Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I invoked one novel of Henry James (1843 - 1916) in my "golden age" list a few weeks back. It was THE SACRED FOUNT. Here is some Wikipedia-type stuff about it.  The novel was published in 1901. It was his 16th novel. By length it might almost be considered a novella.  THE SACRED FOUNT was a departure for James, for several reasons, starting with the first person narration.  Something he never had used before and never would again.  There is also the pagination. All Roman numerals, from beginning to end.  One is accustomed to Roman numbers in a preface and then Arabic numerals for the volume proper.  But in this case, the Romans only end when the book does (at page cxcii). The mental energy required to translate that into 192 is a small thing, but not nothing and presumably contributes to a desired effect.  The plot? As far as outward events go, the plot is simply this.  Our unnamed narrator, a man, takes a train to a party, apparently held on a la...

Most of the atoms in the world are either hydrogen or helium. Hydrogen, of course, is the simplest of atoms. One electron circling one proton.  The Ockham's razor of atoms.  Helium is what you get when a lot of hydrogen atoms are tightly compressed together in a star.  It is the consequence of the process of fusion in that context.  What about all the other elements? Most of them can be explained as themselves also the products of nuclear fusion in the stars, increasingly rare as they get heavier. But there are a few elements that scientists think require a more complicated explanation, and gold is one of these.  These problem elements are neutron heavy and they could only have come into existence in an environment that allows rapid neutron capture, known as "the r process." The usual theory has been, for decades now, that the r-process is created when neutron stars merge with each other, since a dense soup of neutrons, is the most plausible source for gold and ...

  Crude oil is selling for about $75 a barrel. To be precise, as of 22 June 2025 the price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate was $73.84. The price of a barrel of Brent crude was $77.01.  [We do not need to concern ourselves now with the question of why there is a difference.]   This is at the high end of the 'Texas tea' recent trading range but does not represent any break-out.  Interestingly, there was no sharp move in response to the election last year of a President of the United States devoted to a platform of "drill baby drill". MAGA ideology might suggest that all the new running-room for the domestic oil industry should produce expectations of an abundance of the black gold, leading to a sharp fall in prices on supply demand grounds.  But no -- those transactions within the $65 to $75 rage just kept on rolling. Also, if the markets expected a full-on war around the Persian Gulf and, say, the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz the prices f...

News from Down Under.  (It has nothing to do with kangaroos but I like the photo.)  Healthscope, Australia's second-largest private hospital operator, entered receivership in late May due to severe financial stresses. It will continue to operate but with the expectation of a restructuring.  Australia has a dual healthcare system, public and private, both as to payments and as to the institutions of care.  A public system, 'Medicare,' covers everyone for doctor visits, hospital stays and some medical tests,  It also pays a portion of many prescription medications. There is much that Medicare doesn't cover, including dental physiotherapy and ambulance services.  There are also distinct public and private hospitals.    Some Australians take the public.private balance to be itself a value worth preserving.  The president of the Australian Medical Association told a reporter recently that the balance between the two is "what makes our healthcare s...

Advice from and for the benefit of some of my colleagues.  Compiled by the Committee to Protect Journalists after they spent some time watching some members of our guild getting hit by rubber bullets during the recent unpleasantness in Los Angeles.   -------------------------------- Are you a journalist covering US protests? Here are 5 key safety tips: ✅Always try to work with a colleague and have a regular check-in procedure with an editor, colleague, family member, or friend. ✅If there is a risk of violence or tear gas, wear personal protective equipment that includes a helmet, eye protection, and respirator. ✅If possible, avoid carrying your personal phone. Journalists carrying their personal phones should review its contents and remove sensitive information, including contacts and apps. ✅Write down on paper or your arm the contact details of key people, such as your editor, a trusted colleague, and a legal contact, in case you are detained and your devices are taken....

The European Union has decreed that Apple must share information with its rivals,  Alphabet and Meta,  also known as Google and Facebook.  The sharing is supposed to produce "interoperability" per the EU's Digital Markets Act. This helps companies that rely on the App store to distribute their products.  Apple has filed an appeal.  I'm sure this is all very significant though I have nothing very profound to say about it now, except that it reminds me of the US debate about "net neutrality" a few years back. 

I am at work on a newsletter about public affairs, chiefly though not exclusively in the US.  I am thinking of the above as a logo. At least until the moment I receive a lawyer's letter telling me to cease and desist.  The title of the newsletter is to be "Center and Margins," not for any deep philosophical reason but simply with the thought that I want to divide my attention as a newsletter author between matters already at the center of public attention and matters ... well ... on the margins.  Indeed, my plan at the moment is to divide attention geometrically, with the left side of each page devoted to a 'center' issue, the right side devoted to marginal matters.  At any rate, if you dear reader want to receive this once-a-month newsletter, [free of course], simply contact me at christopherfaille@gmail.com and let me know to what email address you would like it sent. Blog readers will notice some familiar material re-used in the newsletter. In the first issue, ...

   Due to wiring problems in this building, or the civilized world's annoying habit of changing its clocks twice a year, I regularly do get the thrill of re-setting the digital timepieces in this apartment. Easy-piesy, in all cases but one.   The clock on the microwave often gives me trouble, and the manual is long gone so I have tended to start afresh, trying out possibilities, every time the situation arises.  No More.  I am going to set it down here so as ever after to be able to use THIS as my manual. First, hold the button that says "clock" down for three seconds.  This gets that display off the "timer" setting onto the proper clock setting. The screen will then give me a choice between the twelve and the 24 hour format. Don't go with 24.  That is annoying.  I was never in the military and though the 'translation' of "1450" into "2:50" is only a little bit of mental energy, it is a bit I'm just as happy to conserve. So t...

For those who are familiar with the saga of the Corleone family: Putin is looking more and more like Moe Green. The attached photo is of the actor who played Moe, Alex Rocco -- though he is not here in character.  Donald Trump, then, is Fredo.  Assigned to be a yes-man and gofer for Moe Putin as a way of keeping Donald Fredo out of trouble.  Yet of course Fredo stepped out of line and took Moe Putin's side in an argument between Moe and his own family, NATO, aka the Corleones.  Michael had to pull Fredo back into line and order up a proper punishment for Moe Putin. The brilliantly executed murder of the movie's Moe, by a single bullet through the eye, has something of a parallel in Ukraine's recent successful strike against a range of Russian military assets deep behind the battle lines.  We could hope for a moment that this would be enough to pull our Donald Fredo back into the service of his true family. But it clearly hasn't.  And it didn't prevent a lat...

  Final thoughts on the material we discussed yesterday.  I no longer identify as an anarcho-capitalist, or even as a libertarian, so I will not affect outrage over the very existence of an excise tax on tanning services.  I will say, though, perhaps with the old instincts kicking in, that there seems to have been an underlying notion when the tax was conceived that the transaction is a suspect one, for public health reasons, and that if some of it is deterred in this way ... well and good. And I still dislike that sort of attitude.  I suspect the general public is well aware that tanning -- at a beach or in a salon -- carries risk of skin cancer.  An adult patronizing a salon is making an informed choice, "yes I am somewhat increasing the risk of cancer, but I'm gonna look really good!"  One is or ought to be free to make that choice. One is or ought to be free to sell services to people who have made that choice. So ... I can see value in Senator Rand Pau...

This seems odd, but no more odd than so much else that is going on around us.  The tanning salon tax may seem a rather small piece in the giant jigsaw of US fiscal issues, but it may prove monumental this year.  It was also only a rather small piece of the legislation in which it first arose, the Affordable Care Act, passed by Congress in 2010 and signed by President Barack Obama. Pne provision there requires that tanning salons using ultraviolet lamps pay an excise tax. The real reason for this was that the guesstimated revenue from that tax made the numbers come out right. The purported reason was that salons cause skin cancer so it is fair to use the proceeds from such a tax to support healthcare programs.   The tax, 10% of the charge, is imposed on consumers by the shops in the same manner as a state sales tax, and the salon pays it to the US Treasury quarterly.      The Trump budget bill, in the firm in which it was unveiled by the Ways and Means ...

 Continuing a thought from last week ... Aristotle is our main source for Zeno's paradoxes. As a side note, there is no mention of a turtle in Aristotle's account of the paradox of Achilles' race with a slower runner. The slower runner is just that.  The paradox began to turn on Achilles against a turtle when Simplicius wrote up his paraphrase.  Simplicius didn't come along and write his commentaries on Aristotle until the early 6th century AD -- three centuries after the flourishing of Diogenes of Laertius.   I am still puzzled that D of L is so scattershot about Zeno and that when he does get around to the argument about motion, gives only one version of it, the idea that something is either at motion in a particular moment or at rest, and that a moving object can't really be either of those.  But let us not go there. Let us go back to Simplicius. I wonder: was he simply paraphrasing Aristotle and adding some zoological pizzazz to it by throwing in the...

  An alien comes to Earth and acquires a human friend. Think Mork and Mindy . But not really. If you're old enough, think of Bill Bixby and Ray Walston and their characters in My Favorite Martian. Anyway, in the story that I will never write the following conversation will inevitably occur. "We have tried to study your planet from ours, and some matters puzzle us." Much about us puzzles us, too.   "Well ... we've noticed a repeated refrain in a lot of contexts. Something like this -- 'After five days come the small warriors.' What does that mean?" Hmmm.  I've never heard that ... ooooh. Do you mean, 'after five days come the week nights'? Alien hits his green forehead with a palm.  "Week nights?????  Not "wee knights"???? 

Our chronicler of classical philosophers, Diogenes Laertius, a source at once indispensable and unreliable, deserves one more blog post from us.  This is so that we can settle the account between Laertius and Zeno of Elea.  I earlier quoted a passage from the Book Six in which there is an account of Diogenes of Sinope and juxtaposition of two observations his biographer namesake attributes to him. "A man once proved to him syllogistically that he has horns, so he put his hand to his forehead and said, 'I do not see them.' And in a similar manner he replied to one who had been asserting  that there was no such thing as motion, by getting up and walking away."  As we've discussed, the sophism of the "horns" arose in the context of Stoicism, and its preference for the hypothetical syllogism rather than the categorical syllogism beloved by Aristotle. The denial of motion is famously due to one Zeno of Elea, although it takes Laertius a looong time to get aro...

Someone asked me on Quora what atheists think about the myth of the cave. I'm not an atheist, but I did have the following possibly responsive thoughts.   The closest candidate for the title of God in THE REPUBLIC itself is the Idea of the Good. In another Platonic work, TIMAEUS, we learn of another figure Plato called the Demiurge, who actively fashioned the world. And the Abrahamic conception of God shared by the three great monotheisms is in effect a combination of Plato’s Idea of the Good and his Demiurge. The Good (upper case) is also the maker of the world, gazing upon it at each stage and saying “it is good" (lower case).  But let us stay within the terms of the allegory of the cave, and so within THE REPUBLIC, as you suggest. A stray creature held as captive in the cave escapes, makes his way out and beholds the realities of the surface world. Then he comes to appreciate the uber-Reality that makes it possible for him to look at those realities, the Sun itself. Fi...

  In order to embarrass a visiting head of state in the Oval Office (which is becoming a habit of his) President Donald Trump showed his 'evidence' of 'white genocide' in the visitor's country, South Arica.  One piece of evidence was a photo of bodybags. Yes, they were real bodybags, and the origin of the shot does involve Africa.... https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/trumps-image-dead-white-farmers-came-reuters-footage-congo-not-south-africa-2025-05-22/ Other than that -- not so much.  One more interesting fact about South Africa -- Trump doesn't seem to know that it is one of the country's referenced by the term BRICS.  BRICS is an intergovernmental group designed as a counterpart to the 'western' world's economic policy group, G-7. The BRICS countries [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] are especially interested in leveraging their cooperation into some sort of alternative to the US dollar as a universal currency, a currency-of-c...