Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In last year's round-up of the top financial stories, I mentioned that I was somewhat embarrassed that THAT list turned out to be as America-centered as it was. Seven of the stories (every one that was NOT about Ukraine) had a US locus. This year, I don't have that problem. This is a VERY international list.   Ukraine is still here, but only once, and the OTHER war that has dominated headlines this year, the Israel/Hamas war, makes its debut in these lists via its ramifications for shipping.  Actually, both wars are here with reference to shipping.  Likewise, the US is still a locus, but only of three of the twelve big stories: April, June, and November. Less than half of last year's. Two of our US based stories this year concern artificial intelligence as a new industry: the other, one of America's periodic games of chicken with a debt ceiling.  China gets and warrants more attention here than any other single country. It is the locus in four of our stories. Af...

  In physics, Stoicism contends that matter is in principle infinitely divisible, like the "infinitely divisible ooze" pictured. This put the founding Stoics at odds with the contemporary atomists They held, as well, that the active principle in the material world is pneuma, literally “breath,” but understood rather figuratively here. Pneuma exists as currents, and these currents combine in ways that give objects a stable, physical character.  In cosmology, the Stoics see the natural world as a single rational and creative God, who is a material body, the body of the whole, of which all objects are, so to speak, organs. In anthropology, Stoics see humans as parts of the natural world, with an important differentiating characteristic.  We are part of the world in that we are within the same bonds of cause and effect as the rest of it.  We are distinct in that we are aware of this situation.  This means that there are certain matters that are within our power:...

  Years ago someone asked on Quora if anyone could sum up each of the decades of the 20th century in 10 words or less. I took up the challenge. I will now offer you those ten concise summaries plus two more, one for each of the first two decades of the twentieth century. My apologies for the America-centered taste of the result. But have another glass of eggnog and enjoy it.  1. A canal in Panama shows off Yankee power to awe. 2. The Great War smashes sunny Edwardian optimism. 3. Stock prices can go up forever, can they not?  4. Trade barriers destroy the industrial base, introduce years of depression. 5. Another war, even worse than the last, splits the atom. 6. Two superpowers face off: no one presses the button. 7. Mao reasserts himself in China: Americans go to the moon. 8. The demise of gold and currency fixes: all values float.  9. Amid the demise of Lenin's experiment, Germany re-unites.  10.  You say "internet" a lot: what does it mean?  NEW CE...

At the start of 2023, specifically in the January 9th and 10th, I wrote here that there were five major and dramatic trials scheduled for the year. And 2023 was in fact a dramatic reckoning for lovers of litigation.  Let us block this out a bit. 1) I wrote first about the Alex Murdaugh case.  That one took place soon thereafter.  The prominent South Carolina lawyer was convicted of murdering his wife Maggie and his son Paul.  Alex M. is in prison and the inevitable appeal is underway... 2) I spoke, too, about the forthcoming trial of Robert Telles, a former public official in Nevada suspected of the murder of Jeff German, a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal.  Evidentiary disputes have delayed matters on this one, and it is now scheduled for April 2024.  3) Thirdly, there was Sam Bankman-Fried, a colossus in the cryptocurrency world at the time, now (given the guilty verdict in his trial for wire fraud and related matters) just a guy in the Brooklyn ...

  Recently, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania all testified to a committee of the House of Representatives on anti-semitism on college campuses. I will leave MIT out of the following and will comment on an important difference between the other two universities.   The difference: Harvard has people who are very good at portfolio management.  U.Penn does not have their equal.  Heck, books have been written about Harvard's endowment strategy.  Without going into the details of those books, they seek to explain how Harvard continues to make a solid stream of income from the money it received from donors decades ago.   Now, one might think that this would allow them to drop what students and their families have to pay in tuition. (HAHAHA you silly person.) No  ... what this does is allow Harvard's directors some freedom from the shifting whims of the donor class. They can respond to indignant alums when the latest...

 Recently, I told a brief story here about how Sam Altman got fired by the board of his artificial-intelligence oriented company, then days later returned in triumph to the head of the company, and with a re-jiggered subservient board. Now I return to that subject with further thoughts.  Why did the board attempt to fire Altman? They weren't at all specific about it. On November 17, 2023, noon on the west coast OpenAI's board of directors announced they were firing him, effective immediately, because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications." Nothing more. That lack of particulars smelled to some people like a lack as well of ... candidness.   One prominent theory that has developed over the subsequent weeks is that Altman was playing hardware against software. OpenAI is a software concern, but Altman apparently had aspirations to, and even raised money for, the founding of an AI chip company. THAT sounds like the sort of thing that might create con...

  The fundamentals of the science of physics that the 21st century has inherited from the 20th consist of two grand theories. On the one hand, there is the general theory of relativity [GR] set forward by Albert Einstein, confirmed by a wide range of experimental tests since. This holds (to put things very simply) that space-time is a continuous fabric that is distorted with all the matter and energy within it, while by the same token this background determines the flows of all that matter and energy. It is at its heart a theory about gravity and it is about certainties.  On the other hand, there is a body of quantum mechanics [QM], advocated by Niels Bohr and opposed in its earliest formulations by the aforementioned Albert Einstein. Quantum mechanics is all about indeterminacy and uncertainty. We can be sure about the location of a particle only if we are willing to accept some vagueness about its velocity. Or, we can fix its velocity only if we are willing to leave some vag...

It is that time of year again.  We ought to listen to this guy.  Damn those Seleucids! (2) Adam Sandler Chanukah Song - YouTube

Three distinct events. Very different, but oddly the same. Three parallel controversies.    December 1941. Japanese forces attack the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. Evidence indicates that the Office of Naval Intelligence was aware of Japanese carrier movements in the days before the attack -- that the attack should not have come as a complete surprise to Admiral Kimmel and others in command in Hawaii.  There is a theory that goes much further, contending FDR knew about Japan's plans and decided no counter-measures would be taken because this looked like a quick way to get the US fully engaged in the war. September 2001. Islamofascist terrorists attack New York and the Pentagon. Evidence indicates a failure of communication, again, between intelligence and operations. A number of theories quickly develop going much further than that: one of them is , again, that the government knew exactly what would happen and allowed it, thereby also allowing its own imperialist "war on...

Justice O'Connor has passed away. May she rest in peace.  My first thought upon hearing of this sad event was about the CASEY decision in 1992, and about how this looks in retrospect.  Casey came just as a twelve-year period of continuous Republican occupation of the White House was ending. Clinton won the election that year -- before then, Reagan and the elder Bush had been President, and it was widely believed that they had put enough Federalist Society types on the High Court to ensure that ROE v. WADE was going to be overturned.  Yet Casey surprised people. Not only was ROE not overturned, what the court called its "essential holding" was specifically retained. This was due to the emergence of a  "centrist bloc" consisting of Antony Kennedy, David Souter, and ... Sandra Day O'Connor. Although their decisive opinion in CASEY was put out as a joint opinion -- no one author among the three -- O'Connor was the one of the three with the greatest seniorit...

 Given the box office success of Ridley Scott's epic NAPOLEON, I am reminded of the following thought from the guiding spirit of this blog, William James.  The essay is "The Importance of Individuals," one of a pair of essays in which he defends a sort of extended-Carlylean conception of history. I've discussed that conception in this blog before and will not go into it in particular now.  Just the one quick quote.  James writes, "Some organizing genius must in the nature of things have emerged from the French Revolution; but what Frenchman will affirm it to have been an accident of no consequence that he should have had the supernumerary idiosyncrasies of a Bonaparte?"     Let us contemplate that thought without a lot of commentary from me:  I'll let Ridley Scott do the commenting.  I will only borrow from a dictionary a definition of supernumerary: "being in excess of the normal or requisite number." Presumably Bonaparte had more idiosyncra...

  Book I of The Republic has four parts. Plato doesn't name them, but we may call them the Cephalus, the Polemarchus, the build-up of Thrasymachus, and the critique of Thrasymachus. Let us take them one at a time.  I. The Cephalus. Cephalus is an old and wealthy man, who owns the home in which the disputants have gathered. He and Socrates have a brief and courteous conversation, which establishes that there are consolations of old age. One of these is that the passions (the desire for sex, for example) die down and allow reason to govern one’s actions unchallenged. That is an important foreshadowing of later elements in the book. Cephalus and Socrates briefly discuss the issue of what is justice. But the old man doesn’t want to get too deeply into the question and says goodbye. II. The Polemarchus . Polemarchus is Cephalus’ son and heir, and Socrates says only half-jokingly that he may have inherited his father’s part in this discussion. Asked what it is to be just: Polemarch...