Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Someone asked on the question-and-answer site Quora, what are the differences between Hegel and Marx with regard to their understanding of the State? My answer: That’s a complicated question. You’re deep in the weeds here. But here is where you might start research on Hegel in particular: https://www.iep.utm.edu/hegelsoc... Very short course. For Hegel the State is the third moment in the usual dialectical triad, where the family is the thesis and civil society is the antithesis. Both are subsumed into the State. You don’t know what this means because it isn’t how normal folk talk? I’m with you. You can delve more deeply into what he meant by the terms involved, but it won't change that. For Marx the State is the executive committee of the ruling class. See the difference? Marx didn’t use the dialectical terminology that, as a Hegelian, he knew perfectly well how to throw about, when it came time to DEFINE the state. Marx did talk like normal folk in defining the state, a...

"According to [Angelika] Kratzer, the verb 'can' in a sentence such as 'A can do B' always comes with an additional, often implicit qualification of the form 'in view of X.' This qualification, if not specified explicitly, is determined by the context in which the sentence is uttered. For example, when we talk about what is humanly possible, we might say, 'We can walk, run, and jump, but not fly,' thereby referring to what we can do by way of the constraints of human physiology. When we talk about how we get from London to Paris, we might say, 'We can fly, take the Eurostar travel train, or travel by overnight bus,' thereby referring to what we can do in klight of the available means of transport. W might add, however, 'We cannot fly or take the Eurostar, because those options are too expensive.' this time referring to what we can do in view of our financial constraints." pp. 103-04 The point in the context of free will, L...

There doesn't seem to be any adjective attached to the reign of Queen Anne, the final Stuart monarch. Kings named Edward get the adjective "Edwardian" attached to their reign. Queens named Victoria or Elizabeth get Victorian or Elizabethan. And so forth. But nothing is Annean. I guess this is because the phrase "Queen Anne" is so short. One doesn't have to refer to an Annean chair when one can simply say a "Queen Anne" chair without losing a beat.  Okay, this isn't going anywhere.... 

That woman who tried to get another woman fired for eating on the train was a World Bank employee. You may have heard of this. It was one of those 15 minute social media sensations.  A World Bank employee who is also an author (not just a hobbyist -- she had a book deal pending when this scandal broke) tweeted angrily about an employee of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) whom she had seen eating on the train. Apparently that is verboten.  The WB employee tweeted about this and mentioned the employee's obnoxious response to a question on the subject, right at 9 AM on a workday. So I would imagine she had just gotten to work when she did so.  So far, no biggie. What makes it something of a biggie is that the commuter sent a complaint to the WMATA. It replied. "Thank you for catching this and helping us to make sure all Metro employees are held accountable. Can you confirm the time you were on the train, the direction you were headed and w...

This is a mess. Harvard, in response to pressure from idiots who have no business venturing beyond  Mom's apron strings, has taken a stance in opposition to the principle of due process and (in that connection) the idea of a right to the assistance of counsel. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/11/winthrop-faculty-deans-to-leave/#.XNbmt-rSpmQ.twitter

Here's a passage from the book WHY FREE WILL IS REAL by Christian List. of the London School of Economics. At one point (p. 74) List recommends what he calls the "naturalistic ontological attitude," that is, the view that "our best guide to any questions about which entities, properties, or phenomena exist in any given domain is to be found in our best scientific theories of that domain." This is why we believe, and rightly, in the reality of gravitational force, electromagnetic fields, and much more recently the Higgs boson. "To follow up by asking whether they are 'really' real would be to ask one question too many." Likewise it is, he says, with intentional agency -- the fact that some things happen because some human beings want to accomplish something, and have specific enumerable ideas about how those things can be accomplished  -- we naturally regard intentional agency as existing because "our best theories in the human and...

The phrase "begs the question" has suffered of late from a great amount of abuse. In response, I'm going to be, as this photo suggests, a little gnomic. I could go work on my garden. Someone observing me, could blog: "This begs the question, does he know which is  weed and which is a flower?" This would disclose not only that I have querulous neighbors, but that at least one of them is ignorant of the vocabulary of logical fallacies, the domain whence comes the abused expression. Proper use:  "It is obvious that I know which one is a weed, because I tug certain plants right out of the ground with gusto!" "That begs the question." My hypothetical riposte is an effort to prove something by presuming what was to be proved. If someone suspected that I was tugging the wrong plants out of the ground, he wouldn't be persuaded otherwise by my reflection on my own gusto when I do so. But let's get back to the misuse. I suggest that...

I've recently discovered a new phrase, the "Gish gallop." It seems to me to fill a valuable vocabulary gap in discussions of argumentative styles, fallacies, etc.  So I'll preserve my discovery here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop The term refers to the debater's tactic of throwing out a lot of (individually weak) arguments in quick succession.  It can be a devastating trick because it takes a lot less time to make any one claim than it does to do a careful dissection of its weakness. So, if I were arguing the "pro" side of the proposition, "do pots of gold exist at the end of rainbows," [a deliberately ridiculous example],  and I and my opponent each had five minutes for an opening statement, I could say: 1) It is arrogant to claim that such pots of gold don't exist, since it is impossible to imagine that the 'gold deniers' have personally visited both ends of any large percentage of rainbows; 2) something ha...

With regard to the Plame/Wilson marriage, and Wilson's trip to Niger, Miller writes that one day in July 2003 she stepped into the office of Jill Abramson, at this point the chief of the NYT's Washington Bureau, and told her  (these are words from the memoir's paraphrase, not the actual words of the conversation), that "Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had apparently helped send her husband on the trip to Africa before the war to investigate the uranium charge.  If true, I said, the CIA was possibly guilty of nepotism and of covering up intelligence that disputed its prewar WMD claims. If the source was wrong ... the White House might be trying to smear them. Either way, I told Abramson the tip needed pursuing." Three points, then apparently intrigued her: 1. Guilty of nepotism? Probably the least of it -- the notion that Wilson (a former ambassador -- there were good reasons for giving him the assignment regardless of his marriage) benefitted f...