Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is from the blog of the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff: "John Bolton :    Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone.    His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove.    A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove,  but a dove nonetheless.    This is a dangerous world.    We must take our comfort where we can find it." No comment. 

For some of you, this may be an easy word to grasp, or to have grasped. "Greenwashing," after all, is a neologism created in deliberate parallel to "whitewashing." A "greenwashed" corporation or business entity is one that pretends to be "green," to be concerned with ecological questions, social issues, etc., because it wants to attract money from investors who care about such things. Why do some corporations want to create that false impression about themselves? Because there are a number of investment funds who are looking for targets for the money of socially/environmentally conscious individuals, yet the standards as to who exactly those funds ought to be investing in are rather loose, and in some respects frankly subjective.

I think this is amazing, for a lot of reasons. There's a big infrastructure deal in the works in the Persian Gulf. The Iraq Ministry of Oil has decided to buy the creation of am artificial island, from a Dutch marine construction company, Boskalis. Their plan involves the creation of two new pipelines and four new marine docks to create an island that will enable Iraq, through its Basra Oil company, to add 3 million barrels per day to its export capacity. It is amazing because I tend to think of infrastructure projects at this level as a thing of the past -- where "past" means Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses. Of course oil rigs and such get created, especially in the Persian Gulf. But this is a three-year construction project that could be disrupted at any time during that run by war or violence short of war, and that could easily end up a dead loss for Iraq or Boskalis if that happens. It's a gutsy move.

Coke Roberts was a presence on America's television screens for more than forty years. One of her regular tasks was to comment intelligently on public affairs. She did this with analytical skill and civility without becoming a bullying blowhard and without chasing after shocks. Instead she focused on adding value. That isn't a bad legacy to leave. Roberts was diagnosed with breast cancer back in 2002. She was treated at that time and, by all accounts, the treatment was successful. But cancer is a mean MF once it has its tentacles in you. It made an encore appearance this summer and she is said to have died to "complications" arising from that relapse.  Our class-act President chose to respond to her death with, "She never treated me nicely. But I would like to wish her family well." Of course it wasn't her job to treat the powerful "nicely." Another good legacy,

On Quora, someone wrote: "Is it possible that the end of this life is the beginning of another?" I replied: "It is possible, I suppose. After all, one can say it without contradicting one’s self, which is the lowest coherent bar for the notion of possibility. "Is it plausible? Not especially. What seems more plausible, IMHO, is that the end of this life is neither the beginning nor the end of some more real life, but simply a (minor) incident in the unfolding of that more real life. "The 'I' with whom I am most familiar might be the avatar in a video game. Yet the avatar may die, the game may end, etc., while the real I, the player behind that avatar, may continue living only somewhat affected by that loss."

In yesterday's entry I outlined Spinozistic philosophy in six points. The sixth of these concerned Biblical exegesis. I'm returning to that today only to provide two quotes that illustrate the attitude I mentioned there. Everything italicized below is in the words of Spinzo, the quotation marks are the words of the scriptures as he is quoting them. In order to understand, in the case of miracles, what actually took place, we ought to be familiar with Jewish phrases and metaphors; anyone who did not make sufficient allowance for these, would be continually seeing miracles in Scripture where nothing of the kind is intended by the writer; he would thus miss the knowledge not only of what actually happened, but also of the mind of the writers of the sacred text. Scripture makes the general assertion in several passages that nature's course is fixed and unchangeable. In Ps. 148:6, for instance, and Jer. 31:35. The wise man also, in Eccles. 1:10, distinctly teaches th

Just to practice concision. 1) In anthropology, Spinoza emphasized what we are not. We are not a "kingdom within the kingdom." We are a subject of nature, which is the only kingdom. 2) In metaphysics, Spinoza is remembered for his naturalized God, or for his deification of nature. They work out to be the same thing, which is the point. This has the odd-seeming but predictable consequence that he has been called an atheist by some commentators and a "God-intoxicated man" by others. 3. In epistemology, Spinoza believed in "geometrical order." The best way to approach truth was to start with a small number of premises that are recommended by their clarity and the difficulty of seeing how things could be otherwise, and to spin out their logical consequences. 4. In ethics, Spinoza believed that the real problem was the confusion and frustration that comes our way when we think we ARE a kingdom with the kingdom, and the solution is just to learn better

Now THAT is a neat phrase. "Causal dynamical triangulation." It is apparently a theory on the cutting edge of subatomic physics. There's a wikipedia article under that title but it doesn't really explain the matter for dense folks like me. What I do understand, though, is that efforts continue to render Einstein's understanding of gravity consistent with quantum mechanics. This requires the quantization of gravity, something that was worked out in principle in the 1960s. BUT ... the so-called "naive" quantum gravity developed by Feynman etc. can't be the last word. Physicists are agreed it can only be an approximation. How to get the rest of the way there is the continuing subject for debate. And THAT is here CDT comes in. What intrigues me is that, as Sabine Hossenfelder has written, CDT requires that we treat space and time differently, "which Einstein taught us not to do." So the idea is to keep Einstein's notion of gra

What does a philosopher mean when he appeals to the "intuitive" nature of a premise? Does "X is intuitive" just means "X seems plausible and the non-X views I have considered seem implausible"? Four authors, led by James Ladyman,  a few years back (2007) wrote a book called EVERYTHING MUST GO: METAPHYSICS NATURALIZED. They complained that most metaphysics of late, especially within the analytic philosophical tradition, has been worthless. I recently read a review of this book in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, posted there in 2010.    It paraphrased the key sentiments of the authors in this passage. Look at any well-written paper in analytic philosophy and you will see arguments aplenty; if the author has not done your work for you by making a list of numbered premises, he or she has probably done enough that you could make such a list without having to exercise too much creativity. The arguments may very well be valid: you will be convinced tha

Time has put some distance between the ever-urgent "now" and the death of Jeffrey Epstein, from an "apparent" suicide in a jail cell. With the benefit of dispassion, and hindsight, let us look back at that. The points that pop to mind are these: 1. This was a man with documented connections to two Presidents and a member of the British royal family; 2. Who had attempted suicide once before while in custody 3. Had been placed on suicide watch 4. But then strangely suicide watch was lifted 5. The ME performed the autopsy the day after his death, but hung onto the report for several days thereafter 6. ... only to disclose when she did release it that he had broken the bones in his neck in multiple places, something a good deal more common in murders than in actual suicides and 7. His death came just hours after the release of a lot of previously sealed court documents, as reporters on this beat were combing through them. Most like a hack Hollywood writer

Rene Descartes wrote a treatise on music.  It was in fact the earliest thing he is known to have written and which survives for us. Perhaps it is wrong to pay too much attention to it. Some historians of philosophy write it off as juvenalia. But it does show us that Descartes was on his way to becoming ... Descartes. He treats music as a sensory instantiation of mathematics. If the proportions are right, the mathematical problem has been solved properly, and the musical work has to be judged to be good. We have nothing from Descartes about other arts. But I suspect he would have expressed a low opinion of the literary arts if pressed. He would have said that words are for communication, and that we should take no sensory pleasure from communication, since such pleasure can only be distracting. As for other arts: painting, architecture, etc., he might have said roughly what he said about music. Insofar as they create forms, they are mathematical. And, since they are mathematic

Just an observation. One of the cutting edge fields in the tech world today is the sale of cloud services. Even big companies don't want to have to own their own servers if they don't have to. Amazon and Oracle both own a lot of servers, more than they need, so Amazon and Oracle in particular (other companies as well) long ago started letting other major companies -- such as the credit card giant Capital One, make use of their facility. Since companies like Amazon have to prepare for peak seasons, and most moments are by definition not "peak," they necessarily have a lot of capacity to sell most of the time. What began as an almost accidental sideline became an industry. This is the sort of service, by the way, that somebody is providing you whenever you say that you've stored certain data "in the cloud." I'm typing this on an HP Chromebook, which runs on google. Chromebook looks like a generic 'laptop' but its distinguishing feature