Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The distinguished historian and Polish-American Richard Pipes passed away earlier this year. Pipes is sometimes said to have taught and studied the "Polish version of Russian history," a line sometimes attributed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. The idea behind the phrase, which is intended as a criticism is this: some anti-Communist Russians (Solzhenitsyn among them) see the influx of Marxist-Leninist ideas into Russia as a disastrous accident, a hijacking of a country that had until then been following a quite different path.  Eastern European anti-Communists, though, see the same influx as a natural convergence, as when someone with a genetic predisposition to the gout starts showing symptoms thereof. The "Polish version of Russian history" is the latter. The jailed are seldom inclined to make excuses for their jailers. I had encountered the quote before, but had never been curious enough to track down the source. Recently, I became curious and did a little go...

The first moments of my first day back in school in the fall of 1972 come to mind now and then. It was the start of my third and final year at Kosciusko Junior High, grades 7 - 9. I hadn't fit in. I had hopes to fit in more successfully at high school, but I would have to survive one more year at "Big K" to get there. The buses let us off well before the school opened its doors, so there was a period of milling around and waiting. This was early September of course, so the business of standing around out of doors was not uncomfortable. So: I was standing still, speaking to no one, generally doing my best statuary impression, when someone I hardly knew ran up to me. Literally, he ran. There was not a lot of open space what with all the milling around, but he had found some, and RAN up to me. Then he stopped dead short, though inside what one might fairly consider my personal space, and asked, "Did you make it to 9th grade?" I said only one word, ...

Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present. My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y. Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner.  The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical invest...

What was the best novel, written by a US based author in English in the years 1980 to 2000, the final fifth of the 20th century?  Someone asked me that question recently on an online forum and I came up with three quite offhand, but I'm open to suggestions: My off-the-cuff three: Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) . Updike, Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (1998). 

I'm working my way carefully through Fiona Cowie's book, WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED   (1999), a book I've only skimmed until now. I believe I've mentioned it here a time or two on the basis of the skimming and its reviews. The book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, is a look at Fodor and Chomsky in particular, and their revival of elements of classical rationalism, especially with regard to a priori ideas. Today I'll focus on an early point, within Cowie's historical discussion. She asks: what exactly was the classical debate, the one featuring Descartes and Leibniz on one side, figures such as Hobbes and Locke on the other, really about?  It is not easy to pin in down. The empiricists sometimes wrote as if the rationalists were saying that a baby comes into the world already knowing, say, what a triangle is, or what constitutes a prime number. Babies clearly don't. And the old rationalists denied this is what they meant. D...

I may be thought to be a Martian anthropologist working on Venus here, but I have to say a few words about the feminism of the 21st century. As I understand it, there is an important divide between what we may call "identity feminists" on the one hand, and the Ruth Bader Ginsburg sort, whom one might call 'radical feminists," on the other. Let's just say IF and RF hereafter for short. I'll call the latter "radical" because that is a term that used to be hurtled at them as an insult, sometimes as part of larger constructions such as 'TERF,' because many of them have adopted it, and because it should in this context give no offense. After all, how can it be a bad thing to get to the 'root' of a matter? The contention of RF is that many (most? all?)  societies have for a long time given women ("female bodied women" if that phrase is really considered necessary!), a raw deal and that people of that description ought to ...

Colin McGinn, via his blog, recently offered an intriguing definition of philosophy. He said it is "the study of logical reality." What did he mean by that? Well ... the idea was to put the question "what is philosophy" within a family of other such questions, which have known answers, and then to locate philosophy as a member of that family. So: what is physics? the study of physical reality. What is psychology? the study of mental reality. What is history? The study of historical reality. And so forth. If philosophy belongs in this family, then philosophy is the study of some [aspect of?] reality. If we say that it is the study of logical reality we say that it is at core about (McGinn's words here), "All the relations of entailment, consistency, and inconsistency that exist." Entailment in particular has to be understood in a capacious sense to make this work as a definition. One of McGinn's examples of how his definition may s...

Somebody very clever fed 1,000 hours of Trump rallies into a computer and had it algorithmically generate an artificial Trump rally. This is part of the result. PRESIDENT: Foreign powers cheat us! Canada steals our milk! China steals our milk! We only had one glass of milk left: Obama drank it. Not fair. Crowd boos. They wanted that milk.  PRESIDENT:  But like President Ronald Rogaine: I will bring back the milk! Crowd roars. They still want that milk. PRESIDENT: A wall of milk. No criminals get through. Democrats want criminals to have the milk. No way. Milk comes from coal. We'll dig it up.

The headline may have fooled you. But no, this post isn't about the op-ed you're probably thinking of, and its not about anonymity. The op-ed that I'm thinking about was signed. In early July of this year,  The   Seattle Times  published an  op-ed  by Samuel Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Sport Concussion Program, on the risks of brain injury for young athletes active in contact sports.  Dr. Browd referenced research on the dangers of repetitive brain trauma. But he cautioned against an alarmist view, saying that millions of children “have played contact sports without overt symptoms” and that “kids sitting around being inactive is bad and unhealthy.” Dr. Browd is a co founder of VICIS, a football helmet company that sells some pretty pricey helmets ($950).  He is also an unaffiliated neurology consultant to the NFL and to the Seattle Seahawks.  The op-ed went out to the public without any editorial note with ...

I saw a movie recently that was a semi-fictionalized telling of Dr. Colin Bouwer's murder of his wife in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1999-2000. The real life events are compelling, (he killed her slowly over a period of months, with insulin in her tea mostly, and through an injection only for the coup de grace, in what must have been for her an excruciating and inexplicable decline from good health) but the movie makers didn't manage to do much with it. They would probably have been better off abandoning the trappings of fiction altogether and doing a straightforward documentary . For those who don't know, Bouwer was the head of the psychiatric department at the University of Otago -- see the photo above -- and the head of psychological medicine at Dunedin Hospital. He was, if anyone would be, 'above suspicion' among the people of both town and gown. A doctor can of course write prescriptions and obtain as much insulin as he may need for such crime. But Bouwer w...

In a new book, Yechiel J.M. Leiter offers a "Hebraist" interpretation of the political philosophy of John Locke. This view holds that, despite Locke's nominal affiliation with the Church of England, and thus by inference, with Christianity, the New Testaments play very little role in his thinking. Furthermore (on Leiter's view) classical Greek sources play only a minor role. Leiter says that Locke's views were formed largely from contemplation of the Old Testament. Leiter is not merely a man of ideas but a man of affairs in Israel. He has served as chief of staff to Prime Minister Netanyahu. Locke has always struck me as a schoolhouse pest, given a role as venerated sage in American secondary school education because of his importance to the founding generation, but not especially intriguing in the way that other great Brits, like Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith, often are. But perhaps Leiter's argument can induce me to give Locke another look. Leiter plac...

"I still live." Those were the last words of Daniel Webster. They were later quoted as inspirational, as meaning, "Yet though I am dying, my legacy will go on and on." In fact, he was engaging in a final bit of braggadocio -- one of his bedside doctors had apparently said he would probably be dead by midnight. He woke from his penultimate slumber and asked the time. Someone told him it was 1 AM. He said brightly, "I still live," then sank into his ultimate slumber. I've heard that NOAH Webster's last words were somewhat more enigmatic. "Zoology, Zoroaster ... Zygote!"

Of course they did. Of course in Dr Who, TARDIS stands for "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space." Some serious minded scientists working on time travel, at least as a mathematical possibility, have now given their proposed model the name "Traversable Acausal Retrograde Dimensions in Spacetime." Which of course gets you to the same acronym. Glad they came up with some different words, because simply using the TV show's words would have been ... silly. https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-came-up-with-a-mathematical-model-for-a-viable-time-machine

A fellow who shall remain anonymous here, whom I encountered on Facebook, made what appears to have been a theistic argument about the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. I reproduce it in full below.  Doesn't it strike you as ridiculously unlikely that that asteroid that struck the Earth 66 million years ago was so incredibly (and unlikely) propitious, fortunate and lucky for humanity, that it was ENTIRELY NATURALLY OCCURRING?....To me, it screams, "ARTIFICE!!!". Many other posters replied. Since this is my blog dammit, I'll reproduce only my own reply to that.  (Recall that I'm a theist, though not one who allows that fact to drug my critical reasoning faculties entirely).  Are you trying to use this as an argument for a supernatural designer and/or providential force? Or an idle statistical exercise? Or something else (maybe involving space aliens treating earth as a protected reserve or laboratory?) If this is intended  as an argument for theism, a...

Last week, in writing about Judith Butler, I quoted a notoriously obscure sentence of hers, often invoked to show how much her work requires that the reader work in the decoding business. I'd now like to take a crack at the decoding of that sentence myself, so here it is again: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.   So ... what does this mean? I'll substitute three shorter sentences for that one ungain...