Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Tell me if you've heard this one. Heck, you may have read it here before but I'm not going to bother looking. There is no blogger's code principle against repetition.    Anyway:  guy walks into a bar in Dublin. He asks for three shots of whiskey and downs them all quickly.  Bartender: "Whoa. Slow down buddy. Are you driving home?" Customer: That'll be all for me. This is a little family ritual. Me brother is in Belfast. Me other brother is in Boston. I'm here in Dublin.  This is how we imagine we're having drinks together. Bartender: "What a fine ritual it is." Customer walks out. He comes in and downs three shots every day at the same time of day for a year or more. Then one day ... Customer: "I'd like two shots of whiskey."  Bartender supplies them. Customer downs them and settles his bill. Bartender says, "Excuse me for prying, but I'm familiar with your ritual. Did one of your brothers pass away?"  Customer:...

  Too many shrimp? Or, are shrimp small enough and fungible enough that we can say "too much shrimp"? In a statement on X, i.e. twitter, last week, Red Lobster reacted to some of the distressed reactions regarding its filing for bankruptcy the preceding weekend.  "Bankruptcy is a word that is often misunderstood" it said. "Filing for bankruptcy does not mean that we are going out of business. In fact, it means just the opposite. It is a legal process that allows us to make changes to our business and our cost structure so that Red Lobster can continue as a stronger company going forward."  I appreciate the Pollyanna-ish note there, but .... To speak more strictly, chapter 11 is a legal process that allows a court to make a decisions on fundamental changes to a business, (dissolution remains a possible result), inclusive of changes as to who owns what interests in it -- changes to the content of the "we" and "us" in that statement.   The...

Let's return to the issue of logic, or the issues of mathematics-and-logic, which was (were?) always of great importance to the Vienna Circle. As we have mentioned, the VC came together at a time of a lot of argument about the foundations of mathematics. The "logicists" said that mathematics is a stern necessary outcome of logic. The "intuitionists" said it is, at least at the margins, a matter of social convention. Both sides in that dispute presumed that their positions were incompatible: social convention is one thing, logic is something utterly different.  Rudolf Carnap, though, offered an distinctive approach to logic.  He said logic itself is a social convention, not a successful flight from conventions. [The illustration for this blog entry is my silly pun, the name "Carnap" never fails to lead me to think of catnip.] Anyway, Carnap, the son of a successful capitalist (the elder Carnap owned a ribbon-making factory), studied at both the Univers...

In our four further discussions of the Edmonds book this week, we will break little if any truly new ground.  We will try to go more deeply into some questions that we raised last week.                                     First, I mentioned last week that Wittgenstein's discussion of the foundations of mathematics after an exposure to Brouwer's views was what brought him fully back into philosophy. I omitted a related point.  Wittgenstein did eventually write up his thoughts on that subject. REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS was published after his death, in 1956.  There he makes the remarkable observation that what is called "losing" in chess may constitute winning in another game.  That is his analogy. His example involves "Russell's system," the logicism/logical apparatus of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. A proposition could be proven the case in Russell's system yet sti...

We have come to a point where we should really discuss the issue of the "unity of the sciences," a central issue of debate, it seems, within the Vienna Circle -- and in the philosophy of science (or the sciences?) to this day.  This was an issue central to their philosophizing. When they became a big enough of a deal to organize international conferences, those conferences were to be known as the International Congress for the Unity of Science. At one of the conferences that they gave that title, at Prague in 1934, Alfred Tarski made his appearance on the stage of the history of philosophy. Tarski (portrayed above) gave a lecture on the ideas of truth and falsity in which he tried to resolve the ancient Liars' paradox. His efforts, Edmonds tells us, "caused so much buzz that an additional session was hastily arranged to discuss it further."  Tarski's reaction to the Liar Paradox was to suggest a formal language with a hierarchy of truths. At the bottom level...

  There was a lot going on the Vienna through the whole period from the turn of the century to the German takeover of Austria in 1938.  In this connection, we have to discuss (as Edmonds necessarily does) one of the brightest stars streaking across the distinguished intellectual firmament of Vienna in the early 20th century: Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis itself raised the question: is this a science? Freud certainly thought it was.  But what has to be true for a certain body of scholarship to be a science, or to be, perhaps more loosely speaking, scientific?   The contrary term, for the Circle, was "metaphysics." The VC disdained metaphysics. Their manifesto said that the VC stood for "removing the theological and metaphysical debris of a millennia," and one is to imagine the adjective "metaphysical" pronounced with disdain as one reads that. Indeed, this is their major link with the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who invented the term "positivism"...

Edmonds repeatedly discusses the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the Vienna Circle in philosophy and Austro-Marxism in politics. You might call it ... some sort of waltz.  But let us begin with Mach.   Ernst Mach was a scientist and philosopher who flourished circa 1900. As a philosopher, he believed that sense perception is the paradigm of all knowledge and that scientific laws, mathematics, and the postulation of unseen entities like magnetic fields, are all simply ways of describing and predicting sense perception. This notion, which came to be called "empirio-criticism," would in time have a great influence on the Vienna Circle.   Aside from geography and chronology, Austro-Marxism would seem unrelated to empirio-criticism. The former was an ideology closely associated with Bruno Bauer, the head of Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934. In '34, as fascists tightened their control in Austria (though at this time they were fasc...

  a n  + b n  = c n , where integer  n  ≥ 3, has no non-trivial solutions. This and, if all goes well, the next seven posts in this blog constitute an unprecedentedly ambitious project for me.  I'll be attempting a very granular reading of the book I discussed in a more abstract fashion earlier, THE MURDER OF PROFESSOR SCHLICK: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE VIENNA CIRCLE.  Let us start with the "rise" of that subtitle. In 1922 Schlick was offered and accepted the chair for natural philosophy at the University of Vienna. Edmonds calls this simple hiring "a turning point in the history of twentieth-century philosophy."  The core of the study-and-discussion group that he seems to have formed almost immediately after that appointment consisted of Schlick himself, Neurath, and Hahn. Otto Neurath and Schlick had background and personality differences as far apart as the poles, as Edmonds tells it. Schlick was a gentile, Neurath a Jew. Schlick was soft-spoken...

Part of that/your world" is a song in Disney's Little Mermaid, sung twice by the titular Mermaid. The first time she sings it, the title line is "part of THAT world." She is responding to fantasies she has built around the wreckage of ships and the fine things she has found they contain.  The second time she sings it, she is addressing a human, Prince Eric, and he is the "you" in the line "part of your world."  I admire these lyrics, written by Howard Ashman for the music composed by Alan Menken. I'd like to say something about what I admire in them. So, here we go.  The lyrics include the following: I wanna be where the people are/ I wanna see, wanna see 'em dancing Walking around on those ... whatdaya call 'em? Oh, feet Flapping your fins, you don't get too far, legs are required for jumpin' dancin' Strolling along down a ... what's that word again? Street. This is very clever stuff. I think Ashman showed some courage...

Australia's second-largest pension fund blacklists thermal coal investments | Reuters I was thinking of using this story for my round-up of financial news later this year. Now, I don't think I will.  As regular readers surely know, in an end-of-year post I go month-by-month through the year just ended listing the big Fin news stories. My choices are not always about the story itself, but about the theme it illustrates.    In May 2024, though? I'll go with something else.  Still, this story illustrates a major point in the financial history of our time. Pension fund managers are powerful people.  Not just because they are rich (they usually aren't), and not because they can order armies into motion (they can't), but because they write or refuse to write very big checks. If a pension fund the size of the Australian Retirement Trust won't invest any further in thermal coal investments on a continent where thermal coal has long been a big part of the energy picture:...

  Click here for the full list of this year's Pultizer winners: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2024 One of my pet peeves is a matter of pronunciation, the common mis pronunciation of the word "Pulitzer". whether used of a man, and corporation, or a prize. It is often slaughtered into "pule-itzer" where the first syllable rhymes with "yule" or "mule".  That is wrong, though, The word is pull-it-sir, as if a titled gentleman had just asked you "how do I get this cork out of this bottle"!  Anyway: I wish to draw your attention specifically today to one of the two National Reporting Pulitzers. Both of the National Reporting awards went to the "staff of" major news organizations for their work on a big ongoing issue.  One went to staff of WaPo for its " sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle." The other? to the staff of Reuters, my old stomping ground, for stories of Elon Musk's aut...

... and the D&D chart. Devotees of role-playing games are familiar with "alignment" on a two-axis system.  It is considered a critical way to define a fantasy character.  One axis is law-versus-chaos.  The other axis is good-versus-evil. Each axis has two extremes and a "neutral" position in the middle, allowing for a grid of nine. In essence, "good" means respectful of life.  "Evil" means disrespect for life. "Order" means obedience to authority and, presumably as a correlated matter, reliability. "Chaos" means resistance to authority, which can in turn means unreliability as an ally.  In the world of comic book characters, Superman is "lawful good".  Batman is "neutral good".  He'll follow the rules or he'll evade or break then in order to control the criminal element (the evil characters) in Gotham. Chaotic good? Someone like the Punisher. Someone with the same goal -- opposition to the plain...

  I think of certain thinkers as "Top Shelf." These are the ones who are named and discussed BY name even in undergraduate survey courses in their field. If you are not majoring in a STEM field, but you don't want to live and die completely ignorant of physics, you might well take a survey course on the field's modern history. That will presumably discuss Newton, Maxwell, Mach, Einstein and Schrodinger: the top shelf.  If you take a survey modern-era philosophy course, an analogous list might include Kant, Hegel, James, Russell, Arendt.  But even drawing up such a list surely leads some to note that the last of those names, Hannah Arendt, died almost a half century ago. Who are the top shelf philosophers of today ? Who will future undergraduates study and know by name as the outstanding thinkers of the early 21st century? We cannot know -- time is the great editor and has not passed on this copy yet.  So forget about contemporaneity for a bit. When we speak of the ...

 An odd post is making its way around social media.  It purports to be a post from someone calling herself "Ann Lesby, Ph.D.". It reads: "Misgendering a pet can result in serious microsubconscious distress. Pay attention to clues. Your pet will let you know his/her/their/cir identity through things like body language, toy preferences, and reactions to gendered pet clothing."   Conservatives in general fall for it and re-post it with expressions of disdain for these insane liberals.  But the author is almost certainly ... one of their own.  A conservative seeking to parody 'those crazy liberals.'  Consider the name. Presumably "Ann Lesby" often ends up signing her name as "Lesby, Ann."  That possibility might give us a clue as to the parodic intent.  The term "microsubconscious" is evidently targeted at the cultural-leftists' all-too-common use of "microaggressions." This means, My action, X, will be taken as aggres...

 A nonsense word that has acquired some sense?  We owe the adjective "runcible" to Edward Lear. He used it several times and, as was his way, he was more interested in the sound of it than in any sense it might be given.  While he used it of a spoon, he seems to have had a ladle in mind. See his own illustration, above,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runcible  Some people seem to have decided that a "runcible spoon" is a spork or something of that kind.  I consider that a runcible invention. 

  Robert “Bob” Hilary Kane died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 85, after a brief illness. He spent his final moments surrounded by family and friends at his home in Guilford, CT.  Kane had moved to Guilford in 2022, and I've read that until very recently he remained a regular at his  grandchildren’s sporting events and noted for his daily walk on the town green. In lieu of flowers, his family suggests people contribute what they can to his preferred charities:  The Union of Concerned Scientists , The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund , The National Alliance on Mental Illness , or Fair Vote . (Intriguing list of causes there.) But he isn't here because of any of that. He gets an obit on Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed because he was, for decades until his passing, the most distinguished contemporary advocate of the incompatibilist/ indeterminist view of the philosophical issue of free will, the view associated with William James, Isaiah Berlin, Ka...

  According to one prominent political-science theory, a candidate of the party that is incumbent in the White House is nearly certain to win an election if he possesses at least six of 13 possible "keys". He does not need all, or most, or even a majority. He needs six.  Each key is a binary question, allowing only yes or no answer, though sometimes the answer will require an exercise of judgment, not mere arithmetic or observation.  For clarity -- for many of these keys the ABSENCE of something is taken as a positive.  So a "yes" answer has the form, "yes, it is true that X did not happen." With that understood, let us start through the list and its 2024 application. We are looking at each election from the point of view of the political party incumbent in the White House during the election.  1. Mandate from the House of Representatives. After the last election (the mid-term election prior to the Presidential election under study) did the incumbent Presi...

  35 years separate the great dust bowl storm of 1935 from the break-up of the Beatles in 1970.  I remember the Beatles news and I'm sure that at the time I would have said at the time that boring depression era history was ancient and best forgotten. The same span of time, though, separates the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 from, say, the passage of the Tik-Tok ban legislation of 2024. This 35 year period FLEW by.  The Berlin Wall thing was the week before yesterday.  Probably has nothing to do with why Einstein thought time was relative, but strikes me as proof of the same proposition.  

  The Future of Humanity Institute has shut down.  Oh, what a rough sentence to write! An organization devoted to ensuring that we as a species has a future ... now officially has only a past.  FHI was a multidisciplinary research center at the University of Oxford. And apparently one of the recurrent themes in the Institute's research was the "Fermi paradox." This is the idea that, on the one hand, there SHOULD BE technologically sophisticated aliens Out There, but that on the other hand we don't hear from them.  As FHI bigwig Robin Hanson has put it: there must be a filter. Something is preventing our approach and likely our colonization by such beings. It is possible that intelligence, and so advanced technology, is much more rare than exobiologist have tended to assume. In THAT case, this is something about life we should want to know. On the other hand, it is possible that the filter is still in our future. Perhaps once a species becomes sufficiently advanced, i...