Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At Quora recently I found this question: Is Nietzsche's will to power a historical precursor to William James' pragmatism? I answered: You probably have in mind James “will to believe” here, rather than pragmatism more generally. If so, the first necessary response is that the two speculations, about will to power and will to believe, were underway at about the same time, so neither can logically be said to be a precursor to the other. They may mirror one another, because they come from analogous circumstances. Nietzsche was trying to survive a bout with Schopenhauerian pessimism by getting THROUGH it and coming out the other side. James was trying to survive a bout with his own personalized pessimism, what he called the “religion of the sick soul,” also by passing through it and finding what he could on the other side. So we get on the one hand Nietzsche’s will to power, where power (German “macht”) means something like self-actualization. And we get on the other hand James’ w...

  Aeon published a story recently about American pragmatism's influence and evolution in India. The story, written by Scott Stroud, condensing Stroud's recent book on the theme, centers on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man who had returned to India after studying philosophy under John Dewey at Columbia in the 'teens of the 20th century.  Ambedkar is a fascinating figure -- of the "untouchable" or Dalit caste, he became one of the framers of the new Republic of India's constitution in the 1940s. That is him (standing and dressed in black) in the photo, when he formally presented the final draft of the new constitution to the president of the Constituent Assembly.  He was already then a member of the first cabinet upon Independence, Nehru's cabinet. Ambedkar's title was Law Minister.  What had he learnt from Dewey? Certainly one great theme of Dewey's writings, around the time that he would have been teaching young Bhimrao, was his unhappiness with the ...

  I recently encountered, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, a review of a book called THE OPEN FUTURE. It argues for a proposition that, I believe, is broadly correct. Time is real and creative. The future is something that does not yet exist.  In fact, as regular readers of this blog may remember, I believe in a "growing block" theory of reality-in-time. The past and present are both real. The present is the forward surface of a growing block, and the future is everything that the block has NOT yet reached. The book in question is written by a fellow named Patrick Todd and it costs $80 (which discourages me from purchase.)  The reviewer, Mitch Green, is a professor at the University of Connecticut. I have a great deal of fondness for that institution: the flagship public university of one of the three states in which I have resided throughout all of my life, and the one in which I have spent more of it even than in NY or Massachusetts. So ... yeah Huskies! Green descr...

  So let us turn back to the conflict between Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein, as I outlined it on Tuesday. Do I have a preference?  Other than Naomi Campbell of course (talking about the beauty myth!).   It is hard to say.  Just weeks ago, when I still saw myself as an anarcho-capitalist, I would not have mentioned this, except as a sample of how the control-freaks of the world might fall out with each other to the incidental benefit of liberty. Nowadays I cannot give such a wise assed answer. So ... what CAN I say. As I indicated Tuesday, I approve of the fact that Wolf, though surely left of center in American political concerns herself, goes off the reservation.  She thinks for herself. With regard to Klein, I know of no similar self-assertiveness at the expense of orthodoxy.  I'd love to see it.  On the other hand, my relatively slight sampling of both authors indicates to me that Klein is a scholar, careful about sourcing. Wolf, though, is an af...

  I have absolutely nothing to say about this today.  Except that it is a fascinating idea for a book.  It will be published this December and is available for pre-order now.  The Concept of Property in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel: Freedom, Right, and Recognition by Jacob Blumenfeld, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble® (barnesandnoble.com)   The author, Jacob Blumenfeld, has also written ALL THINGS ARE NOTHING TO ME, a book on the philosophy of egoist Max Stirner. (The above image is of Fichte. My selection is arbitrary.)     

 It appears that Naomi Klein, a Toronto based feminist intellectual who wrote most famously THE SHOCK DOCTRINE (2007), has issues with Naomi Wolf, a San Francisco based feminist intellectual who wrote most famously THE BEAUTY MYTH (1990). Apart from the name, both women are of the same generation and in many respects similar appearance.  In THE BEAUTY MYTH Wolf criticizes the cosmetics and fashion industries especially as the forward troops in keeping women embarrassed and exploitable. This book was instantly and emphatically praised by various feminist Big Names, like Germaine Greer and Betty Freidan.  Klein says she is frequently confused with Wolf. Their world does not contain room, it appears, for two Naomis.  She doesn't like being confused with Wolf because she, Klein, is a more reliable leftist whereas Wolf goes off that reservation too often for Klein's comfort.    The annoyance has become much more than that, as the phrase "the green New Deal"...

  This is turning into a fascinating year for litigation.  Of course there is the former President and his four indictments, as well as his continued civil troubles.  The civil troubles feature an old lawsuit about a videophone he was hawking back in the day -- a marketing scheme that was mostly about selling the right to sell the phones, or selling the right to sell the right, etc, in classic pyramid fashion.  That aside, the year  2023 has seen the trial and conviction of Alex Murdaugh for the murder of his wife and son.  The Telles/German case is still hanging fire.   Dominion's lawsuit against Fox News would really have enlivened the year. As it happened, the willingness of the Fox empire to pay three quarters of a billion dollars to avoid a trial was itself remarkable and almost as much fun. Another great upcoming trial expected this year will be that of Sam Bankman-Fried, one time impresario of the great cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The cas...

  Mario de Caro and Matteo Grasso together wrote "Three Views of Downward Causation" for publication  in the 2017 anthology,  "P hilosophical and scientific perspectives on downward causation." Nothing much to do with the  Koestler book, but I like that cover image.       The issue of "downward causation" is one that arises in the philosophy  of mind, among those who believe that mind and body, even mind and brain, are different facts in the world, neither reducible to the other. The issue of downward causation is: how if at all can mental events  cause physical events? How does my phenomenal desire that my arm move  lead to my arm moving?       De Caro and Grasso contend that naturalism is consistent with the reality  of downward causation. We do not have to postulate any non-natural facts, souls, trans-empirical egos, a ghost in the machine, etc., in order to acknowledge that the  desire is a non-phys...

  The company Yellow, a freight-moving trucking concern that has been around for nearly a century, is now in bankruptcy.  Why? As usual, there are a lot of reasons: The intransigence of the Teamsters, a series of bad judgments by the managers, and a private equity firm's desire to fish in troubled waters all enter the picture. But what I want to talk about today is the nature of the business that Yellow is in.  (It has no connection, by the way, with Yellow Cabs. Yellow is simply a distinctive and easily distinguishable color on the move, so it was a natural choice for two distinct sets of company founders.)  Yellow is in the LTL business. This means that it contracts to move freight that constitutes less than a full truckload -- less than enough material to fill up one of those ubiquitous trailers one sees on the road.  Though there are other firms that work for shippers willing to fill several full truckloads at once, the segment of LTL freight is a critical p...

  The photo here is of a recent invention -- a device meant to such carbon out of thin air. But I am more interested in a metaphorical sucking.  Once upon a time, there might have been debates going on at this stage in the political cycle about policy.  Has the recent spate of bad weather events at last persuaded doubters that ongoing climate change is a problem requiring human solution? Will the solution come in the form of inventions like the above? Or does it mean something that requires central planning, and sovereign authority?  Why is the price of house rising at twice the speed of everything else? is there enough parking available in American cities and, if not, why not? do we need more pipelines to carry oil or gas from one point in the US to another?  Or would it be wiser to halt the building of any such lines?  What (other than the scandalous presence of an inaugural poem in a library) is right or wrong about public schools?What are the risks and ...

 Yesterday, I spoke of James's discussion of the theory of mind-stuff, or mental chemistry, as a proposed basis for psychology. James famously responded that you cannot understand a sentence as a self-compounding of a number of words. The theory is a bygone. Why bother with it now, except as a curiosity that was on the way out even when James critiqued it in 1890?  Because the theory has one proponent whose name is still very much with us: Herbert Spencer. We tend to think of Spencer as a social theorist. We associate him with the notion that 'survival of the fittest' should be allowed to work its way through the social sphere as it did in the primordial jungle. Those of us who have been to law school associate this in turn with a famous taunt that Oliver Wendell Holmes directed at his laissez-faire colleagues, that the constitution does not enshrine Spencer's philosophy.  But, think of Spencer in this way, we may forget to think of Spencer as his own contemporaries tho...

The italicized passage below is part of a well-known passage in William James's Principles of Psychology.  He is discussing the idea of consciousness as mental chemistry, whereby ideas considered as atoms, or as specks of mind dust, can be said to combine into larger compounds, complicated systems of thought and conclusion. To the believers in such a mental chemistry, the brain is a sort of petri dish where these combinations take place, but the brain doesn't make the connections, it simply allows them.  The underlying system of thought, which owed something to Leibniz' monadology, was expounded in earnest by some now mostly forgotten figures such as Adolf Fick and Hippolyte Taine. James credits (?) Fick with being the first to argue clearly that (in James' paraphrase) "bits of mind-stuff [grow] into distinctly sensible feelings," and perhaps by extension into the whole of a mind.  So James comes to express in the following striking manner, why this idea seems...

  One of the  perennial positions in the philosophy of education is perennialism. "Perennialism" is a valuable word for identifying the ideas behind, say, the Great Books curriculum conspicuously offered by St John's College at Annapolis.  The underlying idea is that the best idea are the ones that have lasted over centuries, because time is the  great editor.  Perennialists typically set students to work reading and analyzing the works by history's finest thinkers and writers.  AT its best, this is of course very different from rote learning.  One is not expected to learn medicine by memorizing the thoughts of Hippocrates and Galen. But one might well be expected to learn something valuable about science by analyzing what Hippocrates and Galen wrote, why they wrote it, what their concerns were, and so forth.   Perennialism is neither all right nor all wrong. I thought I should mention it today because I was writing about Hutchins here, yeste...

I offered some observations last week about the book  An Aristocracy of Critics, which is a study of the 1940s-era Hutchins Commission, and its report about a "free and responsible press."  What strikes me reading it is the extent of my sympathies for Robert McCormick, who wore the black hat in the imagination of the authors of the book that issued from the Commission's work. McCormick, often called Colonel McCormick in acknowledgement of his First World War service, when he was on the staff of General Pershing, ran the Chicago Tribune from the early 1920s until the mid 1950s. The Trib's infamous "Dewey Wins" fiasco occurred on his watch.  Well before that headline, though, McCormick was often regarded as an unscrupulous and arrogant presence.  In the 1930s, everyone associated with the New Deal despised him. Everyone interested in assisting the western allies against the Axis powers ... likewise. He used his position as the owner of the Tribune to campaign...

  Henry directed me to the following:  The New Hellenism (lareviewofbooks.org)     As you infer from the URL, that is an essay in the L.A. Review of Books, about a trend in philosophy since 2010, a trend toward a far less academic and more accessible style. The essay is by Crispin Sartwell, an essayist whose prose is always accessible.  Here is a snippet: " In effect, every aspect of philosophy is being transformed or reimagined today, just as Epicurus produced letters or Epictetus aphorisms rather than Aristotelian treatises on logic. The basic forms are not the 20-page journal article with 123 footnotes or the bristlingly dry and difficult 400-page monograph, one-third of which is 'scholarly apparatus.' Rather, what you get from Agnes Callard or Justin Smith is a sharp, unexpected 2,500-word essay in a blog or newspaper. "One of the shaping influences on the development of public philosophy, the personal/philosophical essay, and intellectual self-help was th...