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...