Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 The phrase isn't as easy to define as one might have hoped.... There is an intuitive division of types of history in which a lot of us engage without questioning it much.   If you tell me, " I'm writing a political history of the United States in the late 19th century" I expect you are working on Boss Tweed, Grover Cleveland, Ida B. Wells.   "I'm writing a cultural history of the United States in the late 19th century." Ah, then I would love the chance to quiz you about the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Thomas Nast's cartoons and the music of Victor Herbert. I've posted a photo of Victor Herbert here. To get a bit closer to what I want -- suppose you are tell me you are writing a history of economics, as a field of study, in the US during this period . Delightful! Nothing like a good discussion of Henry George, Herbert Spencer, John Bates Clark and Thorstein Veblen. But then we get back to where we began.  What does an economic histor...

  These are the facts behind the lawsuit that the jury heard, and decided so quickly, last week.  In 2008 Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska but largely unknown outside of that state, suddenly found herself catapulted into national prominence when the Republican nominee for President, John McCain, asked her to join his ticket. She agreed, and was on the ballot that November as a Vice Presidential nominee.  The McCain-Palin ticket lost. After the election, though, Palin hoped to retain her national prominence and to that end she formed a political action committees, SarahPAC. Only one fact about that PAC is really pertinent here, Its website at some point thereafter adopted a graphic image of a ballistic crosshair superimposed on the 8th congressional district of Arizona, then represented by Gabrielle Giffords. The image of course was intended to convey the general idea that Giffords should be a metaphorical "target" for Republican energies, so that a Republican could replace...

Good news.   On April 22, a jury in New York City ruled that the NYT had not defamed former Alaska Governor and one-time Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial. Today I will discuss this outcome in somewhat general terms.  Tomorrow I expect to dive into the particulars of the case.    This is the second time a jury has done so.  Another one reached the same result on the same facts three years ago.  Palin refused to accept it, and did manage to get the verdict reversed, a new trial ordered, on appeal. The safe bet is that she will appeal this one, too, on whatever grounds her attorneys can cook up.  But, having already had a second bite at the apple, the odds have become rather small that the appellate courts are going to give her a third.  My guess is the Times has won this one.   Cases like this are fascinating because they involve two well-funded opponents.  I am certain that Palin could raise as ...

  I've been reading Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS.  Considered as a piece of writing, it is a terrible job. It is just one thing after another. "Another story told about X is that Q1 happened to him.  But according to some sources, it was Q2 that really happened.  And according to others, Q1 really happened to Y instead. Yet another thing said about X is... Here are three brief poems attributed to X." Considered as a source on events of ancient times, that anti-stylistic formlessness is presumably its value. Laertius isn't inserting his own grand design into his account of lives and opinions of classical Greek philosophers. He is just passing along what he has heard. As to Socrates, [and yes that is the cliched image of Socrates above, the David painting], Laertius has heard at least two things that I hadn't encountered in any other source, and that seem intriguing: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature i...

  As of this moment, I have NOT been able to give this answer to this question at Quora.  For some reason, my interface with the site for this purpose has been unsuccessful.  I will post here then, to lessen the sense of frustration. Both question and answer.   Hello: To the people who read philosophy, can you explain to me its benefits and why I should read a book by a philosopher and then read a book by another philosopher who responded to him 200 years later, for example? Those are two very different requests, but since you have used only one question mark I suspect you think you have asked only one question. First you asked whether I, someone who reads philosophy, can explain its benefits. Presumably this means its benefits to me, whatever keeps me reading such books and articles. You could probably have put a question mark after the word “benefit”. Thereafter you ask a very different question: whether I can tell you why you should read at least two books by phi...

  Something I saw in my preferred post-twitter social media site. https://newsie.social/@Motorod@mastodon.social/114325784714367605   Cian Westmoreland is a US veteran and a whistle blower.  Brief bio: he was born in 1988, enlisted in the US Air Force at 18, and in time became Air Force Technician with the 73rd Expeditionary Squadron in Kandahar, Afghanistan. In that capacity he helped create a data-relay system for the operation of killer drones. He is now out of the service and trying to warn attentive audiences of what he was involved in. "Quite a few civilians died because of what I was working on," he now says.   But what I can't get over is his name.  Cian Westmoreland.   Westmoreland, of course, is the surname of the general, William Westmoreland, who held the title Commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or just "head of MACV," through most of the administration of President Lyndon Johnson.  He was Time Man of the Year...

Last weekend was, for Christians, Easter Weekend. I let it pass unnoticed here.  I come so tardy to the fair because I started work on a Good Friday post on related subject matter, but it got out of hand.  I went with some thoughts on Auden and love, instead. Today, though, I would like to talk a bit about  The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, a 'golden age' book by Albert Schweitzer, 1914, precisely about the life, ministry and death of Jesus.  Consider this my effort at a fair paraphrase of Schweitzer's deep and complicated book.  Schweitzer, best remembered as the medical missionary of his later years after he had put his academic career behind him, was intellectually a remarkable figure who both was and was not a believing Christian. He understanding of the mission of Jesus, Jesus' own self-understanding, is one on which people of entirely secular turns of mind could agree without sacrifice of that secularism.  Indeed, Jesus comes off as a compelling...

When I hear the name of the poet W.H. Auden, I think instantly of the poem September 1, 1939. This poem is named for the day on which Germany launched its Lightning-war on Poland.  Auden understood the significance of the date, and the poem contains some of the most memorable and so the most commonly quoted verse lines of the 20th century, including his lament about the proud German culture and to what it had come. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz What huge imago made A psychopathic god.... Recognizing all of that, I am happy to report my own discovery and delight -- that Auden has other less heavily freighted sides.  Here is a love poem of his that consists of an extended rif on two loves -- the love many humans have for the sight of a cloudless starry night sky, and the love we have, at our best, for one another.  The More Loving One Looking up at the stars, I know quite we...

Trump's tariffs are imbecilic.  If they ever go into effect as designed they stand to do the whole world economy an enormous amount of harm. Even if they are reversed quickly by one route or another, -- not just put off for 90 day intervals but reversed -- they stand to do harm, because these things are not simply a switch easy to turn on and off and on again.   But let us think about a simple bilateral example of this stupidity for a moment. Trump proposes to create a "reciprocal" tariff of 47% on imports from Madagascar, to go into effect when the latest "pause" comes to an end. Why? On some level (the one that justifies the word "reciprocal") he seems to want us to believe that Madagascar at present has a 47% tariff, or greater, on the US, so it is the least we can do on behalf of fairness.  You will likely not be surprised to learn that that is not the case.  About 40% of imports to Madagascar require payment of a 20% customs duty.  Not 47%. Not ev...

  A few days ago I encountered in Brian Leiter's blog a mention of a philosopher named  Paul Studtmann.  The mention was incidental, but enough to make me wonder who he was. Here is the answer. https://www.davidson.edu/people/paul-studtmann  and here is a book of his, available through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Empiricism-Problem-Metaphysics-Paul-Studtmann/dp/0739142550/ Studtmann is a critic of metaphysics on what seem to be Kantian grounds.  Here are some words from a review of the book pictured above.  Graham Oddie of the University of Colorado says that Studtmann's argument against the tenability of metaphysics involves "a multitude of startingly original theses, such as that all so called a priori knowledge is knowledge of the results of effective procedures, and is not really a priori at all. Like Hume, Wittgenstein and Carnap before him, Studtmann aims to leave empirical science, logic and mathematics intact while cutting a broad swathe throug...

  As most of you probably know, dear readers.... Elon Musk is the man behind Starlink. Starlink is a constellation of satellites of a sort critical to internet operation -- to the global and near-instantaneous character of it that we have come to take for granted. That constellation is the property of Starlink Services LLC. The parent company is SpaceX.  The founder and CEO of SpaceX is ... Elon Musk.  Also, as you probably know, Musk has become a big figure in US politics of late.  We will skip further explanation and simply say that the European powers want an alternative provider of satellite internet services.    Starlink, meet your new commercial and geopolitical competitor ... Eutelsat Communications. the company is based in Paris, France. Its chief executive is Eva Berneke, a Danish engineer.  It is Germany that is at present making a fair amount of noise about using Eutelsat as a way of freeing Europe (and Europe's eastern frontier, Ukraine) fr...

 I will assume familiarity with my earlier discussions of this issue. The law of the excluded middle, or LEM, we have found, is useful.  But the most commonly cited reason for taking an absolutist view of LEM is not persuasive.   So we are ready to modify LEM when there seems to be good reason to do so, whether in the direction of truth gluts or in that of truth gaps.  Today we arrive at politics.  There is a common argument in political philosophy that depends on the notion of aggression, or the first use of force, as itself always wrong. I think that it is fair to say that every state structure in the world depends on the consent of large portions of the population, in this sense the legitimacy, of a lot of actions that can fairly be described as the first use of force.  Without more, it looks like we must reach anarchistic conclusions: every state structure is wrong.  That was never a argument of which I was fond, even when I was an anarchist o...

I never realized this before.  Came upon it in some random reading.   The term "solecism," for ungrammatical speech, comes from the name Solon, the sage and law-giver.  How?  Well, the City of Soli in Cilicia is said to be named for Solon. Soli is a good distance from Athens -- it is in the southeastern corner of Asia Minor, near Lebanon. And Athenian settlers to Soli gradually lost the purity (as Athenians saw it) of their speech of that dialect of Greek.  Thus: one who speaks in any manner oddly would in time be accused of uttering solecisms.  I don't know what to do with that fact but I record it here. 

On the final day in March, Marine Le Pen, a Trump-style French politician and a Member of the European Parliament, was convicted along with eight other MEPs of misappropriating more than  €4 million of the funds of the EP for the coffers of Le Pen's political party, known as the National Front.  With luck, she has now been consigned to the dustbin of history.  Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison and a five-year ban on running for political office. So unless she can reverse that she will not be in the running for France's next President in 2027.  Wow.  A country where you can NOT be President after being convicted of a felony.  What a concept! I guess we cannot import that idea because ... the new US tariffs. Importing any damned thing is getting expensive!    

The curse becomes a blessing.  According to the website Interesting Engineering,  Japan's Atomic Energy Agency has created a rechargeable battery using uranium -- depleted uranium -- as the active material in lieu of lead or lithium. The report said that the experimental battery achieved a voltage of 1.3, less than but within hailing distance of the 1.5V of a standard alkaline battery. As to rechargeability, "the battery was charged and discharged 10 times and the performance of the battery was almost unchanged," said the website.  Cool. If this means a new plentiful source of battery stuff, it means cheaper prices for batteries down the road, and THAT has got to be a good thing.  Except for a nagging point: isn't the depleted uranium supposed to be dangerous?  Isn't that why there has been so much of a to-do made for decades now about where it is supposed to be stored? I'm not sure "inside batteries" is an answer that will appeal to everyone.  ht...

  Those who would read the following should really have first read the first part, posted here on March 28th.  I'm going to dive into the middle of material today without reviewing that.  Ready? Let's go. How have defenders of a middle choice (between true and false, EVEN for some well-formed propositions) defended that possibility against C.I. Lewis' critique? Well, to begin, they note that any effort to prove something involves premises.  To the extent that the law itself (we will call it LEM for short) is supposed -- as it is supposed by many -- to be a foundational premise in logic, it of course cannot be proven.  If Lewis has actually proven LEM, it must have been by discovering other deeper premises, and turning LEM into a lemma, so to speak, a steppingstone on the path from some important truths to others. In fact, the Lewis "explosion argument" takes it as a premise that every sentence entails the disjunction of itself and any other sentence. This is kno...

Mary Shepherd is 'having a moment' and I am out of sympathy. Yes, I agree that many women have been written out of the history of philosophy because the history is written by men.  I agree that it is worth our while to reverse this trend and recover the contributions of neglected women where we can.  But Mary Shepherd, an early 19th century British thinker best known for an essay on the relation between cause and effect, doesn't really fill the bill here. In response to Hume, Shepherd wrote thus: "We cannot imagine a beginning of existence to be wholly unconnected with any thing that went before it; and this is sufficient to refute the notion, that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind." She thus infers the necessity of causal relations from our inability to imagine the contrary.  This sort of thing reminds me of the scenes in The Princess Bride, where the bad guy Vizzini keeps assuring his confederates that ...

Softbank, the great Japan based holding company (not a bank), has agreed to buy Ampere Computing, an important chipmaker based in California.  According to a report from Reuters, this is an all-cash transaction, for $6.5 billion on the barrelhead. Now: I would not have you draw the conclusion, "the smart money is getting into chips, maybe I too ought to be getting into chips!" Softbank hasn't always been all that 'smart' in its use of money, I'm afraid.    Softbank was, for example, a big investor in WeWork, the company that gave some excitement and Silicon Valley gloss to the idea of shared working spaces.  The business plan was simple: enter into long-term leases for a lot of office space, and rent it at for shorter terms and higher rent.  WeWork looked good in the period 2010-2019. It was a private company and could keep most of its cards close to its vest.  Then it decided that there was money to be made in an IPO. But a public offering requires complia...

 "The plan required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability." Or maybe (if like certain friends of the Dude you're not into the whole concision thing), "The plan, like all good plans, required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability: precision, because there is a future to control; adaptability, because there is a past to contain."   I woke one morning recently with that sentence, in those and other variants, in my mind pressing for escape. I either had to write something down or consign it all to the waters of Lethe as my day commenced.