Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Moments worth keeping in mind in coming to grips with the Renaissance: 1453: Fall of Constantinople 1455: The War of the Roses breaks out in England 1485: War concludes as the Tudors take over, under King Henry VII 1492. The first of Columbus' voyages. 1494: Savonarola takes over in Florence 1498: Savonarola executed.  1504. Michelangelo completes work on his DAVID. 1510.  Hieronymous Bosch paints THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS 1513. Niccolo Machiavelli puts out THE PRINCE, a study of the means that one must use to control a city-state, expressing a devout hope for the unity of Italy against its foreign oppressors. 1530. The earliest known pictures of instruments recognizable as violins date to this time, in northern Italy.   1598. The earliest known work that could be modern standards be considered an opera is performed in this year, DAFNE, in Florence.  1605. The publication of Cervantes' masterpiece, Don Quixote. 

  It was big news back in November and December of last year. But there have been so many mass shootings since then, that this one has rather faded into the background outside of Michigan.  So, by way of reminder: on November 30, a 16 year old boy named Ethan Crumbley shot eleven people, killing four of them, within the halls of Oxford High School, in Oxford, Michigan. More from here: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3568687-oxford-shooter-parents-seek-to-have-cases-against-them-thrown-out The parents have been arrested on what seem to me quite dubious grounds. Obviously, if the parents had given him a gun and told him "it would be really great if you walked into school and started shooting" there would be criminal liability. But I will allow you to read the facts and determine how far from that is this situation.  Incidentally, this season's contestants on "America's Got Talent" include one talented vocalist who was in Oxford High on that fateful da...

  Our Masters don't want us to be able to buy and sell to each other without everything showing up in official centralized ledgers. They don't like ca sh. They don't like cryptocurrencies either, but they have learned from them. The new step in the War on Cash is the central bank digital currency (CBDC). This simulates a cryptocurrency, but of course the decentralized feature that has long been part of its appeal is gone. As James Rickards wrote recently on Zero Hedge ,   "[A] CBDC is not a new currency. It's just a new payment channel. A digital dollar is still a dollar. A digital euro is still a euro. It’s just that the currency never exists in physical form. It is always digital, and ownership is recorded on a ledger maintained by the central bank." You might well say: so what? a lot of dollar transactions are already digital in one way or another. I use a plastic card to change the digits in various databases. By swiping the card, an account that indicates...

 You other brothers can't deny.... Bill Gates to donate entire fortune to his foundation: ‘I will drop off world’s richest list’ (msn.com) Okay, pointless fun. I don't care what he does with his money, much less whether he drops off lists. But now I've got an earworm.   Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back (Official Music Video) - YouTube

  A sophisticated discussion of emergentism as a solution to the mind-body problem may be found in an article by Timothy O'Connor and Hong You Wong. It is called "The Metaphysics of Emergence" and it may be found at NOUS, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1990). Another important work on the subject, a little older, is that of Roger Sperry. "Mind-brain interaction: Mentalism, yes; dualism, no." NEUROSCIENCE Vol. 5, Issue 2 (1980).  Sperry seems to have disposed of the issue of downward causation with the simple image of a wooden wheel rolling downhill. The wheel has emergent properties, at least in a broad understanding -- it is not made up of circular parts, but it is a circular whole. What about downward causation? Reductionists might want to say that the parts create the whole, rather than the reverse. But does the whole not affect the parts? The atoms of the wheel are going downhill because the wheel is going downhill, and it is going downhill because of its holistic, circula...

 Elon Musk is now in full excuse-mongering mood.  It is not his fault that he isn't going to buy twitter, after all. It is some other fellow's fault. Maybe that fellow behind the tree. As a regular issuer of tweets, I would rather he not.  His desire is to shake up a system that seems to work well enough without him. That is a full disclosure of my interest in the matter. But here is a judgment in principle distinguishable from that: he is starting to seem rather pathetic.  Go back to planning your self-exile to Mars, flyboy. 

  As a new Justice named Jackson is getting used to her robes, and we all await October's first Monday, let us pay heed to an earlier generation's Justice Jackson.  This is from the opening statement at Nuremburg, in November 1945, of the man who represented the US on the prosecution team there, Justice Robert H. Jackson (standing, in the photo).    What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life…. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or...

In the context of our understanding of the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the October 2021 term was BIG NEWS. Just to warm up, let's quote this amendment. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.   I'd like to begin by calling your attention to those last two phrases. The people have the right peacefully to assemble, and to petition the government (which includes the judiciary) for a redress of grievances.  After this term was over, there were lots of people who wished to peacefully assemble in the proximity of Justices' residences. Their grievance was their dissatisfaction with the Dobbs case we discussed in the first of these posts. It is safe to say that they want a redress of their grievance in one manner or anot...

  None of the constitutional provisions we discuss today come from the original text. Each of the cases below concerns an amendment.  I've set the first amendment controversies aside for separate treatment in the final installment. Today, then, we discuss the right to bear arms, unreasonable search and seizure, the right of confrontation, effective assistance of counsel, and the position of the people of Puerto Rico within the United States vis-a-vis the 5th amendment, drawing on language from the 14th Yesterday, we found that on a range of matters, the Supreme Court has not been breaking down on the "3 blues versus 6 reds" pattern one might expect. Today we will discover though that, on another range of matters, it has.  Second amendment, the New York decision Bruen was 6 to 3. The usual suspects, on each side.  This is how that looks in the case reports: THOMAS, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and ALITO, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, and BA...

The title of this post ends with a parenthesis because ... this  first case of the five we will discuss today is not really a matter of statutory interpretation but an exercise of the Court's equitable powers within its area of original jurisdiction. The other four will involve federal statutes: scout's honor. We will spend more than half of what follows on the always pressing issues of criminal sentencing. But let's work up to that, and start out with a aquifier in Dixie.  An Interstate Riparian Dispute  Back in November, SCOTUS dismissed a complaint from Mississippi in its dispute with Tennessee over a groundwater aquifer.    The intriguing thing in this case is that Mississippi's claim was so outrageous one wonders what has happened to the state AG's office, or what happened within it, that could have led to the making of such a futile argument.  Defying a very broad consensus, Mississippi argued that in allowing the Memphis Light, Gas, and Water Divisi...

  Welcome. It is that time of year again: time for this blog's four-part discussion of the just-concluded US Supreme Court session.  The division of the four parts will follow the usual pattern. Today, I will focus on one outstanding case, along with some introductory observations. Tomorrow, I will discuss the Supreme Court's role as the interpreter of last resort of certain statutes, with an eye especially on the significance of partisan split (red and blue Justice) and the help or hurt that interpreters do to or for the cause of human liberty.  On Thursday, I will look at a range of constitutional questions treated this term, though I will leave the first amendment out of it. This will leave us with, for example, the second amendment gun-control case and the question of what if anything the idea of "equal protection" tells us about the treatment of Puerto Rico as in the U.S,. but not quite "of" it. Finally, on Friday, [Later ed: next week] I turn to the co...

Happy Fourth of July. I'm thinking today of something the late Jacques Barzun wrote about "revolution" as a historians' category of event, and I think I will share it with you.  Barzun defined "revolution" in a somewhat narrow way. Nowadays, if someone invents a new vacuum cleaner that can get the dust in the corners more easily than the older cleaners, he is likely to call it a revolutionary product. Even aside from marketing, you can find in dictionaries broad definitions of revolutions such as this: "far-reaching and drastic change." Thus, the late Helen Gurley Brown is both credited with and blamed for contributions to a "sexual revolution," the Vatican II council is said to have worked a "revolution" in Catholic doctrine, and the development of steam engines in the 18th century is widely said to have set off the "industrial revolution." Although each of those events fits in its own way into the broad story Barzun ...