Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Neil Sheehan ( October 27, 1936 – January 7, 2021) has died.   A giant of old-school American print journalism, Sheehan began his career in the Tokyo bureau of the UPI in 1962. He was in Japan with the US Army, and the reporting was a moonlighting gig.  When he was released from the service, the UPI took him on his payroll, and sent him to Saigon. In 1964, he returned to the US to take a job in New York, on the city desk of the Times . But that must have seemed boring to him. By 1966 (I'm skipping some career points), he was in Washington for the NYT, covering the Pentagon. It was that assignment that got him into the history books in a big way.  See below:  After Neil Sheehan’s death, secret interview reveals how he got Pentagon Papers (msn.com) Here is where the new revelation, a post-mortem disclosure of an old Sheehan interview, sheds some new light. Sheehan says in the interview that Ellsberg was very wary of letting Sheehan make any copies of the famous re...

I only recently discovered that there exists a school of thought known as radical enactivism. Since it involves a philosophical issue with which I have done a lot of wrestling, the issue of consciousness itself, I really ought to say something about it. First, though, I am going to have to figure out what it is.  Radical enactivism is associated with  Daniel Hutto of the University of Antwerp. Although there are other ways to understand it, one way to do so begins with the question that Chalmers years ago christened the hard problem of consciousness, "why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" Why, indeed? Chalmers made certain assumptions in the phrasing of this problem: for example, the idea that consciousness (or a "rich inner life") is a late evolutionary emergent. Wherever exactly it emerges in the history of life, probably after the divide between animals and plants and on the animal's side of that divide, the implication would ...

In 1928, Lewis Mumford, best known then and now for his writings on architecture and cities, penned a book review for The New Republic on a quite different subject -- on the life of Charles Darwin.  The review included the following rather over-the top praise: Darwin, the man, is one of the most loveable characters in the annals of the nineteenth century: when he is breeding pigeons or meeting with pigeon fanciers, when he is watching orchids or barnacles or experimenting, with the aid of a tender young lady, upon the emotions of an infant, he is like some great earth-god mingling with his own creations: his patience, his single-minded devotion, his tireless communion with nature, put him at the head of that great company of naturalists who have made man at home in a world so long foreign; and have increased the sympathy of human beings  with the whole lineage of organic creation. I love it. It almost makes me want to get a copy of Darwin's book on the emotions so I can learn...

  One can hardly act surprised that Mr. Outgoing is not going to be at the inauguration of his successor this year. There have been surprisingly few comments about the LAST time that happened. So it is worth being explicit. The last such snub took place in March 1869, when Andrew Johnson left town ahead of the festivities for incoming President Ulysses S. Grant.  Andrew Johnson (pictured here) and Donald Trump share a lot else for the history books, too. Each was impeached by the House during his first-and-only term in office. Each defeated the prosecutors of that impeachment in the Senate and completed his term. And now, we see that each has declined to stick around for the ceremony that would formally end that term.  This means that Bill Clinton is the only impeached and tried President who did show up for his successor's inauguration, that of George W. Bush, in January 2001. And that situation was different. Clinton was impeached in his second term in office. So he se...

A driveshaft is the roughly cylindrical doohicky of an automobile that transfers mechanical energy from the engine or transmission to the wheels. Unsurprisingly, every driveshaft obeys the laws of physics. More specifically, every driveshaft obeys what is called Hooke's law, which describes the dampening of vibrations.  Now some controversial litigation involving a driveshaft is before the US Supreme Court and it may help clarify, or further muddy, the question of what the high court has meant, in other recent cases, when it has said that a natural law is not eligible for patent. At one level, it seems obvious enough. Nobody can patent Newton's law of gravity and sue the owners of orchards if their apples fall to the ground without a proper licensing deal. But nobody has actually tried to patent Gravity. And it is not obvious whether anyone is now really trying to patent Hooke's law.  The case is AMERICAN AXLE v. NEAPCO HOLDING. American sued Neapco in the US district of ...

  Is Ivanka Trump, as Brian Leiter suggests, the "nokhshlepper" of the Trump clan, someone who attaches herself to a crowd where she isn't wanted, and perhaps in sublime ignorance of the fact that she is not wanted? I suppose cultural anthropologists (many of whom presumably care about the Yiddish vocabulary) will benefit in the years to come by watching the Trump clan and its reaction to its change in fortune, and come to an understanding of who the various labels fit. This might help us all deal with such dysfunctional clans in less debilitating ways in the future.  In the meantime.... My own most vivid memory of Ivanka is of a piece of film from some gathering of high muckamucks in which she was clearly delighted to be in the same room with such important women on the world stage as Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde. That is Lagarde to the right of Ivanka in both of the above shots. These accomplished women in the room didn't and don't seem to have been at ...

  One of my Christmas gifts this year was SHE AND ALLAN, a late-life novel by the classic fantasy-adventure writer, H. Rider Haggard, first published in 1921.  The problem (and I only confide this because I am confident that the friend who gifted this volume to me doesn't read blogs!), is that I no longer read this sort of book. There was a time in my life when I would have found it delightful. Haggard has a wonderfully vigorous way of telling a story and his imagination stands up in comparison with Tolkien's. Haggard's imagination didn't lead him to world-creation on the Tolkienesque level -- his stories were set in Africa amidst the scrambling of rival empires, and in one classic case he set a tale in Tibet -- but it did lead him to marvels. His character, Allan Quartermain, became the inspiration for Spielberg's "Indiana Jones," and Allan is of course one of the two title characters of this novel, which presumably brings Allan together with the mysterio...

 Elle recently ran a profile of a reporter ruined by love. The take-away? Don't fall in love with a source. One-time Bloomberg news reporter, Christie Smythe, who was quite the heavyweight back in the day, actually broke the story of "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli's impending arrest on a securities fraud charge. As she was covering the subsequent litigation, the subject became a source, the two became intimate, and Smythe lost everything. Her marriage, her career, ... everything. She is still so devoted (to a man whom any objective observer will recognize as a classic manipulative sociopath who simply wanted some good press) that she has had her eggs frozen, imagining that she and Martin will want to have a child together upon his eventual release from prison.  He's not going to want to know your name, Ms Smythe. I know and respect your work, I'm a colleague, and I say this with respect: you've been duped.  The story interests me more because of its connectio...