Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Reading through the morning-after coverage of the big primary night from two weeks ago (North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Idaho, Oregon) I was looking for some guidance on where we are headed in this mid-term year, and I was struck by the elusiveness of social reality. Our own inner reality, our human nature, dictates that we look for a central theme in the outer reality, specifically in a range of elections across the country. We want a single frame for the night. Lots of important stuff was going on, it seemed all to have SOMETHING to tell us about where all the midterm election jockeying stands, but it refused to gel.  Reporters and pundits seemed to have wanted to write either "Trump still has a firm grip on the GOP" or maybe "Trump no lo nger has a firm grip on the GOP." Instead, they had to acknowledge that he didn't get his way in Idaho or a southwestern corner of North Carolina, but that he had gotten his way in a statewide party primary in NC and in anoth...

  A series of Warren Court decisions, which were at the time very controversial but which have come since to seem anodyne, created a "one person, one vote" rule for legislative districting.  The U.S. Senate was the single great exception to this rule, created by Constitutional language specific enough to avoid being interpreted away. Its "districts" are state lines and of course they can't be re-worked with each census.  But as for House districts, or state legislative districts, including that of the 'upper chamber' of a state bicameral house, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Warren era mandated one person, one vote. This is why every census year since then has been a starting line for a scramble to re-write district lines to comply with this rule and allow for the demographic changes of the preceding ten years. Key decisions in this line? Baker v. Carr (1962) Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) Reynolds v. Sims (1964). Of course there have been epicycles to work o...

  In a syndicated cartoon recently, two teen aged characters were eating pizza on a high diving board as a sprinkling came down from the sky.  One character says to the other that it is too bad they have outgrown random spontaneity. The other says, "dude, we're literally eating pizza on a high dive in the rain." And gets this morose response: "Yes, but we're using napkins."  Was that quoting something? The phrase "pizza on a high dive in the rain" is not merely a  vivid image, it is metrically regular.  PIZ - za on a HIGH dive in the RAIN. It sounds like it might have been used in someone's song as a metaphor for, yes, a spontaneous live-for-the-moment life.    Either the cartoonist had a moment of genius, or he borrowed from a source that escapes me now.  MSN

  Ah, the mind-body problem. As regular readers of this blog may know, it has kept my mind twirling for decades.  Sometimes I'm a dualist interactionist, something like Descartes but with aspirations to empiricism.  Sometimes I'm an emergentist, seeing mind as something on an ontological level higher than mindless life, as life is on a higher level than lifeless chemistry.  Sometimes, I'm a vitalist, seeing life -- even insect life -- as inherently mindful.   Sometimes I believe in the earthsoul of which we are all expressions. Relatedly: sometimes, I am a panpsychic, finding mindfulness everywhere, not merely in life, even in the rocks. These four (or five) views have seemed very different from each other, and I haven't been able to reconcile them to my own satisfaction.  Now I believe I have achieved a reflective equilibrium. Happy day. I'm an emergentist, and specifically one who embraces downward causation and a planetary mereology.  Huh? Well...

  I think it is great when the Trumpeting wackos have a falling out. With any luck, the whole terrible 'movement' is going the way of the doodoo.  Alex Jones, the infamous detector and denouncer of crisis actors, is at odds with QAnon.  It is one of those "I hope ya both lose" moments, boxing fans.  Jones' deal is: there are no real school shootings in America. They are all fake. How can we know? Because when Jones reviews the footage after such events, he always finds that some of the people in one of them look like some of the people in another. So it is all a matter of "crisis actors" trucked from one place to another in the hire of a conspiracy to create a grassroots demand for gun control. QAnon looks at a conspiracy theory like that and says, "you're a piker, boy. Let me show you how it's done." QAnon seems to have begun as "Pizzagate," a rather modest theory (itself endorsed by Alex Jones IIRC) that a specific pizza pla...

  I'm going to try to make some connections. Parmenides to Zeno to Democritus to Newton and Leibniz.  Parmenides: everything is one. And the One that is all is unchanging. Division, motion, change, are impossible. Accordingly, they must be illusions.  Why did Parmenides come to these conclusions?  Generally, he had a simple line of thought that puns on negative words such as "nothing." If there is nothing between A and B, then A and B must be in the same place. Thus, if they are some distance from each other, then they must actually be one. If you don't get that, don't worry about it.  Zeno came up with a cleverer way of arguing for Parmenidean monism. He argued that the common-sense notions of the world we live in are rife with paradox. In order to get rid of paradox, we must run to the the shelter of the Parmenidean One. I've written of such things before, usually in comedic form.  https://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-two-zenos.html The only point ...

  The word "incompatibilism" has a distinctive meaning to many students of, and scholars in ,philosophy.  It arises in debates about determinism and moral responsibility.   The key question, as I understand the debate, is this: is the notion of strict behavioral determinism consistent with our ordinary and strongly held intuitions about moral responsibility?  There are some who say "no, the two are not compatible, and the moral intuitions are worth keeping: fortunately we CAN keep them, because strict behavioral determinism is wrong."  There are others who say, "no, the two are not compatible -- and strict behavioral determinism is right, so we'll have to say goodbye to the moral intuitions and learn to live without them." Both of those are incompatibilists, however much they quarrel with one another.    There are still others who say, "Yes, strict determinisms is compatible with those intuitions,  so it need not at all disturb us to recogniz...

The "Why I Was Not Complicit" genre, with a full shelf of books from the Trump administration by now all saying "I was different from the rest of them -- I was the adult in the room" got a little more crowded in recent days with Mike Esper's offering. Esper was Trump's Secretary of Defense beginning in July 2019, when his predecessor, Jim Mattis, resigned. Let us just name the genre WIWNC, for short. (Maybe pronounce it win-see.)   I'm not sure whether Mattis has himself written a book in the WIWNC style. But he has been the subject of one. An admiring book by Guy Snodgrass (apparently his real name) appeared soon after Mattis' resignation, called   Holding the Line. Anyway, today's subject is the Esper book. It offers a lot of behind-the-curtain gossip about the administration.  With regard to the protestors who were in the streets after George Floyd was murdered, Esper writes that Trump wondered why the military couldn't just shoot them.  ...

  I will say nothing just now about Alito's draft opinion in the Mississippi abortion case, DOBBS v. JACKSON.  I will speak to the question of the leak itself. These things very rarely happen. I remember there was something of a hubbub after a book by Bob Woodward came out in the late 1970s called THE BRETHREN, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the Supreme Court. But Woodward didn't drop a lot of serious "tea" in that book, and he had nothing on forthcoming matters, much less first drafts of lengthy controversial opinions. By the way, a fellow named Scott Armstrong secured himself a footnote in publishing history by serving as Woodward's co-author there. Woodward was done with Bernstein yet not yet willing to fly solo. But it WAS his book.  The closest analogy I can think of, though, involves the Dred Scott case. A new President, James Buchanan, was inaugurated on March 4, 1857. His address made reference to the case then before the court and it certainly seeme...

One would think (a priori) that Immanuel Kant would have had a lot to say about Baruch Spinoza. After all, Spinoza was a great exhibit A for the sort of dogmatic rationalism whence Kant thought he had been saved, awakened, by his reading of Hume.  Spinoza was why rationalism had to go "critical" in order to be worth the attention of people who likewise have awakened from such slumber.  But one finds that Spinoza is barely ever mentioned in Kantian texts at all. When Spinoza IS mentioned, it is in the philosophy-of-religion context. And therein lies a tale. Kant despised Spinoza's God concept. To identify God as nature is to make of God (Kant said) a non-being, a no-thing. In German, an Unding. Further, Kant seems to have believed that Spinoza was clear on this point: he was an atheist who obscured the subject and denied his atheism by his tricky redefinition of terms.  This matters to Kant in part because Kant doesn't believe atheists as such can be morally good, yet ...

 A few days ago I was watching television and a "Special Report" logo filled the screen. Then a somber looking anchorman appeared. My heart stopped. I thought, "this is it. Putin has nuked Ukraine. NATO is planning a responsive strike." Uuuuh, no. Nothing apocalyptic. The special report was a news flash that the Vice President has a disease for which she has been vaccinated (with boosters). Given her lack of underlying problems, the result will likely not be at all severe for her. The geniuses at Walter Reed were able to get an obese old man through a nastier case of it when the science was much less advanced.  But back to the "don't scare me" point.  I remember the days when cutting in for a Special Report used to mean something. Please don't do that again.

  Roger Penrose, a great astrophysicist, did some moonlighting in the worlds of neurology and neuropsychology in the late 1980s, and he developed a theory a quantum theory of consciousness. The idea behind it was (and is, in later more-developed forms) that microtubules, particularly those in neurons, are small enough so that quantum effects become pertinent in understanding their operations. Penrose contended that quantum physics allows for deterministic but non-algorithmic processes, and that these may be harnessed by the operations of the brain, resulting in consciousness. To put the idea crudely, using an old image, the microtubule is the closed box inside which a “cat” is both dead and alive. To refine that a bit: Penrose tells us that there must be a border zone where quantum effects still exist but are becoming of less salience as scales increase toward those of the world of Newtonian physics, the world of what Bertrand Russell once called "medium sized dry goods." The...

  I don't wanna go all Seinfeld on you, but I'm going to talk a bit about Superman. Or rather, the history of his portrayal (but since he is a fictional character, aren't they the same discussion?). With the old Christopher Reeve movies Hollywood got it right. Reeve played Clark Kent and Superman differently. He did't go from one to the other simply by changing clothes and putting his glasses on or taking them off. Posture, manner of speech, even facial expressions differentiated the Man of Steel from the mild-mannered reporter.  It made perfect sense that Lois would find it difficult to connect the dots.  Reeve was an actor of considerable skill, and he could play the tricky part of an alien playing a part as a normal human, while making THAT alien an actor of considerable skill too.  Since then Supermans have been played, on the big screen and small, essentially as "action heroes." As Arnold S. without the accent. Ah for the good old days.