Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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.