Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.  I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."  It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.  One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He ...

In 2008, Acta Analytica, which describes itself as an "international periodical for philosophy in the analytical tradition" ran a piece by Hilla Jacobson-Horowitz and Amir Horowitz called "Conceivability, Higher Order Patterns, and Physicalism." It is a contribution to the philosophy of the mind that argues that physicalism (roughly what used to be called "materialism") is a coherent plausible view and survives the so-called zombie argument. So ... what's the zombie argument? It is roughly this: 1. Physicalism suggests that the phenomenal properties of mind (the specific sensation of "seeing blue" and knowing that one sees blue for example) are fully necessitated and determined by the physical properties of the body, especially of the brain. 2. The "zombies" we are asked to imagine are beings in every other respect like ourselves, every material/physical respect, yet who lack these phenomenal properties. Their bodies ma...

Not long ago, I wrote here about the "process theory" of causality, and attributed it to Wesley Salmon. Today, I'll go a little further, and present a quotation for Salmon's writings on the distinct but closely related question on induction, and the post-Humean debate on induction in the sciences. The idea of a philosopher discussing inductive inference in science is apt to arouse grotesque images in many minds. People are likely to imagine someone earnestly attempting to explain why it is reasonable to conclude that the sun will rise tomorrow morning because it always has done so in the past. There may have been a time when primitive man anticipated the dawn with assurance based only upon the fact that he had seen dawn follow the blackness of night as long as he could remember, but this primitive state of knowledge, if it ever existed, was unquestionably prescientific. This kind of reasoning bears no resemblance to science; in fact, the crude induction exhibit...

I am certainly open to correction about any and all of the "40 snapshots" I presented as yesterday's post. I don't plan to revisit it and rework the post. This is a blog, and spontaneity even at the cost of error, is part of the charm of the medium. You have to look elsewhere for authoritative pronouncements, especially about the more ancient stretches of history covered there. All that said, here is one quick correction: I provided a photo, representing a famous piece of statuary, and said that it represented the Sargon I mentioned in snapshot 2 of my list. It didn't. That snapshot represents Sargon of Akkadian, a precursor empire to the Assyrians. Our Assyrian Sargon I may have adopted his own title from the already-famous Akkadian figure represented in that bust. There is no available image of our Sargon I. Leaving out the Akkadians (and the Sumerians who came before THEM in the same region) was a pretty radical foreshortening.

Somebody on Quora asked how brief I can make the history of the world. I interpreted "world" for this purpose not as going back to the Big Bang back as starting when civilization does. And I foreshortened that too, a little, though not much. How brief can I be in recounting the history of the last 4000 years? Well: I can leave you forty still shots from an infinitely complicated motion picture. 1. By 2025, the Assyrian Empire had been founded in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent, our story begins with a quick rise-and-fall arc for Assyria, because ... 2.  1990 BCE, approx., wthe reign of the great Sargon I in this empire. He is the charming fellow portrayed above. But all institutions are mortal, so … 3. 1730 BCE Assyria fragments, as someone described in the surviving records as a “son of a nobody” seizes the throne. 4. 1680 BCE, Hammurabi founds an empire to the south of Assyria, which becomes known as Babylonia 5. 1353 BCE The Egyptian Pharaoh Akh...

Two literature prizes were bestowed in this years' Nobel season. One was the deferred prize for last year, 2018: it went to Olga Tokarczuk,for a body of work that includes Flights and Books of Jacob.    So far so good. I hadn't heard of her but I' m not well informed about contemporary Polish fiction so that fact isn't suggestive of any limitation in her merits. What was a bit more surprising was the prize that was bestowed for 2019 itself. That one went to Peter Handke, the above pictured author of a variegated body of work including novels, plays, and screenplays. The latter category includes Wings of Desire. What the prize committee may have missed, though, were Handke's politics. He spoke at the funeral of Slobodan Milosovic, in a eulogy often seen as an apologia for far-right Serbian nationalism. Relatedly, back in the 1990s, during the Yugoslavian civil wars, Handke (an Austrian) wrote an essay on the subject that struck many as absurdly naive at ab...

George F. Will has come back onto the radar of the chattering classes, no longer as one of them, but as a sort of elder sage, a chattering fellow whose chattering has been elevated. In that capacity he seems to be interested in enunciating a "conservative sensibility" that will be able to survive the coming wreckage of the Republican Party after Trump passes from the scene one way or another. I liked this bit in a recent interview in his book tour. The interviewer said, "You refer to Barry Goldwater as an important intellectual failure, electorally but then setting the stage for Reagan." "George Will:  It would be a stretch to refer to Barry as an intellectual precursor. But, to me, Barry was an amiable--as someone described, as a 'cheerful malcontent.' But, what he wanted to do was to revive the vocabulary of wide-open spaces, Southwestern individualism;  and  the Founders. Which he did. He famously did not write but presumably read  The Con...

I mentioned the series "Fat Actress" here yesterday. I want to say something else about it now. I won't say anything of substance, but my excuse is that today is my birthday (61), so I'm being frivolous in the spirit thereof. Consider my party hat on. Mayim Bialik does some very good work playing, like Kirstie, a fictionalized version of herself. Bialik is best known nowadays for the part of Amy, in The Big Bang Theory. But that show didn't get its start until 2007, and the character of Amy makes her first appearance only in the third season (it may have been later -- I'm too lazy to look that up). In 2005, when "Fat Actress" appeared, Mayim Bialik was best known as the former child star who had done "Blossom" from 1990 to 1995. Ten years is a long time since one's last Big Thing, so Bialik had a reputation somewhat like Alley's, as someone who "used to be famous." I know nothing about Blossom , but I'm very...

I recently watched, via Showtime, a seven-episode series by Kristie Allie called FAT ACTRESS, which aired in 2005. Allie plays a fictionalized version of herself. An actress struggling both to get her weight down and to get jobs consistent with her former fame as a star in CHEERS, and as the co-star (with John Travolta no less) in the LOOK WHO'S TALKING movies. One of the aspects of the character that I presume is fictionalized is that she is thoroughly and consistently self-delusional. She has two aides constantly around her who seek to protect her from the consequences of her delusions. In one episode, our protagonist stumbles into a raid on a homosexual men's hang out. It is a parking lot to a small park near her home (and near a "bat cave")  where men meet up and engage in what the cops who raid them classify as public lewdness. She meets her ex-husband there, and he spends some time in a prison cell with her. He tries to break it to her that she was his bea...