Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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 V

 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, Karl Popper,

  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.