Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Oxford University Press has posted a timeline of women in philosophy. In order not to go back to Hypatia, which would make for an unwieldy graphic, the Oxfordians have arbitrarily begun the timeline in 1678, when a woman was for the first time granted a doctorate degree in philosophy. The university that broke that particular cave ceiling? The University of Padua in Italy. The woman involved? Elena Cornaro Piscopia. Senora Piscopia is new to me. Here are two other facts from the timeline that are also new to me, arbitrarily selected: Susanne Langer published a paper in the journal MIND (a leading British philosophy journal) in 1926. Langer is often regarded as the first woman "professional philosopher." Her 1926 paper was titled "Confusion of Symbols and Confusion of Logical Types." It expressed her interest in symbolic logic, which she would later put to work in the development of aesthetics. Finally, for our brief survey, the first college course ...

A common fallacious form of argument is that known as the "motte and bailey," also sometimes called the "bait and switch," though the archaic term "motte and bailey" is more evocative for those of us who aren't engaged either in retailing products or in fishing as a regular matter. The term "motte" suggests a strong defensive position (not to be confused with a "moat," though obviously related -- we'll get to that). The motte is the raised earthwork in front of a castle. It may have a wooden palisade on its crest. The "bailey" is a pleasant and less militarized zone, perhaps a courtyard or market, outside of the protection of the motte.  A moat, or perhaps a dry ditch, might exist protecting the whole motte-and-bailey complex. The idea is that the whole complex is defensible against small numbers of foes. But against a larger more determined attack, when a raid becomes a battle, the bailey might have to be aban...

A lot of hopes have been invested for decades now in the idea of a "Tobin tax." The idea, first formulated by Yale University economist James Tobin in 1972, is that a government can tax short-term, round trip transactions from one currency to another. That is, speculators might transfer their US dollars into UK pounds and, shortly thereafter, their pounds back into US dollars. That would be done, and is done, as a way of profiting off expected changes in the relative value of the currencies concerned: it is betting. Tobin's view was that such betting is destabilizing and it ought to be discouraged: thus the tax.  Further, Tobin worked up this proposal soon after Nixon had destroyed the older Bretton Woods system. There was a great deal of concern over what would replace it, how the financial world was going to get along if every currency simply floats against any other, with no agreed up measuring/reference point. The idea seemed to die a quiet death. It was resur...

In its own way this is the most puzzling of Plato's many dialogs. The PARMENIDES establishes that Plato was fully aware of the standard arguments against the "Theory of the Forms." He puts them into the mouth of the elder Parmenides who is supposed to have met a young Socrates. What is supposed to be the take-away? I would guess that it is that the views expressed at the start of this dialog are those of the YOUNG Socrates, and that we're supposed to contrast this decisively refutable stuff with some more sophisticated version of the theory of the Forms we could attribute to the older man, and to Plato himself. But I don't understand of what the implied and later-acquired sophistication consists.

I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology. Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world. This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject, his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will as a “third order good.” I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good. ...

Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton, and a man who had held important economic policy posts in each of the last two Democratic administrations, died on March 16, of suicide. As I write, I do not know the means of suicide. I'm not sure if I should even be wondering why, or if the silence should be taken as a good thing, a giftless horse into whose mouth I should not look. He was 58 years old. His political views were standard-issue center-left. One of the facts that draw my attention, looking at some of the bio notice issued since his death, is: why was his time in the Obama administration so brief? Krueger was named chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors in November 2011, three years after Obama's election. He left that office in August 2013. So he was there for less than two years out of an 8 year term. Then the President brought in Jason Furman instead. Was there a power-struggle story there that we in the general public have never been told...

I've recently read and reviewed a book from Princeton University Press entitled HOW GLOBAL CURRENCIES WORK, by Barry Eichengreen, Arnaud Mehlm and Livia Chitu. Two of those authors are affiliated with the European Central Bank. I won't discuss here the main thesis of the book, which I summarized with my usual panache in my review for AllAboutAlpha. Instead, I'll take up a subsidiary point: the role of the Japanese yen on the world scene. There was a time when Japan was seen as the rising economic superpower. If through the 1970s and 1980s, a random individual of average intelligence and just slightly above average interest in following the world's financial news had been asked, "Is the US dollar going to remain the world's central currency for a long time yet and, if not, what might be its replacement?" that person's answer might well have been, "no it won't, and the yen will replace it." But the yen didn't. Nowadays it is ...

Happy Spring everyone. Here is a story I've heard, and a skeptical comment I'd like to insert into it. All very philosophical. As readers of this blog probably know,  Aristotle was well-connected with the royal family of Macedonia. At one point in his life runs the story, while he was still spending most of his time in Athens, hostility toward him became very high, because Macedonia was a foreign and hostile power. So, fearing arrest, Aristotle left town, going to take up permanent residence in Macedonia. He is supposed to have said to Athenians on his way out of the gate, “I will not stay, and allow this city to sin once more against philosophy.” Personally, I doubt he said that. A later scribe must have thought it would have been the right thing for him to say at the moment. And I think that if he DID say that, he probably muttered to himself under his breath, “especially not on ME.”

I don't know off hand whether I've ever had reason before to mention Nicolas Malebranche, a great though idiosyncratic post-Cartesian French philosopher, in this blog.  I think I may have mentioned him once, in connection with theodicy, i.e. his efforts to make the case for God's goodness despite the evil in the world God created.  But today I've like to say something about a more fundamental issue in Malebranche's thinking: the nature of causation. Malebranche said (1) that material things can't be the cause of themselves (they can't be fundamental), (2) minds are composed of ideas, raising the question of whether ideas can be fundamental, but (3)  finite minds such as our own cannot account for the operation of physical laws in the world they quite imperfectly observe. Therefore (4) only an infinite mind, God's mind, can ground causal relations such as physical laws.  All laws are only generalizations of the actions of God's mind, and for ...