A new book by Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore offers us a view of Descartes' philosophy of the material world, the hypothetical PHYSICS within his metaphysics, that is more sympathetic than many of the other recent takes on it. Here's a link to a review by John Carriero, of UCLA. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/descartes-and-the-ontology-of-everyday-life/ Carriero starts by discussing the Cartesian view of everyday objects. Since extension is the essence of matter, space and matter are one and the same. But for Descartes types of matter differentiate themselves by size. Some are very small, and here Descartes allows for such microscopic realities as may in the course of time be discovered, though he didn't accept atomism -- the idea that there is an absolutely bottom rung of the ladder of scale. Some objects, those of everyday life, are medium size, large globules, and these include the bodies from within which your soul and mine look out at the world. Some objects...
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I have no love for John Bolton. I have, to be more clear, no sympathy for him as a figure in our public life whatsoever. But if one is only going to defend the free speech and press rights of those with whom one has some sympathy, one is a two-faced jackass, not an advocate of freedom at all. The point about freedom is that it works, and coercion fails, for any worthwhile goals. Freedom of the press works largely because rats sometimes have fallings out, and because the public can often learn a good deal about the rats when they do have such a split, when some of the rats kick one of their number out of the rat nest, and when the evicted rat finds a publisher. That is a GOOD thing, not something to be regretted. Even though the process often involves the evicted rat making a good deal of money. As for the current dispute over whether the book contains dangerous national security secrets: I may believe that when I see an evicted-rat showing me the commander in chief's bo...
In another one of his proliferating head scratchers, President Trump riffed on the alleged wonderfulness of the "concept" of a choke hold, before regretfully acknowledging that the actual practice is a bad thing. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/12/21289495/trump-fox-news-chokehold-lincoln The concept of a choke hold, Trump tells us, sounds innocent and perfect. One wishes one had the opportunity to subject him to such perfection, without the presence of his secret service agents. One wishes that hypothetically, of course, because one is not an idiot. I am aware of the context. Yes, one can construe the totality of what POTUS has said about chokeholds as non-controversial. Where a police office is reasonably in fear of his life, etc. Of course the killers of George Floyd were not in fear of their lives. They were sadists. Yet acknowledging that POTUS only seems to want to say that it is not the case that every chokehold administered by a police officer on a civilian...
I remember a day on the bus on the way to school when I was in eighth grade, probably in the early spring of 1972. A non-untypical event took place that day, in a long period of my life when I was constantly being bullied, most vociferously on the bus. An asshat seated behind me poured perfume down my neck. I will refer to him hereafter simply as Asshat without article. On this day, as it happens, I remained dry-eyed and rather Stoic about the perfume thing. I don't know why. Perhaps my mind was simply somewhere else. There would have been times when I would have reacted in a way that Asshat and friends would have found amusing. But this time I just sat there. Asshat was annoyed by the non-response (which annoyance, I confess, delighted me). Since he couldn't see anything but the back of my head, he couldn't plausibly, even by his loose standards of plausibility, joyously proclaim that I was crying. So he asked the fellow sitting next to me -- whose name I have ...
Today, working under the auspices of Jack Dorsey's visage, I'll simply provide some random links on where we stand with the CDA. https://www.theverge.com/21273768/section-230-explained-internet-speech-law-definition-guide-free-moderation https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/cda-section-230-trump-congress.html https://www.vox.com/2020/5/29/21274359/trump-tweet-minneapolis-glorifying-violence https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/politicians-lobbying-facebook-twitter-google.html https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-tech/2019/08/21/tech-mounts-its-section-230-defense-471874 https://www.redstate.com/setonmotley/2020/06/02/trump%e2%80%99s-big-tech-order-the-first-step-towards-less-big-government-cronyism/ https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/30/trump-twitter-fight-silicon-valley-290759
Daniel Dennett gets credit (or, if you will, blame -- we'll come to that) for the expression "Cartesian Theatre" as a name for a flaw in many theories of the human mind. The idea behind the phrase is this: one intuitive way to think of perception is as the recreation of an outward reality within an inner space. Think of a little version of yourself watching a movie relating events that are happening outside the walls of the theatre. The movie is produced in something like real time due to sensors on the outer walls of the same building. Of course if we do think of perception that way, we are open to the question: can the little guy who is my real self be sure that the movie is accurate? Maybe an evil demon has tampered with the processes of production? The way to solve such puzzles, according to Dennett, is to abandon the idea of the Cartesian theatre altogether. Now comes Markus Gabriel, a philosopher I've been reading lately. You may remember that I menti...
Yes, Playboy magazine runs articles. On June 5, a US appeals court ruled that reporters covering the President at the White House are entitled to due process in terms of the availability of their press passes. Specifically, the court upheld a trial court decision that had blocked Trump's effort to punish the Playboy correspondent, Brian Karem. A free, private, and vigorous press, even sometimes a press that takes an adversarial posture to the powerful. has long been thought a critical deterrent to the excesses of those wielding that power. In the words of Louis Brandeis, "sunshine is the best disinfectant." This principle helps us understand both the first amendment and the due process, the procedural rightness, of this decision. Whether the dispute will go any further, and whether SCOTUS would do the sensible thing, are of course matters of weather, not of climate. The Trump administration in particular has often been accused of acting in a quite opaque manner...
The month of June 2020 (understood in a slightly extended sense to include a May 30 launch) constitutes the return of the US to space. It also constitutes a milestone in the development of privately owned space travel. Space-X (aka the Space Explorations Technologies Corp.) was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 just to make possible this month. Yes, back in the golden age of space exploration (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), NASA purchased from private contractors. Boeing, Douglas Aircraft, IBM all played a role. But NASA was in the position of General Motors. It was manufacturing a vehicle, while buying the wheels and axle from one parts manufacturer, the body from another, the engine from still another. Space-X is now General Motors. And NASA doesn't even buy the finished car. It is only a leasee. Cool beans.
... doesn't exist. It is the Big Lie. https://twitter.com/ccfaille/status/1269985796234379265 Trump regularly tweets, as if to cheer himself up, that some recent poll showed he has 96% approval rating among Republicans. Even after recent high-profile defections from the cause of trumpetry, including George F. Will, Senator Murkowski, Senator Collins, General Mattis, Ann Coulter -- Trump keeps tweeting this 96% figure. It comes from nowhere except the fantasy inside the Orange Dynast's head. It isn't a shock that he lies, but it is a kind of strange lie to tell. The number seems to have been stuck in his head for some time. He trots it out to prove that he must be doing a good job: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1252556676818968576?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1252556676818968576&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2020%2F4%2F21%2F21229411%2Ftrump-tweets-coronavirus-pandemic-msnbc You're ready for your close-up, M...
Philosophers continue to wrestle with Freudian psychoanalysis. Case in point, Rudolf Bernet, a French thinker. In 2013, Bernet wrote a book on the subject which was widely praised, but which has only just now been translated into English under the title Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and published by the Northwestern University Press, focusing on Freud on the one hand and Lacan on the other. I'm looking today at a review of the book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , which tells me that one of Bernet's purposes is to create a philosophical etymology of the idea of "drive," or as Freud would have written it "trieb," from Aristotle to the point at which Freud and later Lacan picked up on it. [And since Freud's image is all to familiar, I have provided one of Lacan above.] If I can trust the reviewer -- Daniel J. Smith of the University of Memphis -- Bernet has a Heideggerian background. This means he "...
My recent reading includes a book entitled I AM NOT A BRAIN by Markus Gabriel, a prominent German philosopher who sometimes calls himself a neo-existentialist. I mentioned Gabriel's unorthodox view of 19th century Germany idealism in a post here last week. Today I wish to add only that the title of I AM NOT A BRAIN makes transparent one of its theses: that it is impossible to reduce the mind to facts about the brain or nervous system in the Dennett manner. He also debelieves in a transcendental soul, which works somehow within the otherwise mechanical human body. He acknowledges of course that the activity of the brain is a necessary condition for the activity of the mind. But he thinks it never a sufficient condition for understanding consciousness, or self-consciousness, or the self, or freedom. So far so good. But he seems to argue for this in a roundabout and very 'continental' way that makes me suspect this is all supposed to unclog my overly burdened angl...
My favorite flavor of ice cream, and coffee, is ... French vanilla. For those of you who are uninitiated, French vanilla is somewhat caramelized and eggy in comparison to plain vanilla. This preference may have its origin in too much youthful viewing of Gilligan's Island. In one episode, Gilligan finds a wish-granting stone. The skipper is inspecting it in the photo I've pasted in. The professor is saying something skeptical. As the recent discoverer of the stone, Gilligan is supposed to have three wishes. The skipper explains this to him, because apparently the story of the "eye of the idol" is well known to old Salts. One of Gilligan's wishes is for vanilla ice cream. Mr Howell says, "you might as well make it French vanilla." MaryAnn reports finding ice cream floating in the lagoon. Gilligan dips a finger into the box and asks Mr Howell, "Does French vanilla taste kind of smooth and creamy?" Howell: "And rich and ful...
Immanuel Kant is a giant in the history of philosophy. He is remembered as the leading exponent of deontological ethics; as the inventor of a sort of transcendental idealism that breaks both with Plato's objective and Berkeley's subjective idealism; and a proponent of keeping Christianity within the realm of reason (a determination that really ticked off poor Kierkegaard, among others.) G.W.F. Hegel is another giant. He is remembered for sticking yet another modifier in front of "idealism." No objective, subjective, or transcendental -- it is Absolute Idealism that was his brand. The line from Kant to Hegel is contested terrain. The figures in between, especially Fichte and Schelling, are generally treated as exactly that, as in between figures, as transitions. Historians of 19th century German idealism debate how those intermediaries brought Kantianism to the point of becoming Hegelianism. Markus Gabriel has a different view. In his 2013 book, TRANSCENDENTAL ...
President Lyndon Johnson is thought to have said, after hearing of a critical Walter Cronkite commentary about the Vietnam War, words to this effect: "If I have lost Walter Cronkite, I have lost middle America." The precise wording differs depending on from whom you heard the story. And although Cronkite held great importance in his day, more so than any one individual CAN possess in the multipolar media world of today, the story is likely apocryphal. Still, I think as a rapt reader of Caro's books, that Johnson may have had the self-awareness necessary to have said something like that. Trump would never say, "If I have lost Ann Coulter, I have lost my hypernationalist base." Maybe he should, though. https://www.thewrap.com/ann-coulter-turns-on-disloyal-actual-retard-trump-in-twitter-rant/ I have no dog in that fight. May Coulter and Trump tear each other to pieces until neither is heard from any more. Just get me some popcorn.
There has been a good deal of talk about the "re-opening of the US economy." I have to say: I despise that expression and anything like it. The term "the economy" is a high-level and for many purposes a quite confusing expression. What is the economy, that it could be closed and re-opened, turned off and then back on by some act of political will, so flicking of a finger? "The economy" is a high-level and confusing expression. Consider this answer: the economy is what an economist studies. As opposed to what? the society, which is what a sociologist studies? the body politic, which is what a political scientist studies? Surely they are all studying the same sort of facts, but with somewhat different emphases and methods. Anyway, we have seen of late a lot of orders from a lot of different authorities dictating a lot of particular actions, prohibiting some others. We have seen no flick of a particular switch. We have seen no closing of a given...
A great "life is so unfair" story. Also, a fine peek into an incident in the history of journalism. Robert H. Jackson was a photographer working for UPI in 1963, out of its Dallas office. Sometimes History with a capital H comes to one's hometown, as it came to Jackson's in late November of that year. Jackson's press pass got him into the Dallas police station's basement around noon on November 24, when Oswald was about to be handed over to the sheriff. Those of you of a certain age surely know where I am going with this. It was Jackson who got THE PHOTO. One that would win him a Pulitzer Prize. You know the image. Oswald had just been shot, the bullet was entering his body. Oswald's face is registering pain and shock. His body is still upright but already crumbling. This photo: Jackson was not the only photographer who was there that day. The Dallas police had opened up their basement to the press. Another shutterbug there, an employee of...