Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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...

Some time ago, I don't know how long, I wrote in this blog about the book MORAL SKEPTICISMS by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. After a long time away from that book I returned to it recently. Here is a summary. Although the title, and the programmatic parts of the book, sound as if the plan was the emphasize the diversity of forms that moral skepticism might take, most of the book is devoted to a single argument, which may simply be resisted by moral cognitivists for different reasons. So the real debate is between moral skepticism singular and moral cognitivisms plural.  Before I get to the argument, one critical semantic point. There is a distinction, among meta-ethical philosophers, between a normative proposition and a moral proposition. Some thinkers use "normative" as a broader term than "moral" and "normative but not moral" is a sort of intermediary thing between "is" statements and "ought" statements. So if we can't get from n...

  My favorite canonical author, William Faulkner, had a phony war story to tell.  While he was alive, biographers would say that Faulkner, born in 1897, left the US for Canada in 1916 because he was put off by Wilson's neutrality policy and wanted to get into the Great War. He trained in Canada to become a pilot in the RAF and spent some time flying in France before the war ended. That was what would now be known as "stolen valor." It begins with his misdescription of when he left the US and why. The precipitating cause wasn't eagerness to fight, it was romantic heartbreak. His family (and the family of his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, prevented the two young'uns from marrying in 1918. Broken hearted, and aware of course that there was a war on, Faulkner tried to enlist. He was rejected by the US Army because he was too short. He entered Canada then, hearing that the height requirement there was one he met. He was never anywhere near the fighting. He did enlist in ...

  Regular readers of this blog may remember that I have on earlier occasion covered the very slow march through the court system of a monster of an intellectual property case, the dispute over the legality of Google's use of Java interfaces in its Android coding. But to review: years ago Oracle bought Sun, the company whose engineers had created the Java programming language, on which various APIs (application programming interfaces) have in turn been built.  The dispute is a matter of copyright, not of patents. And early on in this litigation, Google took the position that there is no copyrightable interest in APIs. The Federal Circuit held against that view, and remanded to the trial courts for consideration of whether Google use is "fair use" under copyright doctrine, or unfair and thus infringing use. The Supreme Court, in 2015, declined to hear an appeal from the Federal Circuit, so Google resigned itself to fighting that battle in the trenches of a trial.  The jury ...

 The Nobel Prize in Chemistry acknowledged a remarkable contribution in to health and medicine: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna received it for the development of a method for genome editing known as CRISPR.  CRISPR has revolutionized all the life sciences, from plant breeding to genetic therapy. Charpentier is a French microbiologist, and Doudna is an American biochemist affiliated with UC Berkeley. In 2012, they were studying the immune system of a Streptococcus bacterium. They discovered that they could use "genetic scissors" already present in the metabolism of the bacterium so that they could make precise cuts in the DNA sequences. Just as one illustration of the ramifications, consider that early this year researchers tested a cancer treatment in which the body's immune cells are CRISPR-edited to get them to hunt down and attack the body's cancer cells. The results were not such as to declare a breakthrough cure, but they have encouraged continued ...

 "I was defending myself" is probably the most common phrase spoken by anyone with a smoking gun in his hand and a dead body in the vicinity.  There is a broad (not universal, very little is universal, but quite broad) consensus that violence, even to the point of fatal violence, can in principle be justified by some version of those words: If, of course, they are supported by the evidence.  So: what is to philosophize about?  https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/self-defense-necessity-and-punishment-a-philosophical-analysis/ There is a good deal. Indeed, this is a good illustration of something I have long considered THE DEFINING FEATURE OF PHILOSOPHY. Philosophy is thinking -- about any subject whatever -- that passes the limits that social convention assigns to that about that subject. Social convention (which in turn develops from individual self-preservation instincts) tells us that we should think rigorously about the proper materials to use in the construction of a bridge...

  Karl Popper, renowned as the inventor of falsificationism in the philosophy of science, also popularized the term "the open society," of which George Soros nowadays makes a lot of use.  Early in his book THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, Popper has admiring things to say about the pre-Socratic philosophers. He identifies their views with the open society of which Periclean Athens is a paradigm. He has a particular fondness for Heraclitus.  Popper was especially fond of the idea that life is a river into which we cannot step twice. Popper takes this, along with certain other Heraclitean bon mots, as meaning that (in Popper's words now) "all matter, like fire, is a process."  This, Popper think, put philosophy off to a promising start. It is this start that was unfortunately shut down by Spartan victory and Plato's codification of that victory in his dialogues.  I don't believe this. I believe much that Popper has to say, but he is using Heraclitus as a ...