I included a comic in yesterday's post -- one which mentioned the Buddha is a hypothetical sort of way Today, we will invoke an actual carton image OF said Buddha. This is funny and thought provoking. If the recipient is pleased with the box, then the gift is the box, not the absent coffee maker. Had the Buddha been confused or unhappy about the empty box, the giver would have apologized and run off to fetch the coffee maker. A superposition of possibilities here. Would this be like Schrodinger's cat? Let's not try to press that thought too hard....
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Perhaps I'm just being a curmudgeon, but I really wish people would stop using "they" as a neuter third-person singular pronoun. There are two situations in which the grassroots seem very recently to have decided that this is acceptable, whereas it until very very recently would have been a barbarism. There is (a) the case of the individual whose sex is not know to me and (b) the case of the individual who "identifies as non-binary" and who prefers "they." The former case includes, "A child was in danger, so they had to be helped," where the sex of the child is unknown, or the child is hypothetical and the sex is not important to the hypothesis. In the old days, one would have gone with the generic "he" here. In our own enlightened time, "he/she" seems still to be available, though "they" is gaining ground. Perhaps the people have spoken. Those bastards. The use of "they' in the above comic is ...
I hope every reader of mine has had a fine Thanksgiving break and is ready for another work week. In New England, the home of the origin story of this feast, we certainly had great weather for it: weather harsh enough that we could think of ourselves as new settlers in a harsh dangerous land and show some Calvinist fortitude in facing up to it! The following may have some connection to Calvinism, but not much. I'll inflict it upon you anyway. A young friend of mine, in college, taking a course on the philosophy of religion, was recently assigned to write a paper about the dispute between Mackie and Plantinga over free will and the problem of evil. Mackie has argued (as have many others, but the Mackie version of the case has become a focal point of recent debate) that it is logically impossible to reconcile three claims: that an omnipotent God exists; that this is also an ideally benevolent being; and that evil exists. Any theology with any hope of plausibility ...
The question for the day, how closely related are these two contentions, by MP: 1. "While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable." 2. "The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA."
At my birthday celebration last month, my sister gave me a book about the works of William Faulkner, FIGURES OF DIVISION (1986) by James A. Snead. This gift led me to google Snead's name, and discover a fascinating story. Snead was a promising scholar who died young -- at 35 years old (well, I'm old enough to consider that young). He died in 1989 -- apparently an AIDS related death. FIGURE OF DIVISION , an analysis of race in Faulkner's use of language, began its own life as Snead's doctoral dissertation. That earlier version got him his PhD in English from Cambridge, St John's College, under the direction of Colin McCabe. Here's a nice, I think representative, passage in the book: an appreciation of the character of Thomas Sutpen, "If one must read Sutpen as 'a version of the American dream,' a myth of rags-to-riches elevation, then clearly the American Dream of advancement deconstructs its own performance. Something is wrong if, even aft...
I saw it on television, on one of those "show business news" shows. Don't ask why I was watching one of them. A bear cub tries to climb up a cliff, while his mother waits patiently at the top. Baby loses his grip near the top, slides down, and starts climbing again. This happens a couple of more times until, triumph! mother and child are reunited. It was always only a motion away. The TV show got the footage because it had already gone viral on social media, and social media got the footage because a drone took it. That's what ticks off Faine Greenwood, who has written on this clip for SLATE. https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/inspirational-baby-bear-video-drones-harassing-wildlife.html
Dennis Hof for President in 2020!!! Hof, a licensed and very successful pimp, branched out (a little bit, hardly even enough branching to be noticed) into politics in the final year of his life. He was running for a post in Nevada's state assembly when he died, on October 16. That was too late for any change in the ballots and, as it happens, Hof won. What happens with the seat now, I don't know. I suggest that Hof's body be preserved, that an "abstain" be recorded in his name for any actual votes that august assembly may take, and that sensible pro-freedom folk rally around Hof as our candidate for the next US presidential campaign.
A word about Robert Filmer. His name makes an occasional appearance in this blog, mostly in contexts in which I'm warning about abuse of, or excessive claims for, supreme executive power. I noticed years ago that many libertarians invoke Thomas Hobbes in contexts like that. The dangerous proposed new regulation or evidentiary privilege is "Hobbesian," gasps the writer. I generally agreed that it -- whatever had provoked this outburst on a given day -- is a bad thing, but I grew tired of the ritual invocations of Hobbes there, especially where they didn't fit all that well. After all, Hobbes was a very secular thinker. He was wary of religion because in his own lifetime he had seen religious fervor lead to an open challenge to the sovereign, and he had seen THAT challenge lead to a civil war that must have looked a bit like a war of "all against all" to him. He was a member of the Church of England, but he clearly explained that he was so because his ...
Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...
Four recent or forthcoming books that may deserve the attention of some of the readers of this blog, below. 1. AFRICA, EMPIRE, AND FLEET STREET, by Jonathan Derrick. Published by Oxford University Press, this is the story of Albert Cartwright, an anti-colonialist, and the newspaper he ran for decades, the London based WEST AFRICA MAGAZINE. 2. WHITE SHOE, by John Oller, published by Dutton. This one is forthcoming -- March 2019. It tells the story of the Wall Street lawyers of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th who created what are still considered the establishment (or "white shoe") law firms in that vicinity to this day. 3. CONSCIOUSNESS AND PHYSICALISM, by Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove. Published by Routledge. "Physicalism" in the philosophy of mind is roughly what used to be known as "materialism." These authors think it should be regarded not as a dogma but as a research program, and that it is a sensible program. A reviewer in the...