Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

By now you have all seen the footage. Elon Musk, amidst the pageantry of the so-called "indoor parade" after the inauguration of a President -- Musk showed his own view of our new chief executive by offering him a long familiar sort of salute.  Then, to make it clear that this was no accidental expression of exuberance, he turned around and did it again. He wanted to make sure we all saw the Sieg Heil gesture. [Also, look at that facial expression: neither accidental nor exuberant.]  Nor has he denied that this is what he was doing.  Others have denied it for him. But he has not denied it.  He has said that "they" shouldn't make such a big deal of it.  That is not a denial.  “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” he wrote. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” I am happy to speak for a moment as one of the "they" who think this a big deal.  We don't think you're Hitler, dude. We think you're Hugo Ferdinand Boss.  The German cl...

  “Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented." That is from Josiah Royce.  We do tend to think of philosophers as "representing" -- as Socrates represents Periclean Athens and Leibniz represents the fragmented condition of the German speaking world as the Holy Roman Empire sank into irrelevance. Heck, the metaphysics of monadology might be linked to the inner-directedness of the various principalities of that world. Royce's statement was not plainly wrong though it may constitute an overstatement. The source of the quote is The Problem of Christianity (1913). For much of the book Royce follows the practice of philosophers as he defined it.  That is, he takes himself to be a representative of a Christian civilization and he explores Christian theological concepts: sin, atonement, saving grace.  B...

The US and Colombia nearly began a trade war on January 26-27. Colombia refused to take in planeloads of migrants that the Trump administration has decided belong there. Trump announced ginormous tariffs on Colombian exports to the US [the legal traffic -- chiefly this means coffee and cut flowers] and after some mutual posturing Colombia backed down.  The migrants will go 'back' to Colombia.  [I am not at all confident that is where they came from -- no vestige of due process or diligent inquiry seems to have been involved. But I'll ignore that right now.] What about those cut flowers?  There has been a fair amount of commentary about how US florists and their customers have dodged a bullet.  Prices will not skyrocket just before Valentines Day, after all. Whew.  EXCEPT.  That isn't how it works.  Prices at the retail level tend to react to risks of supply chain obstruction.  They don't wait for the reality of the obstruction to show up.  Tr...

  Continuing with our precis of Buzan and Waver's REGIONS AND POWERS... we come to the discussion of sub-Saharan Africa. One finds a good summary of their view of the security climate in that vast area here: "[After decolonization] the African state system mostly did not follow the Westphalian model into military rivalry and interstate war. Instead, it developed three almost postmodern features: (1) a loose ideology of pan-Africanism; (2) a continental institution, the OAU, which at an early stage pre-empted what could have been a drift toward rival territorial claims by institutionalizing the rule that there would be no forceful changing if the postcolonial boundaries ...; (3) a willingness to experiment with a variety of regional institutions."  The phrase "the Westphalian model" refers to the principles of the Peace of Westphalia that took in effect in Europe in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years' War.  It formalized the end of feudalism, and made the Ho...

A few days back (Dec. 26, a day traditionally associated with two turtle doves) I offered two arguments against mind-body dualism and promised a response to each of them.  Soon thereafter, I responded to the first of them. I explained why I believe that an argument from naturalistic continuity would not necessarily render impossible an emergence at some period in paleontological history.  BUT [to get to the promised argument against dualism] for well over a century now evidence has been building up that there is indeed causation, and one can make a case that the cause-effect arrow runs in only one direction. Neuronal electrical activity is the cause of whatever I may report about such ideas. In that context I didn't really review the evidence/arguments, but acknowledged that there are plenty of sources if you want to pursue them.  If we believe that neuronal electrical activity is the necessary and sufficient cause of everything we tend to call 'mental,' we are left eithe...

Let us continue through the regional security complexes of the globe with the authors of REGIONS AND POWERS as our guides. The Middle East is an RSC. Buzan and Waever divide it into three parts (subcomplexes) -- from east to west these are: the Persian Gulf, the Levant, and the Maghreb. The Maghreb -- Libya, Tunisia, Morocco etc. -- seems to these authors' rather uninteresting, although it figures of necessity in ideological movements of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic coloration. The Persian Gulf and the Levant are, as one might expect from students of international security, quite fascinating to our authors.  I will offer three quotes on the Middle East from this book. p. 198, "Having itself exposed the weakness of Britain and France in 1956, thus hastening their departure from the region, the United States was drawn into the vacuum. To the extent that Soviet successes had linked communism and Arab radicalism in US thinking, Israel's resounding success in the 1967 established it...

  Something you have no need to know. How I send attachments to colleagues. I don't know why it has gotten so complicated but it has.   Typically I complete a file in a MS Word folder. Then I go to my email page, write a cover letter for the article, and attach the file thereto.  Ah, easy. Right?   Well, the attaching turns out to be complicated, or at least multi-part.  To attach (in the manner my co-workers want) I hit the "Insert" tab above the email.  That causes a new set of tabs to appear, and I hit "Attach File" there. That produces a drop-down menu, and I hit "OneDrive".  That creates another box, most of which is a list of recent files completed or added to the folder.  On the left hand side of that box is a column giving me other actions in the event the file I want isn't showing.  Often, the one I want (when its completion is very recent) is not yet showing.  I don't know whether patiently waiting would work.  I...

  On the 10th of the month, the US Supreme Court heard arguments on "whether the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" violates the First Amendment.  One week later, the Supreme Court issued per curiam opinion with no dissents upholding the law. Sotomayor and Gorsuch each filed a concurrence.  By way of reminder: this case arose because President Trump, in his first administration, sought to make it impossible for TikTok to continue in the US. He purported to ban it by executive order. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/ But a district court judge struck down the ban on the ground that there would have to be a statutory mandate.   Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a statutory mandate, and that is the law that (oddly, with Trump's blessing) the PRC backed management of TikTok was seeking to have declared unconstitutional on first amendment ground...

  I will assume a reader's familiarity with the first two panels of this ongoing discussion of a book by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever. With our authors, we turn now to the east of Asia, the Pacific rim. Looking with the eyes of these scholars affiliated respectively with the London School of Economics and the University of Copenhagen, let us start with this quote.  [p. 145.] "After the east Asian economic crisis in 1997, the succession crisis facing Indonesia became critical, and at the time of writing it was far from clear whether the muddled shift to electoral politics would be able to handle the turbulent mix of economic disaster, secession, (East Timor, Aceh, Irian Jaya) and recurrent bouts of communal violence in various places. Indonesia had all the appearance of a crumbling empire, and its internal disarray and weak leadership contributed to the paralysis of ASEAN, which was already burdened by both over-ambitious expansion and the impact of the regional economic crisis....

That is a photo of a graveyard.  Included here for no reason.  Consider it an arbitrary visual.  At Quora, I was asked recently whether Democrats are "mentally incapable of understanding that the purpose of tariffs is precisely to make foreign products more expensive in order to make domestic products more competitive?" I answered for you, Democratic friends. ------------------------------------------------------------- friends.  There is room for some confusion, in part because our Dear Leader himself seems to have multiple ideas about what “THE purpose” of tariffs is. Tariffs are such wonderful things, in his view, that they can serve many purposes. In part, yes, he does seem to want to encourage what some economists call “import substitution,” where buyers in an importing nation learn to bring their own supply chain within the borders. But: no one has ever postulated that import substitution is a smooth or costless process, and Trump is not leveling with us about ...

In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year.  It makes, I think, an impressive list.  But it will naturally raise questions.... 1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36.  Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole.  2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense?  This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those ...

The phrase "bursting of the hydrogen bubble" itself sounds amusing --- as if one is making a pun on bubble in the literal and in the financial/metaphorical senses of the term.  But, then, I might just be too easy to amuse.  My thoughts here are about the financial sense and the hydrogen industry as a candidate for major post-fossil-fuels world, energy space.  The underlying idea is that hydrogen is the key to storing and transporting energy from the more intermittent renewables. Solar power isn't incoming on cloudy days; wind power isn't helpful when the air is still. But either the sun or the wind can be used to split water into its constituent parts and store the hydrogen side of that split.  The stored and transportable gas can then be used for a lot of projects that otherwise would involve the emission of carbon. It can be used for shipping, aviation, the creation of ammonia and methanol, and fuel cells.  That's the theory anyway. In practical terms, the ...

More on the book on RSC Theory I discussed here a bit as my New Years' Day entry. [By way of review, RSC Theory means a theory of international relations that looks at the globe from the bottom up -- from the circumstance of particular regions regarded as each a "security complex" in its own right, to their relationship with each other and so to the Big Global Picture. This, as expounded in the 2003 book REGIONS AND POWERS, is in accord with the old Machiavellian realist approach to the subject and averse to top-down views such as the "end of history" or "clash of civilizations" theorists.]  I'd like to quote a striking passage about matters of cause and effect in this book. "For much of history, only one scenario appears as relevant ... because development has turned onto one of the tracks that becomes self-reinforcing. At crucial moments of historical change, the situation is open and several scenarios become possible, though, as we have see...

Early last year I promised to keep on eye out for five then-upcoming high-profile trials.  They were:  Apple v. Dept of Justice; Nevada v. Telles, Illinois v. Crimo; Trump's hush-money case; RealPage (the property management software concern). Today I will catch up on each of them.   1. There has been no APPLE trial yet.  US District Court Judge Julien Xavier Neals has a motion to dismiss under advisement and some news is expected soon on whether the trial will proceed and on what schedule.  2. The TELLES case has been resolved. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in August, and he was sentenced in October to 28 years in prison.  3. Robert CRIMO, suspect in the Highland Park 4th-of-July-parade shootings, backed out of a plea deal this summer.  Near year's end, the Judge denied a motion to exclude much of him interrogation video. A trial is expected shortly. 4. Donald TRUMP's hush money case? That one went to trial (you may have heard). ...

Perhaps the real golden age of philosophy is quite recent.Perhaps it is a mere "bag of shells" into our living past.  My thesis is that the real golden age in (western) philosophy occurred between the years 1880 and 1920. Between two Dayton brothers' receipt of a patent on the cash register in the former year and consolidation of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia with their Civil War victories of the latter year. ["Western" above very much includes Russian. It does not include Japanese, though, so the works of Kitaro Nishida, though written within this period, and discussed on this blog not long ago, will not be highlighted on the list below.]  Here are some of the outstanding works of philosophy and of philosophy-adjacent intellectual and creative fields, published in this forty-one year period 1880 - 1920 within the West. Most are books, some are poems, articles or lectures. I have not made any typographical distinction among them. Each seminal work is named i...

  On a social media site that shall be nameless, another participant asked me what are my three favorite Christmas songs. I answered quickly, without over-thinking it, but while trying to show some range among the many different kinds of song, and eras of song-writing, in the genre. I answered: Snoopy's Christmas (1967) Have yourself a merry little Christmas (1944) I heard the bells on Christmas Day (1863/1956). "I heard the bells..." has two dates on this modest list because it began life as a poem by Longfellow.  When Johnny Marks composed the tune most of us have heard, so that Bing Crosby could sing this poem to the world, Crosby cracked wise.  "I see you've finally gotten yourself a decent lyricist, Johnny." Anyway: I have since been thinking too much about my list of three.  In the lyrics of none of them does one find any reference either to Santa or to Jesus. My list avoid both commercialism and specifics of faith.  Two out of my three choices invo...

Antithenes: if one is going to claim any familiarity with the Platonic moment in philosophy, with the moment that produced but did not yet contain Cynicism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, one needs to know the name Antithenes.  He was one of Socrates' followers, and so of very much the same philosophic milieu as Plato.  But Antithenes went the other way on the issue of universals. He may even be said to be the founder of nominalism, saying thing like, "A horse I can see, but horsehood I cannot see."  Too little in known about him.  We do know, though, that the later Cynics claimed him as a spirit kindred to their own. They would tell a story of Diogenes of Sinope, as a young man, following Antithenes around to bask in his wisdom. This tale seems unlikely.  It was invented to give the Cynics a sort of apostolic succession from Socrates, who by Diogenes' day was seen as the gold standard of philosophical greatness by a number of distinct factions. Socrates to Antithene...

Yes, Big Pharma is a suitable target for resistance, even Resistance. A lot of people agree about this -- pretty near every adult American not on the payroll of Big Pharma and even many who are on those payrolls would agree with this. And so we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr ready to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Aside from his family name and connections, this is the one point of appeal about RFK Jr.: not that he once hid a dead bear in Central Park in an elaborate ruse, not that he is a licensed master falconer, not even that there is a dead critter in his head ... but that he is an enemy of Big Pharma. But we ought to try to be clear at the expense of that unlikely appeal. For many of us, the big problem that MAKES IT SO is not that Big Pharma invents imaginary ills in order to sell drugs that create real ills. No ... the big problem is that Big Pharma abuses IP law so that it gets to jack up the prices of drugs that are genuinely valuable. Not that its products a...

I haven't been reading books at all like THIS since I was a political science major at an undergrad college in the late 1970s. Barry Buzan & Ole Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge UK 2003). I've discussed the underlying idea before on this blog.  Buzan and Waever pursue RSC Theory, a form of international relations realism that focuses on states as primarily members of regional groupings. My previous comments on the theory were offered at second hand. Now I'm finally reading the theorists themselves. I propose to write a series of posts on the subject, beginning with this one (hence the Roman numeral in the title). Start with this.  "A handful of states at the top of the power leagues play a truly global game, treating each other as a special class, and projecting their power into far-flung regions. But for the great majority of states, the main game of security is defined by their near neighbors....The binding theme of ...