause for which it is employed. [And a reasonable induction is that it is employed for all human causes.] So: I open this to my readers. What are the odds that actually comes from Voltaire? Or from anyone speaking or writing earlier than, say, 1932?

On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I picked up a newspaper in the historic town of Appomattox and noticed on the sports page that the teams of Appomattox High School call themselves "The Generals." I bet when they lose, the sportswriters of the towns of the rival team can't help but begin with a lede like this: "The Appomattox Generals surrendered again Wednesday to the Jubreau Devil's crushing linesmen...." Team names are funny things. The Appomattox High School's choice of name seems easy (at least in retrospect) to anyone with even a passing knowledge of US history. Other team names come to seem obsolete with the passage of time, or offensive, or become grandfathered in past our moral sense so that they aren't outrageous only because they've been around for a long time.  My Junior High School's teams were named the "Chargers." What image (if any) comes to your mind when you hear that? A shopper pulling a credit car...

Xenophanes, one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, observed, "Ethiopians say that their gods are snub nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired. "But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own -- horses like horses, cattle like cattle." What was he trying to do via these assertions? We don't know much about the context. But they are intriguing. Was he trying to suggest that the truth about the gods is unknowable? This could be akin to Kant's antinomies. Kant told us that it is possible to prove, for example, both that the universe must have had a beginning and that the universe could not have a beginning. Thus, we can only conclude that the ultimate reality is unknown to us. Perhaps Xenophanes was saying likewise, and we should simply read "the gods" as "noumena."