Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year,  as regular readers know, I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year slipping away, in terms of its busin ess/fina ncial news. Last year, for example, stories with a bearing on the financing of the war in Ukraine were dominant.  This year ... not so much. With the single exception of July that particular war stays outside of this list. The war in Gaza, and the question of "what next in financial/business terms for that fraught tract of land," does make an appearance.  But Sino-American economic relationships dominate the list this year.   I'll break matters down by month as usual, and as is my habit I will avoid assigning priority among the various monthly champions.  Each is tagged with a theme but each is a news story, NOT a theme.  Each is a story about some "who" doing some "what" at a where and when.     January.  Sino-America economic relations I.    The new President of the US and c...

  A year-ending thought.   I've been thinking about an old medieval French term, with Latin roots: "liege".  At a King Richard's Fair, one costumed character may bow to another and call him "my liege". It is akin to saying "my lord," but not exactly, and a variation is to say "my liege Lord" -- which makes sense in a feudal system, where there is only one particular Lord to whom I owe allegiance - the rest are more or less a matter of indifference to me, a humble serf or page or whatever -- so you can be a lord without being MY lord, or you can be my liege Lord.    And, thinking thus, I experienced a bit of a semantic epiphany. Liege.  Allegiance. The second syllable in the second of those words sounds a lot like the first of those words.  The gravest of sins, the one that gets you assigned to the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest final circle of the Inferno according to Dante, is betrayal. Betrayal, specifically, of one to whom the s...

 I only recently encountered a brief discussion of the Jamesian will to believe in the context of climate change.  It appears as a chapter in an anthology, Philosophical Tools for Climate Change (2024), prepared at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.  One odd feature of this book is that, although all the other chapters have an author credited by name on the table of contents, the will-to-believe chapter goes uncredited.  So I don't know to whom we owe it.  The anonymous author chiefly wants us to recall James' point that some choices are forced.  They are (as we say in the 21st century) binary.  Either I act in a certain way or I don't. Either I attend my usual religion service this weekend or I don't.  There may be many reasons why I don't -- difficulty with transportation, loss of the underlying beliefs, conversion to a different set of beliefs and attendance at another service. Whatever.  But if someone is interested in whet...

 In recent days, a lost manuscript from the files of Dr. Watson has come to  my attention.   After Watson’s honorable discharge from Her Majesty’s forces he retired to London and, as everyone knows, he became the roommate of an eccentric detective at 221B Baker Street. The new file reveals that on a certain Christmas day while residing there, Watson received a note from a young lady down the street (102A Baker) asking for a Christmas rendezvous. Delighted at the prospect, Watson hastily explained the matter to Sherlock Holmes, showed him the calling card from “Ellie,” and headed out.  Just a few minutes later, a crestfallen Watson returned.  Sherlock Holmes was seated in his easy chair, smoking from his famously bent calabash pipe. He said, “I expected the round trip would take you a little longer, my friend. No matter, the plum pudding is waiting for you.” This, as it happens, was the first time on that sacred day that the two men had had the leisure for ...

  I saw a report that Rob Reiner's son, allegedly his father's murderer, has hired "famed defense attorney Alan Jackson".  I have to say, I have never heard of a defense attorney of that name.  Whoever he is, he toils under the disadvantage that it is such a common name.  Both the surname and the given name are aggressively ordinary.  Perhaps more to his taste, the famed defense attorney has the same name as a genuinely famed country music vocalist, pictured above. THAT Alan Jackson is known for "Chattahoochee," "I'll Try," and perhaps best known of all, "It's 5 o'clock somewhere."  This post plainly isn't going anywhere, so I think I'll close it down. After all, it's five o'clock somewhere. Time to clock out.  

  The bullet-point presentation of Cartesian philosophy.  I have in earlier posts sought to summarize others of the Great Thinkers of the philosophical canon in five tenets per head.  Today we take on Rene Descartes.  In some respects, this may seem an idiosyncratic take on Descartes, and it is a take I would be prepared to modify in the face of appropriate contrary explanations, but it is honestly and painstakingly arrived at.   That said: Rene D was trying to tell us ..  1. That if we try to doubt everything that can be doubted we will end up forced to a choice between accepting the existence of a benevolent God (a postulate that can guarantee the reliability of our senses and our reason), OR accepting solipsism.  2. Having accepted God for this purpose, we don't really have much day-to-day use for Him.  The physical world is a mechanism, just matter in motion where objects push each other around and can be exhaustively understood in those ...

The US administration has now decided to let Nvidia export its advanced H200 semiconductors to the People's Republic of China. A think tank that keeps track of such things, the Institute for Progress, says that the H200 is approximately six times as powerful as the previously most advanced chip the US has been exporting to the PRC. The usual (bipartisan) policy has been to try to keep China behind the cutting edge on such chips, given our competitive situation with them with regard to AI, and for that matter given the potential for a military showdown in which computer sophistication could well play a part.  There was a time when I would have hailed such a decision.  As a sort of laissez-faire reflex.  What business does the US government have telling Nvidia they can't sell to willing buyers? Heck, there is a neat legend surrounding Nvidia and how it was founded after a late-night BS meeting in a Denny's restaurant. Sort of like the legends of how firms that would be Gian...

  As promised yesterday. “Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs; I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary. He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses.” Thomas Reid, being rather grouchy and Chestertonian. 

   Hume on causation.  We may define a cause to be ‘An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter.’ If this definition be esteem’d defective, because drawn from objects foreign to the cause, we may substitute this other definition in its place, viz. ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’  Treatise of Human Nature.  This may lead you to reply: Huh?  By "object" in the above I think we should generally understand "event." The object of the touch of a lit match to kindling is both precedent and contiguous with the ignition of that pile of kindling. There may be exceptions, as where the kindling is wet so the fire-setti...

The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars.  India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries.    The public danger posed by heat waves may be under...

The philosophical novel is alive and well as a literary form, and a venue of philosophizing. I think of John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION (1986), Rebecca Goldstein, THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (1993), David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST (1996), E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014), and John Irving, AVENUE OF MYSTERIES (2015).  But let us go back to Wallace.  I included INFINITE JEST in my little list above because it is explicitly philosophical, built as it is around the challenging notion that "the truth shall set you free. But not until it is finished with you." Confronting reality may indeed set us free from the impediments of our preferred delusions.  But it is painful to let them go.  Separately, an earlier book of Wallace's, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, make an intriguing use of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a use that justifies the title.  BROOM starts with the news that an elderly woman is missing from her retirement home.  The missing person was once, in her youth, a stud...

The good news: 2024 YR4 is no longer considered a threat to the earth. The bad news: its course suggests it may strike the moon. The consequences of a moon strike are under active discussion, as is the matter of what the human species might do about it before the predicted time (December 2032).  Some background? Late in 2024, astronomers discovered a building-sized asteroid, 2024 YR4, on a course that made collision with Earth possible. They at first estimated that as a 3% possibility of a collision. It was not the human-extinction threat beloved by science fiction screenwriters, but it could have created widespread damage wherever on land it might hit, or generate a tsunami in the event of an ocean impact.   More recent data about 2024 YR4 suggests that, though the Earth is safe, the prospect of a hit on the moon is respectable, about 4%, or 1-in-25.  Some scientists are concerned that a l unar impact could increase the meteoroid flux by up to 1,000 times, flooding...

  I vented here not long ago about the difficulty I was having upgrading my driver's license, instead of merely renewing it: getting it renewed into a "Real ID" with the star in the corner that will allow me to take airplane flights without fuss or an extra charge. I am happy to inform you that the hold-up, whatever exactly it was, has been resolved in my favor.  I have the new license in my wallet now -- it has a gold star in the top right corner, just like in the sample above. There is also (again as in the sample) a pale black-and-white drawing of a bird in the middle, just to the right of the photo.   I don't think that is there for every state, it may be a Massachusetts thing. Anyway: nobody has given me a gold star since elementary school.  Happy day!  

What the bleep is happening to Bitcoin, and why?  Its value hit a historic peak on Monday, October 6. A bitcoin was worth $123,857 that day.  Of course since I called that a "peak" you have probably already figured out that the value has come down since.  Pretty dramatically, too. On Monday, Oct. 20 that was down to $110,245. On November 6. $103,976.  Then came the big drop. Before Thanksgiving, the value got as low as $86K before beginning to claw its way back up.   Here's a link: Bitcoin value real time chart - Google Search In part the problem is the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin speculators want interest rates down?  Why? Because higher interest rates tend to support to dollar, and Bitcoin is likely to prove the beneficiary of a flight from the dollar.  If I can't get much of an income stream from just owning US bonds, I may well sell the bonds (for dollars, naturally) and then convert those dollars into the dominant cryptocurrency.  This impu...

When I was young (back when 'analog clocks' were known simply as ... 'clocks') I had a tough time learning how to tell time on them. The adults around me kept saying "big hand" this and "little hand" that. Sorry: one of them was long but thin. Is that big or little? The other one was short but thick. Is that little or big? I didn't really get over this until I started narrating it to myself in more explicit terms. "The fat short one tells the hour, the long thin one tells the minute." That is still my rule as a writer -- explicitness and clarity even at the expense of concision. So everyone can understand that the photo I've included here indicate that ten minutes have passed since 10 o'clock not that fifty minutes have passed since it was 2 o'clock!

  In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS), scientists at the Carnegie Science Institute claim that chemical signs of photosynthesis, and so of life, have shown up in rocks at least 2.5 billion years old. Vegetative life existed on earth that far back. Until now, photosynthesis was generally traced back only to 1.7 billion.  "Good for the scientists," you might say, "it clearly helps make them stand-outs within their special field of study.  But should it matter to the rest of us?" I submit that it should.  One reason is that as one pushes back the dating of the earliest emergence of life, one shortens the amount of time for the chemical, pre-biological evolution that may have been necessary to get the history of life underway. How long a span of time is necessary for life to emerge on a planet, when circumstances (such as the distance to the nearest sun, the size of that sun, etc.) are amenable? There is only one case ...

  In his classic book, PRAGMATISM, William James tells a story about a squirrel.  Or, maybe it is about something else.  You decide.  He asks us to consider an argument among camping buddies in the Berkshires. It seems that a squirrel had gotten itself positioned on the trunk of a tree so that the tree was in between its own body and the body of one of the campers, on the other side.  The camper, wanting to catch sight of the squirrel, started walking around the tree. The squirrel (randomly so far as we can tell, not out of anti-observer animus) moved around the tree to which it clung, in such a way as to keep itself on the opposite side from the man. When they had each travelled in this way 360 degrees around the tree, an intriguing question arose.  Had the man at this point gone round the squirrel? James noted that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree.  This was enough for some of the disputants -- he had gone roun...

I mentioned here earlier this week that, in college, I was taught a Straussian version of Thomas Hobbes.  That is: the typical Straussian position in interpreting a wide range of early modern political thinkers is that X was secretly an atheist but was pretending to believe in God because of the whole fear-of-persecution thing.  The political philosophy can be understood only once one penetrates beneath the veneer of winking conformism about religion. Just a quick further note along those lines today.   That is (despite contrary views such as the one I discussed here Tuesday)  a fairly easy sell as to Hobbes. And Hume.  A little more difficult (IMHO) with regard to Spinoza, and much more difficult with regard to Montesquieu and Locke. And it is almost impossible to look at Maimonides in the manner that the Straussians want.   The founder of the Straussian view was, as one might imagine, Leo Strauss (1899 -1973), and the grand name for his characte...

"The crowbar is all inside your head" she said to me, "And we can demonstrate it mathematically, "I'd like to help you here in Alexanderee, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." She said, "It's really not 'Eureka' I exude, Furthermore if one should break it's not me who will be sued You built a Death Ray pal so you'll live if I am crude, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." You just find a firm place, Ace Fulcrum's the plan, Stan Don't fear the big weight, Fate Just make the Earth move. Hop on the horse, course You don't need dialectic Chariot'll do, Lou Just make the Earth move.... 

  Still waiting for my "real ID" as I write these words.  I had all the information and documentation in the hands of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles more than a month ago -- and aced an eye test to boot, and was told I would get the new supercharged form of a drivers license, the real ID form, the get-me onto-airplanes version, in two weeks   Hasn't happened.  Have to call to complain now.  Just venting....

The Notre Dame Philosophy Review   tells us of a new book on Thomas Hobbes' philosophy of religion, reviewed by Arish Abizadeh of McGill University.   If I recall the relevant undergrad course properly, Hobbes' view on religion was straightforward. He was willing to worship in any manner his sovereign tells him to worship -- to worship a thousand gods, or one, and that one conceived as three persons, or as simply One.  "Any law has reason enough for my obedience."  At another level, Hobbes was suspicious of religious fervor, precisely because fervor in the worship of a Leviathan in the heavens, distinct from the Leviathan on earth, is always in danger of spilling over into opposition or insubordination with regard to the latter. "I'm looking at you, Oliver Cromwell!" The first-level view may be said to be delivered with a wink: "You're the boss, so I'll go along with Trinity-talk Sire." The second-level view was heartfelt. Between thos...

A few days ago, on November 15, we passed a rather random unobserved anniversary. That was the 158th anniversary of the debut of the first stock ticker machine. It was unveiled, appropriately, in New York City, by its inventor Edward A. Calahan.   Calahan was building upon the now ubiquitous telegraph, combining it with a printer so that institutions that chose to get one could receive a steam of stock prices, transaction by transaction, from a particular exchange whose action they were following.  The transactions would print out on a tape. The machine with its click click clickity click became quite familiar very rapidly, and lasted a long time. I seem to remember that the father in the old Addams Family sitcom had one in the family abode. Also, the tape generated by such machines could then be cut up and thrown out of windows on festive occasions like so many streamers.  Hence the expression "ticker tape parade".    So: congratulations Mr. Calahan for gi...

  The following is from QUORA. Why do some people believe that the concept of God preceded philosophy, even though influential philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard were atheists who believed in God before them? Huh?   This was an AI-generated question, and it illustrates how absurd AI can get. I'm not sure what it means to say that the "concept of God" preceded philosophy. Let us make things easier by speaking of "worship".  The worship of gods certainly preceded philosophy.  Heck, the worship of a single supreme capital-G God may be said to go back to around 1350 BCE, a long time before Thales. So it happens to be the case that our earliest record of worship of God precedes what we generally call philosophy. What sense does it make to ask why people believe such a plain truth?   But then the AI generated question takes a  really weird turn. The evidence that shows that the "concept of God" is not so old is attributed to a trio of philosopher...

 Of course, your cash will be delivered in a sealed paper bag. And of course it will only happen if you are at home -- no baiting porch pirates. WSJ headline, Nov. 14 print edition "Robinhood offers cash deliveries -- for a fee".   The virtual brokerage Robinhood has alied itself with  delivery app Gopuff to allow customers to withdraw cash from their Robinhood bank accounts and have it brought right to their door. For at most a $6.99 delivery fee you can avoid having to go out to the ATM and have money delivered in a sealed paper bag while they are at home. You don't have to be a weatherman to know whatnow? 

There was a referendum in Ecuador over the weekend. President Daniel Noboa, who is generally regarded as friendly to foreign investors, wanted the referendum to set the stage for new constitutional deliberations.  I won't discuss here want kind of new constitution he wants.  I'll only say that potential investors -- buyers of Ecuador's bonds or of stakes in its corporations, etc., have expressed ambivalence about the result of the vote, and something slightly darker than ambivalence about Noboa's plans for a constitutional convention.  In general, they think, a "yes" vote would enhance Noboa's political capital. That would be good.  On the other hand: why does he have to want THIS?  A convention in 2026 could prove unpredictable and, so, definitionally, risky.    Who knows but that populist opposition to Noboa, and to the aforesaid investors, could sway whatever deliberative body is actually convened?  A recent report from Gramercy, an influential...

In September 2019, after President Trump (first time around) fired John Bolton, a distinguished philosopher wrote the following in that philosopher's blog. John Bolton :    Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone.    His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove.    A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove,  but a dove nonetheless.    This is a dangerous world.    We must take our comfort where we can find it. The philosopher was Robert Paul Wolff, and I quoted that at the time in this blog, without commentary. Dr Wolff passed away early this year. Here is a link to an obit.   North American Kant Society - In Memoriam: Robert Paul Woff (1933-2025) I'm afraid that his analysis of the Trump/Bolton pairing does not seem as sound now as it did at the time.  Trump is not a dove -- he...

I'll just leave a link here, without further explanation.  You'll Never Guess What Happened to Saudi Arabia's 100-Mile Skyscraper A certain impressively futuristic project is now looking a bit like the abandoned Tower of Babel. 

 How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins?  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm  The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here.  If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time.   But archeologists want to be more specific.  And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here.  We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea.  Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.  A simple matter for specialists, you say?  Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...

 I am happy to report that on Wednesday November 5 the Justices of the US Supreme Court gave the lawyers from the US Justice Department a hard time during oral arguments on the legitimacy of President Donald Trump's monarchical tariff system last week. The question is whether Trump's extraordinary sweeping impositions, and modification, of tariffs on a country by country basis can be said to be warranted by the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.   The only honest answer is "no". Fortunately, most of the Justice seem inclined to give that honest answer, upholding the courts below. Chief Justice John Roberts (an appointee of President George W. Bush) said flatly that this law "has never been used to justify tariffs. No one has argued that it does until this particular case." Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, appears to want to be part of a decision that emphasizes that Congress has no power to delegate away its own proper constitutional r...

Ya gotta be kidding me.  Three hundred and fifty?  I cited New Scientist Wednesday . Today I'm invoking it again in connection with another of my favorite subjects -- the mind/body problem.  What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality | New Scientist The article, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, breaks the 350 contemporary contending theories into ten buckets: 1. materialism 2. non-reductive physicalism 3. quantum mechanical 4. information based 5. panpsychic 6. neutral monism [buckets one and eight are the non-neutral monisms]  7. dualism 8. idealism   9. anamolous and altered states [i.e. taking 'parapsychology' seriously]  10. challenge [i.e. accepting that the answer is beyond human capacity -- as suggested perhaps by the above cartoon].  My own preferred view, emergentism, is treated by Kuhn as a form of non-reductive physicalism, bucket 2. 

The next mayor of New York City is .... Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Mamdani and I share a birthday.  He was born on October 18, 1991, the day I turned thirty-three.  At any rate, I believe I have already shared my view that Mamdani's election in likely to be a disaster for the City that has now placed itself in his hands.  I would like today to address the question: will that disaster help or hurt President Donald Trump? I've heard one theory that Trump needs a good bogeyman.  After all, Nancy Pelosi was his bogeywoman for a long time. She remains in the House of course but has faded into the background and her successor in party leadership there, Hakeem Jeffries, has a much lower profile.   The mayor of New York City has long been a national figure -- Jimmy Walker, Fiorella LaGuardia, John Lindsey all come to mind -- even though the post doesn't seem to work as a stepping stone to higher office. So ... a mayor of New York, one who attaches the label "socialist" ...