Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens. This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived. I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work.  Sooner or later -- likely sooner -- the site will be taken down. I have a fondness for some of the work I did for it, so I will risk whatever the IP consequences might be and post some of my work here.  They fall into three categories. I wrote about health (Covid, cancer research, the health insurance industry, etc.), politics (in a narrow sense involving cam...

  The NDPR has two new reviews of book about Nietzsche up.  One concerns FN's "philosophical psychology." The book is the work of Mattei Riccardi. The review comes to us from Christopher Fowles, of the University of Oxford.  I will merely drop in this passage from Fowles: Consciousness has been the locus of much discussion regarding Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind, and not without reason. The inadequacy of conscious thought and the threat posed by the misunderstandings it engenders are central themes in Nietzsche’s mature writings. Furthermore, his remarks are perplexing. Nietzsche presents consciousness as at once a danger—error-strewn, superficial, misleading—and a nullity, of little consequence in contrast to the sub-conscious interplay of drives and affects. One might reasonably wonder if these can be reconciled without Nietzsche being guilty of some egregiously misleading overstatement. Riccardi’s picture, however, promises a solution. Nietzsche, we are told, should b...

  I won't be saying anything new here next week. This will probably be the last you'll hear from me on 'Refreshed' until August 30. So for my final pre-break post, allow me simply to say that I enjoyed the moment in the movie The Gambler (1974) when the late James Caan discusses Dostoyevsky with his students.  Caan is a 'literature' instructor. His course work in vaguely defined, so he can discuss whatever books the screenwriters think suitable for that point in the plot of his extracurricular life.  The plot of this movie is very loosely drawn from the Dostoyevsky novel of the same name (where the protagonist is a private tutor).  In the movie, Caan is discussing another work of Dostoyevsky's, Notes from the Underground , and especially the passage involving the truism that 2 + 2 = 4. The protagonist rails against conformity, and reason itself, and says that he will assert his right to count 2 and 2 together as 5. It is absurd. Dostoyevsky, knows it, Caan...

"The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means."  Salman Rushdie, from SATANIC VERSES. Pull through, Mr Rushdie, please. And write a few more pithy and devastating lines like that. I'm old enough to remember that novel and the fuss over it. Rushdie is on the side of the angels. His attacker is just another demon. One of a large interchangeable lot.  The above image is of how the state sponsored newspaper in Iran is covering the story of the attack on Rushdie. Stay classy, San Diego.  

 Here is an image. That is a triptych oil painting by Hieronymus Bosch. The "canvas" is oak. This has been in the Prado, in Madrid, since 1939. There is painting on the back of both the left and right panels that works like a Mad Magazine fold-in gag. One is supposed to see the image only when the left and right panels are folded together to hide the central panel.  But I'll stick to the front (or inside) of the painting. It is extraordinary.  On the left panel we see the Garden of Eden. Someone (an angelic visitor? God Himself?) is presenting Eve to Adam.  God (we will presume) is holding Eve's wrist. The gesture looks a bit as if He is taking her pulse, to assure Himself that the operation with the rib actually worked.  One interpreter, Wilhelm Fraenger describes this detail in the painting as suggesting that God is "enjoying the pulsation of the living blood." This may be taken as an anticipation of process theology, the sort of 20th century theology asso...

Yes, I know midterm elections as supposed to go against the party with the White House. Sometimes by a large margin, at other times not.  But I do believe that we are looking at an exception this year, especially in the Senate. There won't be any "red wave" in the House, either. Perhaps a marginal improvement in the GOP's position in the House, but the size of its will be a disappointment. My guess? If Pelosi is no longer Speaker a year from now it will be because she has decided to step aside in favor of a younger-generation Democrat, not because any Republican holds the post. As to the U.S. Senate -- I'm guessing the Democrats win a minimum of two seats, enough to make Manchin and Sinema figures of lessened importance. The voters of deep-red Kansas, God bless them, have revealed the depth of popular revulsion at the overreach of the U.S. Supreme Court as now constituted, and by association revulsion at Mitch McConnell and the shenanigans by which SCOTUS has reac...

  The screenplay of a recent Amazon release, "Being the Ricardos," features a brief mention of the unfortunate Wally Pipp, discussed yesterday. Desi and Lucille are speaking.  At this point in the plot, Lucille has continued to work within the movie studio system looking for her big break. The decision to try working within the maw of the new technology, television, as an alternative route to stardom is still ahead of them.  Lucille is frustrated because she has been stuck getting bit parts -- just a couple of words beyond being an extra. For example, in one Astaire-and-Rogers movie she played an unnamed hairdresser, seen fixing up Ginger's hair backstage. She had one dispensable line.  To the point: in a key scene in Being the Ricardos Desi and Lucille are speaking. She is excited. A famous actress has taken ill, and will have to back out of a leading role in a big studio project. She thinks she is going to get the part.  So she tells Desi this, but she starts...

  The name "Wally Pipp" used to be famous among baseball fans. It was famous for decades. It became a coded way of saying "never call in sick!" Pipp was the first baseman for the New York Yankees for a decade, 1915 to 1925. That's his picture above. Pipp lost his job in early June of the latter year, when he complained of a headache. The manager took him out of the line up, and put in a bench warmer to play first base for the day.  That proved a disaster for Pipp and a big break for the erstwhile bench warmer: Lou Gehrig. "Uh, Mr. Pipp, does it kinda make you wish he would get a terrible disease that needs a new name?"   Boo, Hiss. I'm evil. I had actually planned to write something about the Renaissance again today and to explain what I see as the historic/aesthetic significance of the Bosch painting I have mentioned.   But I'll leave further explication for next week. In the meantime, whatever your job is dear reader: Don't Call in Sick! 

 Last week I offered a post that was a simple timeline of some of the events associated with the Renaissance, that "rebirth" of classical culture beginning in northern Italy that soon spread both west and north. I will expand a bit on the subject here. As a matter of periodization:  the term "Renaissance" is conventionally associated with the second half of the fifteenth and the whole of the sixteenth century. I think it's fair to stretch into the seventeenth just a bit to take in Cervantes' great novel, as I did in the timeline. The term first appears in the middle of the 16th century, in the Italian form "renascita" (rebirth) in a book by Giogio Vasari, LIVES OF THE ARTISTS. "Renaissance" is a Francophone reworking of Vasari's term, coming much later. The period known as the Enlightenment, which saw itself as a successor to the Renaissance, may be said to have begun about 30 years after the publication of DON QUIXOTE, with the publi...

  SLATE did a neat piece lately on the idea of schizophrenia. To start from the beginning, the general definition of schizophrenia is a mental condition that splits the sufferer from reality -- delusions, sometimes hallucinations, paranoid ideations, and other such opacities between mind and world may be involved.  The diagnosis has been around for close to six score years.  Does that sound vague? Well -- it should.  The vagueness is worsened by the popular use of "schizophrenic" to refer to split or multiple personalities in the same body. That idea is NEVER what professional psychologists or psychiatrists mean by the word.  The SLATE article goes further and suggests that the word "schizophrenia" does not in fact name any disease entity and is about to be abandoned by the pros.  We shall see. 

  It is a question that may not have occupied much of the brain energy of those of you who follow my humble blog, EVEN those of you who are concerned about and follow with some care issues about carbon emissions and climate change.  How much carbon is emitted by all those commercial vessels in the ocean. Vessels travelling across the Pacific from, say, Shanghai, China to Long Beach, California, packed with consumer goods, automobiles, and so forth. Aren't they driven forward with diesel fuel?  Are efforts underway to decarbonize ocean shipping? If so: how have they fared?  I have looked into this in more depth that I care to expound upon just now. All I will say is: 1) Yes, such efforts are underway, 2) They may have made a modest contributions to the supply chain problems now being blamed on the Covid epidemic, but 3) the market is readjusting, and green shipping may be an industry-defining reality a lot sooner than green commercial transport on land.