Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Jeanne Darc, known in the English speaking world as Joan of Arc was executed (burned) on this day, May 30, in 1431. Nearly a full six centuries ago, but still a thought that makes me woozy.  One odd fact that doesn't help at all: in 1456 an inquisitorial court reinvestigated Joan's alleged offenses and overturned the earlier verdict. The latter court said that the proceedings a quarter century before had been tainted with error.  https://archive.org/details/joanofarcherstor00pern/ Oddly enough, Joan's ashes were not re-animated by this vindication. 

  The oft-used word "sustainability" states an ideal.  It would seem to be a simple one, even a low bar.  Can the human species sustain itself on this planet?  Do our practices sustain our planet's ability to host us?  Three years ago the University of Alberta put the point this way: " Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." At the same time, "artificial intelligence" is on everyone's lips. Nothing about the near future seems more certain than that there will be ever higher levels of AI there, doing ever more and ever-more complicated tasks. So, let us promote the battle of the finance world buzzwords, by asking: is AI sustainable?  What is the ever-increasing dependence of the human race on self-teaching complexes of algorithm going to do to the environment in which we live?  The reason for asking? AI uses up a lot of power.  A story that appears recently in MIT N...

For my day job, I recently wrote an article on the use of artificial intelligence within a certain specialized field of investing. I won't tell you what the investments in question were. Rather, I'd like to make a point about AI that I learned, or at least came to appreciate more fully, while working on this piece. One of my interviewees for the story told me this,      “For many people, AI is still a black box.  But the source of the innovation, and of the resulting errors, is in principle simple: a random number generator. This is attached to a machine-learning system that reins in that randomness according to a model of what is realistic and what is not.” So: randomness is critical to AI, just as it is critical to, say, biological evolution. Random variations give the process of natural selection some clay to shape. In the AI context, this notion of AI as a box containing a random number generator which has to be restrained reminds me of Goldilock's love of ...

    An astonishing display of ignorance by a US cabinet member played out in a hearing room on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 20. The ignoramus in question was Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, testifying before the Senate Committee on ... homeland security.   Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire asked Noem what the phrase "habeas corpus" means. Digression here.  As a matter of simple translation, that Latin phrase means in English "you have the body".  The phrase is significant in Anglo-American jurisprudence because we are to think of it as directed to a warden or jailor, "You have the body of John Doe in your custody, now you are required to come to court and explain why you are holding that body and whether you should be allowed to continue to do so." In other words, "habeas corpus" is the name for a venerable proceeding that limits unlawful detention by requiring such public explanations.  Digression complete.  Secretary Noem...

  Credit soundness affirmed. Israel can continue to finance its war.   This month, S&P Global -- the company formerly known as Standard & Poor's', the bond rating giant -- affirmed the long and short term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings of the state of Israel at A/A-1.  Of course, since they aren't idiots, the authors of this report observed that prolonged or intensified military conflict can negatively impact fiscal soundness and balance-of-payments performance.  So the resumed military operations in Gaza and 'ongoing military activities' in Lebanon and Syria, could lead to a ratings deterioration. The time for that deterioration is not yet, though.  But the report also says that Israel has  strong fiscal fundamentals (which means it has a sufficiently productive economy to create tax debtors and it is good at collecting from them), which have gifted it with a  net external asset position  and a current account su...

You may be excused for not knowing the name, dear reader.  But Sheldon Leonard Bershad was an important figure in Hollywood for decades.  He was a ubiquitous character actor in the 1940s, playing the bartender Nick in A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) for example, and playing Cyprian Boyle, a pirate, in CAPTAIN KIDD the following year. You can find his name in the above movie poster, although you may have to look closely for it there. By the mid 1950s Bershad had moved behind the camera, becoming a successful movie and television producer.  Very successful, especially on television. He produced MAKE ROOM FOR DADDY, THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, GOMER PYLE USMC and others.   In the second season of the show THE MONKEES, there is a sort of tribute to Sheldon Leonard Bershad, and in fact to his role as a pirate.  In the eighth episode of that season a character named "Sheldon Leonard" approaches Peter Tork and persuades him to trade in his guitar for ... a treasure map! ...

From the history of ancient philosophy that we discussed yesterday we now turn to the history of modern philosophy, because a distinguished intellectual historian concerned with the latter subject, and associated with the University of Notre Dame, passed away recently and we should note the fact. Karl Ameriks is best known for his work interpreting Immanuel Kant in particular and German idealism more generally. He is known as a critic of a strict anti-realist view of Kant (or of that broader tradition). Kant is less of an anti-realist than, say, George Berkeley, on his account.  Not just a different sort of anti-realist, but less of one.  To explain the relative degrees of anti-realism he had in mind, Ameriks invoked a distinction between "long" arguments and "short" arguments for idealism.  Here is a short argument: Any experience I have must be an experience of mine. That which is mine is subjective -- i.e. it depends upon me. Therefore, any experience I have is s...

  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about Diogenes Laertius' work on the "lives and opinions" of the classical philosophers. I will continue that discussion now.  In book six, our Diogenes gets around to someone else of the same name, Diogenes of Sinope [the cynic]. I am fascinated by the proximity of the following two sentences. A man once proved to him syllogistically that he had horns, so he put his hand to his forehead and said 'I do not see them.' And in a similar manner he applied to one who had been asserting that there is no such thing as motion, by getting up and walking away. This little passage confirms the point I made in the earlier post about Diogenes L's utter lack of creative impulse.  No pausing to explain, no over-arching narrative. Just one damned thing after another.  More important I have no idea who our Diogenes was mentioning in the first of those sentences, i.e. what argument Diogenes of Sinope had encountered. Was there any standar...

Supplemental briefs in the matter of KENNEDY v. BRAIDWOOD MANAGEMENT arrived at the US Supreme Court Monday, May 5. The court had requested them subsequent to oral argument on the case, which is itself unusual.  KENNEDY is the latest in a line of cases challenging the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Specifically, this case involves the ACA's creation of the Preventive Services Task Force, a body that passes on which preventive medical services must be covered by compliant insurance plans.  Braidwood, a small Christian owned business in Texas, doesn't want to be required to pay so its employees can be protected from HIV infection. Braidwood says that the coverage mandates raise an issue under the appointments clause, Art. II, section 1, clause 2. This clause distinguishes between "officers of the United States" on the one hand and "inferior officers" on the other. Officers of the United States must be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the...

Ignore that Theranos image.  Today's subject is a series of television ads promoting Xfinity's wifi capability that uses "boomtown" as a theme.  Wifi is "booming," we are told.   I am amused by the use of stereotypical examples of other historic booms. There are gold prospectors (a/k/a the '49ers), -- oil barons (suggestive of the source of Clampett family wealth that fueled its collective relocation to LA) and "tech founders" (a contemporary plague, though these boomtown tech founders have a dotcom/ '90s look). The company offering us these vignettes, XFinity, is suggesting that the new gold is wifi, and that they have staked their claim. AdWeek did a sympathetic writeup of the "Boomtown" ads.  As to the "tech founders" portrayed in the ad, there is a bit of dialog that is deliberately obscure.  Two stereotypical Silicon Valley types are in the same room, a man and a woman.  He asks her a question and she answers with w...

  One interpretation of certain of Nietzsche's somewhat cryptic comments is that the idea of equality -- that my life is worth as much as yours, or in a variant that no quantitative comparison can or should be made  between  my life's value and yours -- is a religious presumption at heart. It depends upon the background notion that we are all alike creatures of the same Creator and it will not long outlast the death of that idea. In that spirit, Brian Leiter has recently written a paper on the connection of ideas in Nietzsche's work. You can download it  via SSRN.  Or read a précis on his blog at typepad. Here's what may be the money quote (taken from that blog): Consider the Nietzschean Trolley Problem (apologies for anachronism): a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks towards Beethoven, before he has even written the Eroica symphony; by throwing a switch, you can divert the trolley so that it runs down five (or fifty) ordinary people, non-entities (say ...

One-time imperial power and the one-time jewel in that old crown.  It is good to see amity between the United Kingdom and India. They have a new trading accord.  This may be a matter of considerable significance for the ongoing transformation of world trade. Not only are these two powerhouse economies, but this deal may be part of a pattern. Negotiations had been on a back burner for years,  But, when the President of the US started talking about how we need only two out of every 30 imported dolls -- or whatever -- the rest of the world had to think about work-arounds.  "Who can we sell to when the US stops buying from us?  Who will we buy from while we are holding up our end of a trade war with them?" Accordingly, the Brit/Indian deal went to the front burner in recent months.  This one may have some special resonance for those fascinated by the history of the US, because we know that in 1861 Lincoln told the Brits they could no longer import cotton from t...

  Ammonia is "having a moment" as a possible alternative fuel. Hydrogen had a moment a while back, but it has faded, and now ... the green-hype machine has turned to ammonia.  It is possible to burn ammonia, and to do work thereby.  Further, ammonia is a molecule with no carbon atom, so a machine that burns ammonia won't be emitting any carbon dioxide.  One big problem though, is this: ammonia is also a critical fertilizer. As in ... ammonia is poured onto the soil to help produce our food supply. Is it really a good idea to create a new use for ammonia, one that we are to regard as critical to saving the planet, that will compete with the fertilizer use?  thereby driving up the price of ... food? I am reminded of the days, now long ago, when biofuels were having a moment.  This amounted to using corn to make booze and then mixing the booze with gasoline, as a gas-extender.  That still happens as it was entered into law, BUT nobody any longer thinks of...

Again: I'd like to transfer here something I wrote for Quora. (How many times have I done this? Well, there will likely be more.)   Someone there asked, "What can an atheist gain from studying Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas?" I responded: Interestingly, Bertrand Russell -- a very outspokenly atheistic philosopher and historian of philosophy -- had great respect for St. Augustine as a philosopher. Perhaps his example answers your question. As you may know: one of the common arguments by pagan philosophers in Augustine's day, used against monotheism and views of creation ex nihilo, was this: there must have been a specific moment when God decided to create the world, and there must have been an infinity of moments of time before that. These Christians seem to believe that God made the creation decision at any arbitrary time during His self-sufficient aloneness. How is such a view sustainable?  Augustine answers that argument with a theory of time. He said that...

Casey DeSantis may once (in the distant days of late 2023) have possessed some hope that she would become First Lady of the United States. Now, though, the First Lady of Florida has adjusted her expectations and wants only to become the Governor of her own state. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5267460-florida-first-lady-casey-desantis-controversy/ As with her husband, Ron, though, so with Casey: nomination has to come before election.  Before she contends with the Democratic Party nominee, she has to contend with her fellow Republicans. And in that respect, she is encountering some turbulence.  She raised her profile early in her first-ladyship, with a program called "Hope Florida -- A pathway to prosperity" in 2021, a program implemented by the Florida Department of Children and Families.    The goal of the program is to maintain a network of private sector non-profit and faith based groups that will help individual Floridians develop the resources, skills, o...

There was a time when this would have been a HUUUGE scandal.  Now it is I gather just the sort of thing that happens.  Still: I will note it here.  There is reason to believe that White House officials have leaked highly material information, to which they had privileged access, to Wall Street firms: that is, that they assisted insider trading. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have long opposed the criminalization of insider trading. I have taken a sympathetic view of defendants on related charges from Michael Milken to Martha Stewart. Still, if we are going to have such laws on the book, there is no good case for giving an immunity to White House officials or the President himself.  Heck, there isn't even the BAD reason that the Supreme Court cooked up recently in another context for giving the President immunity. Their reason may not apply here on its face. But just to avoid a digression, let us focus on the staff involvement that seems to have been inv...

I regaled you last week with a couple of simple points from a book written in the early 200s of the Common Era, Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS.  The two points were these: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature in the manner of the Ionians. Separately, Socrates may have been a dramatist, who assisted in writing some of the works normally attributed to Euripides. If accepted as true (I don't think they are -- I have read a fair amount of discussion of Socrates without encountering ether of them) -- but IF accepted as true, do they change our understanding of the Athenian Enlightenment in any important way? Well ... perhaps. One of the bromides of Socrates scholarship is that before his time philosophy was about Nature writ large, the essence of the Cosmos. (Is everything water? is it air? fire? atoms? something else?). Through Socrates, philosophy came to encompass also a microcosm, the human soul and its virtues and vices. ...

 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...