Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.  I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."  It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.  One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that although the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania, alt...

  I have written here before about Henry James' novel, THE SACRED FOUNT.  Today I'll discuss one detail in it.   James offers up a protracted discussion between two characters, each speaking in oddly cryptic fashion, in which they seem to end up stumbling accidentally into a Platonic metaphor -- indeed THE Platonic metaphor, of wisdom as an escape from the darkness of a cave.  The unnamed first-person narrator is talking here to Ford Obert.  They had first run into each other at the train station at the start of this weekend gathering. Obert is sometimes called "Obert RA," signifying in British usage that he is a member of the Royal Academy.  Near the end of the book, Obert has caught up again with narrator to say that he has been thinking about the question they had discussed earlier (to wit, the way the life force can seemingly flow from one member of a couple to another, enervating one and energizing the other). He has found it illuminating.  I...

  Julia Roberts in a psychological thriller: what could be better? I approve of Julia Roberts in just about anything else.  But in AFTER THE HUNT she is wasted, as is the viewer's time.  BBC called it "more of an admirable project than an engaging drama. "  And that is being kind.  Roberts plays a professor of philosophy, at Yale, on the edge of receiving tenure. The stakes are rather low for something marketed as a "thriller": will a #MeToo scandal keep her outside of the magic threshold of academic tenure?  I'll spoil it for you (no harm done, I assure you!), the answer is "yes," at least for a period of five years.  The implication of the final scene -- a flash-forward -- seems to be that her character, Alma, has recovered her upward path five years after the events displayed in the main narrative line.  Back to the mainline. The harassment scandal involves Alma's Platonic but flirtatious man friend, Hank, who is also a candidate for tenure...

 I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism.  My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism.  But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument.  In brief that means: 1) Continuity.  All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...

  When I was a kid, grownups would sometimes advise me that to make my counting approximate the passage of seconds, it would help to say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi...."  Other times, though, they would say that the right phrasing was "one one-thousand, two one-thousand ...." Can both be valid?  Mississippi has four distinct beats.  "One-thousands" only has three.  Wouldn't the latter system yield shorter seconds than the former?  A little experimentation since has found that I do tend to pronounce the four syllables of "Mississippi" roughly as rapidly that the three of "one thousand". Those esses, eh?  One tends to slide right through them.  One the other hand, after the word "one" I reach a full stop then press forward with the "the" sounds.  I think we may say roughly that the space in between the two words acts as a beat, so both expressions are four beats.  One childhood quandary at last resolved at 67...

As I write these words, Robert Roberson still sits on death row.  But he is still alive, and another scheduled date for his execution is in the rear view mirror.   This is what has so far prevented the execution of Roberson. In 2013, Texas enacted a specific legal avenue allowing prisoners to challenge allegedly wrongful convictions by arguing that changes in the field of forensic science have undermined the conviction or, in the alternative have exonerated the prisoner completely.  This is popularly known as the "Junk Science Law" -- formally Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. The "shaken baby syndrome" [or "abusive head trauma"] is the key here. A medical/physical fact like a bruise, a fever, a broken bone  is often consistent with several hypotheses about cause.  No trauma by itself tells us it was the consequence of abuse. That is an inference that, in a criminal trial, the finder of fact, paradigmatically the jury is supposed to d...

  When I was young and foolish, I believed in the story I heard in a sappy song on the radio about the climactic "night Chicago died," the time when Al Capone decided to go down fighting rather than going to prison so he "called his men to war 'gainst the forces of the law". There was no such night.  But it does make a  good story. For those of you young-uns who may never have heard it: you've missed out.  Here's a link.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR0gjl66PVs&list=RDtR0gjl66PVs&start_radio=1 Whatever happened to Paper Lace? 

If I had my druthers -- if I had unlimited resources so money was literally no object -- would I want to abandon the grind of writing on deadlines and for specific assignments?  No. I'm 67, still writing within that grind, and hopeful that when it is my chance to die, I will die at my desk. Why? Having an assignment is grounding.  It means I am responding to market demand. Somebody wants what I am producing. That realization is energizing, not enervating. Also, writing on deadline to an assignment is exciting.  Imagine looking at a blank window with just a quick note about the assignment at the top along the lines of "editor wants 600 words on BDC Cap cushions by 5."  I have a good deal of material on BDC cap cushions spread out among different computer files and some of my interview material is in pen scrawls on old-fashioned dead tree notebooks.  But ... put them together into a coherent story in 600 words?  Ah ... challenge! I do still want to write some...

I have only recently discovered that a fellow named Owen Gingerich ever lived or died.  Yet he and I have very much overlapping timelines -- I was born when he was 28, and he died just two and a half years ago. Now that I know who he was, I am sorry I didn't learn of him sooner. So here is a post for Gingerich, concluding "science week" at Jamesian Pragmatism Refreshed.   Gingerich was an astronomer, and an important participant in debates over what we understand by the word "planet," debates that centered -- while he was most involved in them -- on the case of alleged planet Pluto.  Gingerich was also a teacher of the Harvard University course "The Astronomical Perspective," a core science course for non-scientists. To me what is most fascinating about Gingerich, though, is his work as a historian of science, and especially of the early modern developments in astronomy and physics beginning with Copernicus and continuing through Newton's day. In 2...

Yesterday I wrote here on palm oil plantations. My point was that their creation at the expense of forests has bad effects, such as has justified the EU in barring palm oil from such plantations as imports.  The bad effect on which I focused then involved the greenhouse issue of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and the value of "carbon sinks" such as forests.  This equates to the dis-value of their removal even if "temporary" while the commercially preferred sort of vegetation grows in. At any rate, I also mentioned that there are other problems with such plantations. One of those other problems is water pollution. Here is a fact sheet: https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/is-palm-oil-harming-the-environment   The gist of the water pollution problem is an excess of nutrients in the run off, run as Palm Oil mill effluent, or POME.  This leads to algae blooms in bodies of water downstream, which depletes oxygen levels, which creates dead zones where marine lif...

In September the European Union announced, for a second time, that it has delayed the launch of its anti-deforestation law.  In case you came in late ... this is a law that bans the importation of commodities into any of the member nations if the production of those commodities is deemed conducive to the destruction of the world's forests.  One flashpoint in debate on the subject is palm oil. Indonesia and Malaysia together produce nearly 88% of the global supple of the stuff.  They do it by converting their pristine forests into palm plantations. The heavy machinery involved in clearing the land itself emits hydrocarbons. But, more damningly, it causes soil erosion and water contamination. Beyond either of those points there is the main one.  Forests are major carbon sinks.  They absorb carbon from the atmosphere into the biomass of the vegetation.  When we speak of "net carbon zero" as a goal we mean creating a world in which as much carbon comes out of t...

Welcome to "science week" at my humble blog. To begin: the standout in the Nobel Prize awards this year, the one likely most fascinating to observers outside the field itself, is ... Medicine.  This year's award for advances in medicine went to researchers who opened up new vistas in the study of immunity. Immunity, and related matters such as vaccination -- these have been on a lot of minds of non-experts since the Covid epidemic, and even more intensely since a rogue member of the Kennedy family became the US Secretary of Health. The apotheosis of the non-expert.    The Nobel Prize winners were rewarded for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Breaking that down a bit: "immune tolerance" means simply that our immune systems tolerate our own tissue.  The system doesn't go after our own tissue in the ways it goes after foreign matter. So ... anyone who doesn't have an autoimmune disorder such as lupus or multiple sclerosis by definit...

  Bad things are happening to the auto industry and related industries in the United States in recent weeks. You may not have heard, because so much else has dominated the news cycles. But ... bad things are happening.  On Thursday, September 11, Tricolor Holdings entered bankruptcy.  This was not the standard corporate "let's try to reorganize and shed some of this debt" bankruptcy, chapter 11. No: Tricolor went right to "let's just liquidate and be done with it" bankruptcy. Chapter 7.  A rare admission by corporate leadership that there is nothing to salvage there. Who was Tricolor? It was a company that lent to car buyers and that sold used cars at auctions. It was a considerable presence in the southwestern US, specializing in lending (and/or selling used cars to) Spanish-speaking buyers.  Its name is a reference to the Mexican flag.  Soon thereafter attention turned to CarMax. This is a bigger player than Tricolor in both of the markets they share, sub...

  File this post under "random quotations". The subject of this quote is the philosophical inquiry into cause and effect. I may have cited the book that the italicized bit below appears in, before in this blog, but I doubt I have referenced this particular passage. The more specific question under discussion is whether "natural selection" is an explanation of evolutionary change: that is, whether it names a cause of which the origin of a new species may be an effect. Suppose that to be a student in a certain classroom R, students must pass a test indicating that they read at the third-grade level. Some students A and B are admitted on the basis of this test, and others C and D are excluded. The use of this test amounts to a selection process, and the existence of this process explains, in one perfectly good respect, why it is true that "All of the students in room R read at the third-grade level." Nonetheless ... the existence of this selection process doe...

 The Chicago Fire of 1871 began 154 years ago today. It is said to have begun in the barn of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, and ended as a burn zone four miles long and one mile wide. It is often said to have begun with the kick of a cow.  There is no good reason for THAT belief. Indeed, the contemporary view is that the cow is, as Ockham would say, an entity introduced into the chain of cause and effect without necessity. With wooden structures, large open doors, lanterns that were themselves simply small fires, and high winds: who needs a cow?   In the days after the fire had burnt itself out, the notion that Mrs O'Leary had been milking her cow and the latter had kicked the lantern was one of several competing rumors. Another was that  a boarder in the O'Leary house, Dennis "Peg Leg" Sullivan, had slipped into the barn to have a few drinks with some of his friends. During their partying they started a fire, not by knocking over a lantern but simply by smokin...

 I've never involved myself in debates about the QWERTY keyboard versus alternatives. I will say, though, that it would be better to have "t" further away from "w".  On a different line, maybe?  This arrangement makes the typing of "not" for "now" or vice versa all too easy, I'm guessing that is the reason that Thomas Paine wrote "Now is the time for all good men...." In a first draft he surely wrote "It is now the time..." only to start worrying that some middleman would turn that accidentally into "It is not the time."  "Not is the time for all good men..." seems more nonsensical than "It is not the time"  so the latter would be more likely to survive as a typo than the former. And of course the now/not reversal is worse than nonsensical.  It produces a sensible sentence with a meaning exactly the opposite of what is intended.     

New book. May be of interest to some of those who follow this blog. The Cartesian Brain , a collection of essays edited by Denis Kamboucher, Damien Lacroux, Tad Schmalz and Ruidan She, has just been published by Routledge. It looks at Cartesian writings far beyond the Meditations . One might get from the Meditations the impression that Descartes didn't care all that much about the brain, and nascent neuroscience. After all, the "I think" is accomplished by an incorporeal spirit.  Actually, it turns out, he did care about the particulars of the human brain. and not just the pineal gland either.  One fascinating tidbit I get from the review of this book recently posted in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the applicability of the "law of the conservation of motion" to the action of mind on brain. I put the phrase in quotes because in Newtonian and post-Newtonian physics, our physics, there is no such law.  There is a law of the conservation of momentum: but tha...

  I know almost nothing about the late Charlie Kirk.  In case it needs to be said -- I of course abhor violence.  Anyway, one of the very few things that I do know or think I know about Kirk is that he debated undergraduate students and often showed them up as numbskulls with "minds full of mush".  [That phrase comes from the 1970s movie PAPER CHASE, about first year law students -- but it seems to apply.]   Today I came across something written by Matt Taibbi soon after Kirk's murder. Taibbi has a leftward reputation -- he is a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone , and a few years back he penned a notorious essay attacking Goldman Sachs as a sort of avatar for everything wrong with capitalism. Nonetheless, in the passage below, as in a fair amount of Taibi's recent work, one hears echoes of points made by rightward folks.  Perhaps, then, this is a point that deserves a broad hearing across partisan and ideological lines. --------------------...

 In a blog post this summer I discussed Eric Weinstein, a VC manager trained as a mathematician. I said, quite incidentally, that Weinstein received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard with a thesis on the extension of self-dual Yang-Mills equations. I also admitted that I don't know what that means. So, dear reader, let us struggle a bit with what that means. Back in 1954 Chen Ning Yang and Robert Mills developed ideas loosely called "gauge symmetry" in order to describe the strong nuclear force. The "strong" nuclear force is the one that has to counter-act electromagnetism at the subatomic level.  That is: two protons stick together in a nucleus even though both are positively charged so, given our understanding of EM, they "ought" to be flying apart.   Yang got his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1948 and thereafter was briefly an assistant to Enrico Fermi. His work with Mills in essence outlined the mathematics of a scenario in whi...