Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year ending in business/financial news. This year, the answer "Covid-19 and its Consequences" must dominate, as completely as the Wall Street centered financial crisis dominated 2008. Breaking that down by month as usual, I've given Covid-related stories to four of the twelve. That still rather understates its significance, but blame that on the ease with which I am bored. And I could have called my December entry Coronavirus (5), but chose to go with something more specific for that one.  Let's start with those innocent days of January, when few people very far from Wuhan had any clue what was coming. Instead, there was a lot of talk about pipelines that month.  January Pipelines.   The TurkStream pipeline illustrates the continued viability of fossil fuels. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-russia-pipeline/turkey-russia-launch-turkstream-pipeline-carrying-gas-to-europe-idUSKBN1Z71WP   ...

  Years ago I offered on this blog a close reading of the lyrics of a classic Christmas song. Because I feel lazy, I will just paste that close reading here and perhaps do some minor tinkering on it. ------------------------------------------------------- The news it came out in the First World War The bloody Red Baron was flying once more The Allied Command ignored all of its men And called on Snoopy to do it again The Allied Co mmand has a rather low opinion of its own men. Snoopy's flying-ace fantasy on top of his doghouse was firmly established in the pop-cultural consciousness well before The Royal Guardsmen did this in 1967. But Snoopy always seemed to lose his imagined battles with the Red Baron. He'd go down in flames, shouting "Curse you!" That was the running gag. So how had the Allied Command developed its confidence in his ability to do "it again" -- if "it" means anything they should want done?  Apparently, they were confident in his a...

Recently, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who maintains a wonderful blog, posted her thoughts about "infinity," its necessity as a mathematicians' tool, on the one hand, but its unreality from the point of view of the science of physics, on the other. Her point is that a physicist only regards something as real if it is necessary in order to explain an observation. Infinity, she says, will never fill that bill.   She also went a bit into the mathematics of infinity, and the fact that not all infinities are the same. The real numbers are a different sort of infinity from the integers. I used the co mment section under her blog post to ask a question that has long been on my mind.  I remember when I was a kid, many decades ago, some of us nerdy types excitedly read "One, Two, Three, Infinity" by George Gamow. Gamow covered some of the same territory you just did although I'm guessing progress has been made in the last half century or so. If I recall corr...

 I am at most a casual movie viewer, and extremely casual about following celebrity news. So I didn't know, until my social media news feeds started telling me, that there was a new being in the world calling himself Elliot Page, or why that was extraordinary. Apparently, Elliot Page is the new chosen identity of a Hollywood actor who won the Austin Film Critics' Award for "Best Actress of the Year" in 2006 and 2007 for Hard Candy and Juno . I had to do an absurd amount of work to find that out, because there seems to be a rule in the mainstream media against saying things like "Elliot Page, pre-transition, was known as Ellen Page."  I don't think that rules against stating history (quite recent history too) accurately are sensible ideas. Even Howard Cosell must have said a time or two, "Mohammed Ali, the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay, won his appeal today," or similar sentences.  Yes, I've watched more boxing than I have movies. 

Yet again with Herbert Spencer. My comment on him today is that a chapter on his work in a recent book by Robert Bannister makes the whole arc of Spencer's work and his life seem tragic. Spencer's big picture was that the world is Matter in Motion There is a Mystery to this -- Spencer in full Victorian manner bowed toward the Mystery of why there is any matter in motion at all, but then he showed Mystery the door again as outside the purview of science or of his sort of philosophy, the sort that seeks to remain in close touch with science. Having bowed God out the door, he stuck with Matter in Motion. Moreover, what we can say about this world is that progress always proceeds from homogeneity to heterogeneity. The increasingly heterogeneous world, or for any given chunk of the world the increasing heterogeneity of THAT, requires ever more complicated relations among the parts, but change always works toward new equilibriums, accommodating these complications.  Spencer thought h...

  I have said very little on this blog -- if anything -- about the post-election controversies in the US which consist largely of Trump and a shrinking group of supporters arguing that they haven't really lost because.... I have said little about it because it was boring, and because I had confidence the process would run its course through the electoral college vote. Anything I said during that period between the two votes would so quickly become dated there'd be no point to having said it.    Now I'll say this: Trump's arguments were always very weak, even ludicrously so. I actually heard an apparently serious Trump supporter make this point: Biden got a significantly lower vote count in New York State than Hillary Clinton did. This proves he was (except when cheating) a weaker candidate. This proves that all the states that he won and Clinton lost, must not really have been won fairly at all. Seriously. That’s not only a real argument, it seems to be a fair s...

  My view of Spencer as a philosopher has largely been shaped by William James' comments on Spencer,which were consistently negative. This negativity was later confirmed as I came to understand the criticisms of Spencer offered by G.E. Moore and Emile Durkheim.  Nonetheless, Murray Rothbard has said good things about Spencer, and there has been a bit of a Spencer revival in recent years, The online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that Spencer has been the victim of "interpretive caricatures," and that it is fortunate he is enjoying some "restoring and repairing" scholarship.  So: I decided to go back to the source. In Spencer' FIRST PRINCIPLES (1862), he wrote as follows about economic markets: The production and distribution of a commodity imply a certain aggregate of forces causing special kinds and amounts of motion. The price of this commodity is the measure of a certain other aggregate of forces expended in other kinds and amounts of motion by ...

  Puzzling about a matter of translation. Lucretius, the great Latin poet, wrote ON THE NATURE OF THINGS some time around 58 BC, giving us a book-length rendering of the views of the Greek atomists.  The matter of translation I have in mind is Lucretius' decision to refer to "atoms" as "primordia." That word in turn gets translated into English as "first beginnings." This is odd. "Atom," as even a flunk-out of languages like Christopher Faille knows, means "indivisible." Isn't there some word in Latin that would be a better translation for that then "first beginnings"? Oh, I don't know (he looks up the etymology of the English word "indivisible")  -- indivisibilus?  Well, "primordia" has only four syllables and "indivisibilis" has six. That may have made it easier to use in verse -- easier to rhyme, and to work into the meter as necessary.  A further investigation of that would take wa...

  In the study of autism, a meta-theory called the “theory of mind” refers to a “theory” that the typical development of the nervous system enables. This development is said to prompt an intuitive understanding that other people have minds and points of view different from one's own. This hard-wired neurological "theory" typically develops around the time a child is four years old. Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith are credited with developing the idea, the meta-theory of the theory of minds, based on a story they told children that involved Sally and Anne. Sally put a ball into a basket and went out for a walk. While she was gone, mean ole Anne took the ball out of the basket and put it into a box. When Sally came back, she wanted to play with the ball. Where, the children are asked, will Sally look for the ball? Neurotypical children figured out that Sally would look in the basket [picture above!] and be disappointed. They had a “theory of mind.” They were looking at this...

 Someone at Quora asked, "Who Would Dante Alighieri Find in Hell if He Could Write the Divine Comedy Nowadays?"  I liked my answer to that, so I'll give it again here, with some slight stylistic improvements. It is probably an appropriate subject for the long Thanksgiving weekend. Let us Americans give thanks for our recent rescue from autocracy.   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Napoleon Bonaparte would definitely be in one of the lower circles. Perhaps in the lowest. After all: much of Dante’s work is motivated by the conviction that the Roman Empire (which he saw as continuous with the Holy Roman Empire of his own time) has a special part in salvation history, and thus is the ordained government of this world. Defiance of the Emperor was treason against God. This is why Brutus and Judas are together at the very center of hell, being forever chewed by the teeth of Satan. Brutus, as much as Judas though ...

  This quote has been bugging me of late. I remembered it vividly but wanted to be able to quote the exact words. Yet I couldn't find it -- my memory located it in the wrong chapter. Now I'll keep it safe here. About the Bible, James says, the big question is not one that history or archeology by themselves can untangle for us, because it is pragmatic: "[O]f what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming into existence so defined [by the historians and archeologists] be to us as a guide to life and a revelation? To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our existential judgment we might indeed deduce another spiritual judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value were to affirm that any book, to p...

I had a strange dream recently, in which I was driving through Nebraska, or at least I thought I was. I wasn't finding the place I was supposed to get to, so I stopped and asked for help. Turns out I wasn't really in Nebraska. I was in Kansas. I woke up thinking how nice everyone was being to me. They must understand what an easy mistake it is to make. A simple dream (as mine go) but a strange one. You aren't supposed to find that the dreamscape in which you are lost IS Kansas.   

One of Plato's dialogs has Socrates arguing moral and related issues with Protagoras, portrayed here as the leader of the Sophists.  Although as usual Socrates is the vehicle for Plato's presentation of what are almost certainly Plato's own views, Protagoras has some really striking lines. I like to think of at least one of these lines as a bit of the historical Protagoras, embedded here like the DNA of a dinosaur within a mosquito within amber. "The Athenians are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all." That speaks to the greatness of Periclean Athens, when it attracted the best minds from all around the Hellenic world, an extensive world stretching from the coast of Asia Minor to Sicily. Athens would, in that sense "accept advice from anyone. A closed city in in danger of becoming "no city at all." That brief passage speaks to the idea of an Ope...

Third Bob, as he is known, recalls a family story about his father, known to familiars all his life as Bobby, and about his grandfather, known more formally (from childhood) only as Robert. And, of course, about Amma.  The story begins with this: The second Roosevelt had just been inaugurated when Amma went into labor and grandpa Bob rushed her to the hospital.  Skip forward three days: she was ready to leave, with her new baby, but President Roosevelt had closed all the banks, had called a 'bank holiday.' This meant that the hospital refused to accept a check - they had no idea how long it would be before the paper would do them any good. They were demanding cash. It is amazing (one would always say, hearing the story) that people were so well behaved. Wouldn't there be anger in the halls, people demanding their checks be accepted? rushing for the exits if not? Were there a lot of fearsome looking Pinkerton men about?  Not a lot of people had a lot of cash ready to hand ...

  This illustration has nothing to do with the following text. I was playing with the "insert image" tool here -- the blogger folks have changed their format a bit. And that is the image I came up with. What the heck. I'll keep it.  I loved Borat's first "movie film," but I think I have had my fill of Borat and will probably skip this one.  Also, given the mess that one can charitably call my country's politics, and what I've heard of the Giuliani scene, it would probably cut too close to the bone this time. So I'll give him a "thanks, but no."  It is funny how Giuliani is talking tough about a lawsuit, though. That's not going to happen. Not in the USA, which can still boast a system that resists the attempts the efforts of the publicly powerful to silence their critics through defamation suits. I haven't heard that even the three Trumpets of the Supreme Court have any interest in erasing the line of precedent that began with ...

We're not going to "kill the earth." We may, by virtue of an impact on earth, kill each other, but sentimental save-the-earth talk is not to the point at all.  And actually, the human race is adaptable, so ongoing climate changes (one no longer needs to say 'coming climate changes') won't be quite so disastrous as advertised for us either.  We have to allow ourselves to adjust by abandoning this notion that it is either a fixed equilibrium or extinction. Heck, the Rose family (see yesterday's item) made an adjustment.  Here is something germane: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/?fbclid=IwAR0Eild3WJDSYbL1NjgSjMsmenRUf6wbPy9HQE7DEkIrfLnlxHbvzp0g9Xc

I've finally been watching episodes of Schitt's Creek in recent days. This is amazing -- it's been a "thing" for six years, it includes two of my favorite comedians, but only now am I catching up with it.  Well ... better late than never, and this gives me something for an election day post that has nothing to do with the election, which is a plus.  The two great comedians at the heart of the show are: Catherine O'Hara as Moira Rose, and Eugene Levy -- pictured here -- as her husband, Johnny Rose. They were both in the ensemble that put together SCTV in the old days, a sketch comedy show of utter brilliance. I remember especially O'Hara's  Margaret Meehan, a quiz show contestant who would ALWAYS hit the buzzer before the question was complete, answering the fragment she had heard and losing the points to the embarrassment of her teammates.  Eugene Levy was the game show contestant in that same bit, named "Alex Trebel." (Hmmm -- wonder if the ...

  WARNING: This is more than 3600 words long. TL;DR types move along.  For the remainder: please notice two points about the above title. The first is the word “one.” This is not to be a definitive case against Trump’s continuation as the US President. Indeed, there are important subjects under that heading that I will not mention at all. Nor will it consider, or even name, any possible other President. This will be one focused case, looking at the issue of Trump’s deliberate concentration of personal, familial, and irresponsible power. The second point to note at the outset is the word “against.”  I don’t plan to say anything positive about anyone, either Trump or any of his political adversaries. This is a case against; so anyone with an allergy to negativity may well wish to go elsewhere.  There are a lot of constraints that do and should limit the power of a US president. Some of these constraints are constitutional, some traditional, some practical. I will n...