Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A well-known popularizer of philosophy has passed away. Bryan Magee died on July 16 in a hospital after a long illness. Magee was the author of MEN OF IDEAS (1982), PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD (1985), CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER (1997), and WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY (2001), etc. He was a great popularizer of philosophy for non-academic audiences, adept at breaking down complex problems into their component parts and presenting them in ordinary (and non-patronizing!) prose. It was Magee's view that Immanuel Kant brought about "the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy," and that Kant was right to compare it to the turning produced by Copernicus in astronomy. Magee wrote, "Because of the fundamental character of these problems [unearthed by Kant], and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since." However well expressed it may be, I don't believe that.

Raymond Guess, a philosopher affiliated with the University of Cambridge, recently wrote about the evolution of the Frankfurt School of social philosophers.  Guess observes that Adorno, in 1951, questioned the "liberal fiction which holds that any and every thought must be universally communicable to anyone whatsoever." We shouldn't make a fetish of communication or communicability, making it too fundamental an organizing principle.  Guess adds that the Frankfurt school soon fell into the trap Adorno had warned about. Jurgen Habermas, in the early 1970s, introduced what Guess calls a "normatively highly charged concept of 'discourse'" and "communicative action" that does exactly this -- in the hope of reinvigorating a Kantian liberalism. What d I think about all this? I will let you ... Guess. 

I'm curious: are there any believers in the authenticity of the Kensington Stone among active archeologists? This is a runestone allegedly unearthed in the neighborhood of Kensington, Minnesota in 1898. The inscription says that it was left there by Scandinavian explorers, "Vikings" if you will, on an expedition in the 14th century. Although there is solid evidence for Norse settlements along the northeastern coast of the US and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, there is no OTHER evidence (aside from this stone) that they ever got anything like THAT far west. One is naturally inclined to think that such an outlier is a fraud. But I'd like to know if it is still an open question. 

Sometimes a great theory and its believers are like the parties to a marriage that fails after just a year or two. Maybe the two of them always looked great together, they seemed to be destined for a life together. But when they break up, the have to pick up the pieces and face their respective post-destiny lives. So it has been with one of my favorite theories of medieval history (yes, I have a top ten list in my mind of favorite theories of medieval history -- doesn't everybody? -- this one is my fourth). Associated with the Stanford University historian Lynn White, the theory posits that the invention of the stirrup, a neat way of maintaining the balance of the rider of a horse, was critical to the development of the feudal system. It was an adventurous speculation. The stirrup made possible shock combat (riders aiming lances at one another); the new form of combat required an infrastructure, armorers, pages, and so forth. The good lance bearers became knights, the low b

I'm returning to an earlier discussion of a recent book by Aidan Dodson, AMARNA SUNSET, which concerns the death of Egypt's 18th dynasty. I won't repeat anything that I said in my previous post on the book. Instead, I'll quote something very poignant I found here. The Hittites, a Kingdom in north central Asia Minor, received a message from an Egyptian Queen in the 14th century BC. The document still exists, on a tablet such as one of those in the photo above. The Queen was addressing the Hittite King. "My husband died, and I have no son. But, they say, you have many sons. If you would send me one of your sons, then he would become my husband. I do not want to take a servant of mine and make him my husband. I am afraid!" If I understand Dodson's construal of this letter, if comes from the waning days of the 18th dynasty. Nefertiti was alone. Her husband, the pioneering monotheist Akhenaton, was dead, as was their only son, Tut. She was desperate t

Both George Soros and Charles Koch believe that the foreign policy of the United States has become unhinged from any defensible conception of national interest or human rights, and together they hope to use their vast fortunes to move the US toward diplomacy and peace, away from the endless war to which it now seems committed. Charles Koch is one of the “Koch Brothers,” renowned for having long offered financial assistance to Republican and conservative candidates for public office. Soros is the Hungary-born financier who notoriously said in 2003 that removing President George W. Bush from office would be the “central focus of my life” over the following year, as it was “a matter of life and death.” A headline in the  Boston Globe  has called it an “astonishing turn” that these two men have teamed up. Astonishing or not: Koch and Soros are combining to endow a new foreign-policy think tank, called the “Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.” The name is in homage to the

We hardly ever see strikes like this any more. From a safe distance, it is possible to be nostalgic about them. On July 15, 1959, sixty years and half a week ago, half a million American steelworkers walked off the job at once. Nearly every steel mill in the US closed. The steel companies demanded that the union give up a "contract clause," which limited managerial discretion in changing the number of workers assigned to a task, introducing new work rules, or automating of many tasks. The union insisted on keeping the contract clause, the talks broke down: hence the strike. The Union won. The contract clause stayed in.  One key figure in resolving the stand-off? Vice President Nixon. With his own campaign imperatives for the following year in mind, and with the prospect of a major reversal in the economy if steel production stayed abysmal, Nixon adopted the mediators' role. He was instrumental in pressuring the managers to back down.    You didn't know t

I've heard that Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, used the issue of the chemical composition of the Sun to illustrate his idea of questions that could not be answered. Since it is obvious (in Comte's view) that we can never get a sample from the inside of the sun to test, we can never know what it is made of, and such an inquiry should be written off as "metaphysical," not positive. Silly philosophers, eh? It is very easy in hindsight to say that Comte shouldn't have been so dogmatic about the possible reach of human knowledge, or the specific means by which chemical composition can be determined. What about the inside of a black hole? Can we say anything definitive about THAT? If so ... how? since we can't go there? Or, if anyone of us could get within the "event horizon" for a time, we couldn't get information back. In a recent blog post, a physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, considers whether the question of the contents of a bl

My recent reading includes the book AMARNA SUNSET (2018), by Egyptologist Aidan Dodson. It is about the demise of ancient Egypt's 18th dynasty, the dynasty famous for the heresies of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gets credit (or blame) for the creation of monotheism. Akhenaten was featured in Sigmund Freud's last book, MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939). Freud posits that the historical Moses was a devotee of Akhenaten, and that he and the other loyalists were exiled from Egypt after his hero's death, and followers of the older polytheism restored their own power and their gods. That was the origin of Judaism, on this view. There is much more to Freud's theory, and of course he brought psychoanalysis into the picture. He believed that the reason Moses didn't reach the promised land was that he was murdered, as an oppressive father figure, and that after he was murdered the memory of that dark deed was buried in the unconscious of the perpetrated, taking the form of exagg

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?” - Blaise Pascal No, Blaise, nothing can be stupider than that. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that the human race, in the centuries since your day, has found a variety of new ways to be stupid, and has improved its implementation of the way you mention, but hasn't founder any thing stupider.  Nice triangle, by the way. 

John Searle is no longer affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. He has been stripped of his emeritus title. This is quite a comedown since Searle's name regularly shows up on lists of the most prominent and influential philosophers writing today. Let's review a little intellectual history. As of the late 1970s, the dominant view of consciousness, intelligence, and the mind-body relationship among professional philosophers in the Anglosphere was functionalism.  There was a lot of disagreement about the details, but mostly consensus on the big picture. The idea was that the brain was a machine that functioned more or less like a digital computer. Or, at any rate, its functions could be indefinitely approximated by a digital computer. Thus, there was nothing fundamental (just irrelevant biological history) setting the brain aside from what algorithms embodied with wires and on/off gates can or will eventually be able to do. Alan Turing had speculated ab

So ...  here's a thought. Three classic Greeks walk into a bar. The bartender, Heraclitus, recognizes Thales and of course pours him a glass of water, because water is everything. Then he recognizes Zeno and said: "Aha! so motion must be logically possible even if your path into this bar was infinitely divisible." But he doesn't recognize the third fellow and he says to Zeno "Who's your friend?" "Euripides." "I didn't rippa those tunics, you guys must have ripped them yourselves!"

The court this term went in different directions on the two sorts of gerrymandering. It may have finally closed out its long history of fiddling around the matter of "partisan gerrymandering," by deciding that it doesn't possess and cannot fashion the tools to deal with that. I'm reminded somewhat of the "shopping malls as public forums" cases in the 1960s and into the '70s. The idea was that malls, though privately owned, were functionally public places, so people have first amendment rights there. Even the Warren Court was hesitant about this, but the hesitancy seemed to make the subject cutting edge/intellectually stimulating. Eventually, though, the Burger court decided the idea had been a bad one, and backed far away.  The Roberts court has now done much the same with partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause.  But a couple of weeks earlier, the court had decided Virginia House of Delegates v Bethune, a case that seems to indicate