Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 At Quora, someone recently asked me who was the greater influence upon Plato: Socrates or Parmenides? It is a fascinating question, to which I could only answer with some further related questions, a dash of context, and a joke.  I enjoyed it all so much, though, that I will reproduce it here.  To begin with, there is no good metric of “influence.” You can’t measure influence like inches or Celsius degrees and say X is exercising more of this unidimensional stuff than Y is. Who influenced John Dewey more: Charles Darwin [pictured] or William James? Except that in the Dewey case we have much more information. We know what Darwin’s views on a wide range of subjects were, and what James’ were, and we can work to understand how Dewey’s thought was formed by each. We don’t depend on Dewey to tell us what James said or thought! In the Plato analog, though, we do largely depend on Plato to tell us what Socrates said or thought. There are other sources who help at the edges — Ar...

  Two points today. First, a lot of the wealth of Greater China is about to experience a generational turnover. Greater China is defined for this purpose as the People's Republic, including the special administrative district of Hong Kong, AND the Republic of China, aka Taiwan. Trillions are about to change hands as a critical cohort of old guys dies off and leaves their world to their heir.  Second, IMHO, the People's Republic is not about to attack Taiwan. There is a fair amount of saber rattling right now, but the PRC sees its way to becoming a great regional hegemon and that way may be a lot clearer if it is seen as a force for order in the region.  The relevant region is just about everything south of the old Soviet Union and north of the equator, stretching from Ethiopia to Indonesia.  The People's Republic wants peace with the other China so Greater China as a single entity can become the hegemon in that vast region. A third point, subsuming each of the first...

In the world of investment, "family offices" are what it sounds like they are. They are the offices that handle the investment portfolio of particular rich families, some of which seem to hire an outsider to the family to manage the portfolio in much the same spirit as that in which they might hire a live-in maid. Sometimes running a family office is a young person's ticket into the investment industry, and he/she will get hired for bigger things by a Wall Street bank impressed by the demonstrated acumen. At other times, though, the families actually hire established bigwigs AWAY from Wall Street or the big London firms. Anyway, family offices have themselves become a "beat" for financial reporters. In that spirit, I observe that FOs have as a group taken a lot of interest in the issue of "sustainable" investing. That is, investing in companies that do business in a way that will allow us to sustain ourselves on this planet. The principal of a private...

 Verdant greens -- quiet blue lakes -- these are the common colors for screensavers.  Personally, I prefer more dramatic or complicated images.  Brown and black skies, sheer cliffs, tiny human structures juxtaposed to vast natural goings on.  THAT is a screen worth saving. 

  The latest figures on inflation turned out poorly. Yes, gasoline prices have headed down but that has been overwhelmed in the rising numbers by increases elsewhere.  We're not back to 1970s-era figures yet. But it is worth mentioning that this administration has not been honest with us about inflation. Not by a long shot. Yes, Biden is not Trump and I am willing to cut him some polemical slack for that great merit. Further, under Biden's administration there appears to be a real chance Trump will be quite deservedly indicted. More slack.  Still, this is a "normal politics" issue. And I have to say, the administration has not been straight with us.  Early on it said there was no inflation, just a transitory blip in prices. As the blips continued and increased, the Biden line become: this is all Putin's fault.  What Putin did was wage a war against a neighboring country, leading to sanctions, leading to the cut off of pipeline supplies to western Europe. That in...

 Donald Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has become the former official closest to former President Trump yet to cooperate with the Department of Justice's investigation of Trumpian behavior during the 'transition' period.  Here is a Newsweek story.  Mark Meadows Complying With DoJ Jan. 6 Subpoena 'Not Good for Trump'—Lawyer (msn.com) The phrase "not good" in that headline came from the mouth of Tristen Snell, a former assistant AG for New York state, to whom Newsweek turned for comment.   A little history: Meadows was open about his eagerness to be President Trump's chief of staff. Almost puppy dog lapping at face eagerness. In December 2018 John Kelly left that post and Meadows made his availability known. Trump went with Mick Mulvaney instead. But Meadows got his prize in March 2020 after Mulvaney left. Mulvaney left to become special US envoy to Northern Ireland. Puppy-dog Meadows resigned from his seat in Congress immediately and start...

  Sydney Shoemaker died recently. A philosopher affiliated with Cornell University, Shoemaker was an important figure in the continuing debates about personal identity. He sided with John Locke (and William James) in tying personal identity closely to memory.  He began an essay on the subject with these words, "Persons have, in memory, a special access to facts about their own past histories and their own identities, a kind of access they do not have to the histories and identities of other persons and other things."  That proposition is a step toward the broader view that such access, for most people most of the time, simply IS identity. John Locke was the first important philosopher to put forward that view of a self. The importance of Locke's advocacy of it was that it was an immanentist view. It saw identity as something quite this-worldly, and not as a transcendental soul.  By way of clarification, consider that I (a man in his early 60s) may not remember anythi...

 Suppose you were looking for the Reuters news page. You made a rather simple typo within the familiar URL. You would then end up here: https://www.reiters.com/ And that might be to your good fortune. It looks like an intriguing collection of books!

  Until her death last week, Queen Elizabeth II had been the only Queen of England in my lifetime, and I'm getting on in years.  She died at 96, so one can hardly curse the fates about her demise. She was entitled to Rest. Near the end, she was unable to leave Scotland and go to London to play her part in the transition from one Prime Minister to the next. the two PMs, outgoing and incoming, had to come to her. This was a big clue to the extent of her frailty. Still, the end came as a shock when it came.   I am an anarchist, but I salute her. She carried herself with grace through difficult times, in impossible situations, and as the Mum of an impossible family, a characterization by which I mean emphatically to include the new King.  The new King did not HAVE to call himself Charles III. Tradition allows for the adoption of a different "regnal" name. But Prince Charles went with remaining Charles even as he becomes King, and now the third King of that name....

 Five quick points: 1) I have no belief as to whether anyone within the Gibson family is racist, nor does that matter as to the following propositions; 2) The Gibsons' owned a bakery and were sensibly concerned about shoplifting-- from people of any race, 3) The Gibsons' won their defamation lawsuit against Oberlin College, which AS AN INSTITUTION had defamed them over a confrontation over an alleged shoplifting; 4) Appeals have been exhausted -- Oberlin should pay up. 5) The black Oberlin students whom the Gibsons thought were shoplifting eventually pleaded guilty to ... shoplifting.  This has become something more than the usual town-and-gown tension. 

  My thoughts are turning ever more of late to the process by which the reigning Democratic-Republican Party broke up in the 1830s, with the Jacksonian Democrats on the one and the Whigs on the other. I think I have explained in this place WHY my thoughts are turning so much to that point. But the short version is: we may be entering another Era of Good Feelings. The Democratic Party may once again have a period of dominance. I hope it is a brief period, and I hope the Whigs are more competent that the Republicans have been for a long time now.  For the curious, here are the basics:   Whig Party - Definition, Beliefs & Leaders - HISTORY The Whig Part was born in 1834.  It lost its first national election to Martin Van Buren in 1836. But it won in its second effort, electing William Henry Harrison in 1840. Harrison goes down in the history books for two pieces of trivia: (a) shortest term as president, dead after 32 days in office, and (b) half of the only grandfa...

 People who wonder about the contents of the defunct website Vote.net may never be able to see any of it. Except for the three items I highlighted last week.  Why those three? There was a stochastic element to the rescue operation, I grant you. But the three I selected might well go into a time capsule entitled "things politically conscious people were talking about in the spring of 2022." Let us go over why.  My "Science" item was not about science, in any purist sense. Nor was it about technology news, because the tech developments that provide some grounding for it are old "news" indeed. It was about the global competitive structure for one particular well-established technology. Greater China  (a phrase one uses to combine Taiwan with the PRC) dominates the world of semiconductor manufacture. Taiwan alone, a smallish island, manufactured 22.4% of chips created anywhere in 2020. The People's Republic, that huge dragon with a curved belly near Taiwan...

  Our guest blogger today is Henry Cohen, a retired legislative attorney for the Library of Congress/Congressional Research Service. This is an essay he first published in Spring 2022 issue of  THE LINCOLN FORU M BULLETIN . The above map shows Italy's political divisions in 1860. This was after the Garibaldi victories to which Cohen refers, creating the large red area, yet before the King's announcement giving the red area an ambitious name: the Kingdom of Italy.  We leave the rest to Henry. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our story begins in 1861. Giuseppi Garibaldi (1807-1882) was the personification of the Risorgimento, Italy’s nationalist liberation movement, and was the most inspirational and beloved hero of mid-19th century Europe. In 1860, with his guerrilla Redshirts, he had conquered Sicily and Naples, giving southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel II, who in 1861 established the Kingdom of Italy. But not all of Italy w...