Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I mentioned here earlier this week that, in college, I was taught a Straussian version of Thomas Hobbes.  That is: the typical Straussian position in interpreting a wide range of early modern political thinkers is that X was secretly an atheist but was pretending to believe in God because of the whole fear-of-persecution thing.  The political philosophy can be understood only once one penetrates beneath the veneer of winking conformism about religion. Just a quick further note along those lines today.   That is (despite contrary views such as the one I discussed here Tuesday)  a fairly easy sell as to Hobbes. And Hume.  A little more difficult (IMHO) with regard to Spinoza, and much more difficult with regard to Montesquieu and Locke. And it is almost impossible to look at Maimonides in the manner that the Straussians want.   The founder of the Straussian view was, as one might imagine, Leo Strauss (1899 -1973), and the grand name for his characte...

"The crowbar is all inside your head" she said to me, "And we can demonstrate it mathematically, "I'd like to help you here in Alexanderee, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." She said, "It's really not 'Eureka' I exude, Furthermore if one should break it's not me who will be sued You built a Death Ray pal so you'll live if I am crude, There must be fifty ways to use your lever." You just find a firm place, Ace Fulcrum's the plan, Stan Don't fear the big weight, Fate Just make the Earth move. Hop on the horse, course You don't need dialectic Chariot'll do, Lou Just make the Earth move.... 

  Still waiting for my "real ID" as I write these words.  I had all the information and documentation in the hands of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles more than a month ago -- and aced an eye test to boot, and was told I would get the new supercharged form of a drivers license, the real ID form, the get-me onto-airplanes version, in two weeks   Hasn't happened.  Have to call to complain now.  Just venting....

The Notre Dame Philosophy Review   tells us of a new book on Thomas Hobbes' philosophy of religion, reviewed by Arish Abizadeh of McGill University.   If I recall the relevant undergrad course properly, Hobbes' view on religion was straightforward. He was willing to worship in any manner his sovereign tells him to worship -- to worship a thousand gods, or one, and that one conceived as three persons, or as simply One.  "Any law has reason enough for my obedience."  At another level, Hobbes was suspicious of religious fervor, precisely because fervor in the worship of a Leviathan in the heavens, distinct from the Leviathan on earth, is always in danger of spilling over into opposition or insubordination with regard to the latter. "I'm looking at you, Oliver Cromwell!" The first-level view may be said to be delivered with a wink: "You're the boss, so I'll go along with Trinity-talk Sire." The second-level view was heartfelt. Between thos...

A few days ago, on November 15, we passed a rather random unobserved anniversary. That was the 158th anniversary of the debut of the first stock ticker machine. It was unveiled, appropriately, in New York City, by its inventor Edward A. Calahan.   Calahan was building upon the now ubiquitous telegraph, combining it with a printer so that institutions that chose to get one could receive a steam of stock prices, transaction by transaction, from a particular exchange whose action they were following.  The transactions would print out on a tape. The machine with its click click clickity click became quite familiar very rapidly, and lasted a long time. I seem to remember that the father in the old Addams Family sitcom had one in the family abode. Also, the tape generated by such machines could then be cut up and thrown out of windows on festive occasions like so many streamers.  Hence the expression "ticker tape parade".    So: congratulations Mr. Calahan for gi...

  The following is from QUORA. Why do some people believe that the concept of God preceded philosophy, even though influential philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard were atheists who believed in God before them? Huh?   This was an AI-generated question, and it illustrates how absurd AI can get. I'm not sure what it means to say that the "concept of God" preceded philosophy. Let us make things easier by speaking of "worship".  The worship of gods certainly preceded philosophy.  Heck, the worship of a single supreme capital-G God may be said to go back to around 1350 BCE, a long time before Thales. So it happens to be the case that our earliest record of worship of God precedes what we generally call philosophy. What sense does it make to ask why people believe such a plain truth?   But then the AI generated question takes a  really weird turn. The evidence that shows that the "concept of God" is not so old is attributed to a trio of philosopher...

 Of course, your cash will be delivered in a sealed paper bag. And of course it will only happen if you are at home -- no baiting porch pirates. WSJ headline, Nov. 14 print edition "Robinhood offers cash deliveries -- for a fee".   The virtual brokerage Robinhood has alied itself with  delivery app Gopuff to allow customers to withdraw cash from their Robinhood bank accounts and have it brought right to their door. For at most a $6.99 delivery fee you can avoid having to go out to the ATM and have money delivered in a sealed paper bag while they are at home. You don't have to be a weatherman to know whatnow? 

There was a referendum in Ecuador over the weekend. President Daniel Noboa, who is generally regarded as friendly to foreign investors, wanted the referendum to set the stage for new constitutional deliberations.  I won't discuss here want kind of new constitution he wants.  I'll only say that potential investors -- buyers of Ecuador's bonds or of stakes in its corporations, etc., have expressed ambivalence about the result of the vote, and something slightly darker than ambivalence about Noboa's plans for a constitutional convention.  In general, they think, a "yes" vote would enhance Noboa's political capital. That would be good.  On the other hand: why does he have to want THIS?  A convention in 2026 could prove unpredictable and, so, definitionally, risky.    Who knows but that populist opposition to Noboa, and to the aforesaid investors, could sway whatever deliberative body is actually convened?  A recent report from Gramercy, an influential...

In September 2019, after President Trump (first time around) fired John Bolton, a distinguished philosopher wrote the following in that philosopher's blog. John Bolton :    Bolton is a genuinely dangerous man, and I am delighted to see him gone.    His summary dismissal highlights the odd but welcome fact that Trump is a dove.    A belligerent dove, a bullying dove, a bombastic dove, an ignorant dove, a feckless dictator-loving suck up of a dove,  but a dove nonetheless.    This is a dangerous world.    We must take our comfort where we can find it. The philosopher was Robert Paul Wolff, and I quoted that at the time in this blog, without commentary. Dr Wolff passed away early this year. Here is a link to an obit.   North American Kant Society - In Memoriam: Robert Paul Woff (1933-2025) I'm afraid that his analysis of the Trump/Bolton pairing does not seem as sound now as it did at the time.  Trump is not a dove -- he...

I'll just leave a link here, without further explanation.  You'll Never Guess What Happened to Saudi Arabia's 100-Mile Skyscraper A certain impressively futuristic project is now looking a bit like the abandoned Tower of Babel. 

 How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins?  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm  The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here.  If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time.   But archeologists want to be more specific.  And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here.  We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea.  Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.  A simple matter for specialists, you say?  Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about th...

 I am happy to report that on Wednesday November 5 the Justices of the US Supreme Court gave the lawyers from the US Justice Department a hard time during oral arguments on the legitimacy of President Donald Trump's monarchical tariff system last week. The question is whether Trump's extraordinary sweeping impositions, and modification, of tariffs on a country by country basis can be said to be warranted by the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.   The only honest answer is "no". Fortunately, most of the Justice seem inclined to give that honest answer, upholding the courts below. Chief Justice John Roberts (an appointee of President George W. Bush) said flatly that this law "has never been used to justify tariffs. No one has argued that it does until this particular case." Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, appears to want to be part of a decision that emphasizes that Congress has no power to delegate away its own proper constitutional r...

Ya gotta be kidding me.  Three hundred and fifty?  I cited New Scientist Wednesday . Today I'm invoking it again in connection with another of my favorite subjects -- the mind/body problem.  What 350 different theories of consciousness reveal about reality | New Scientist The article, by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, breaks the 350 contemporary contending theories into ten buckets: 1. materialism 2. non-reductive physicalism 3. quantum mechanical 4. information based 5. panpsychic 6. neutral monism [buckets one and eight are the non-neutral monisms]  7. dualism 8. idealism   9. anamolous and altered states [i.e. taking 'parapsychology' seriously]  10. challenge [i.e. accepting that the answer is beyond human capacity -- as suggested perhaps by the above cartoon].  My own preferred view, emergentism, is treated by Kuhn as a form of non-reductive physicalism, bucket 2. 

The next mayor of New York City is .... Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Mamdani and I share a birthday.  He was born on October 18, 1991, the day I turned thirty-three.  At any rate, I believe I have already shared my view that Mamdani's election in likely to be a disaster for the City that has now placed itself in his hands.  I would like today to address the question: will that disaster help or hurt President Donald Trump? I've heard one theory that Trump needs a good bogeyman.  After all, Nancy Pelosi was his bogeywoman for a long time. She remains in the House of course but has faded into the background and her successor in party leadership there, Hakeem Jeffries, has a much lower profile.   The mayor of New York City has long been a national figure -- Jimmy Walker, Fiorella LaGuardia, John Lindsey all come to mind -- even though the post doesn't seem to work as a stepping stone to higher office. So ... a mayor of New York, one who attaches the label "socialist" ...

I ended yesterday's entry with the idea of hope.  We can reasonably hope that it is possible to build a sustainable capitalism, and that certain investors and fund managers now active are engaged in this work -- uniting the profit motive with the save-the-planet motive.  After completing work on that post I found an article in NEW SCIENTIST with the headline "Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think."  Let us pay a little attention to the case made in this article by Madeleine Cuff, a London based reporter who has devoted years to environmental/energy issues.    Solar energy is going to power the world much sooner than you think | New Scientist Cuff cites an analysis by a UK based think tank that said that solar has been the largest source of new electricity globally for the last three years in a row.  The good news, the reason for Cuff's optimistic headline, is that over the last 15 years, the cost of installing a solar system h...

 Roughly five years ago an energy-themed  private equity fund named JOG Capital changed its name to Carbon Infrastructure Partners, because the change reflected its new emphasis.  I wrote about this at the time, and happening across my old piece in some recent web-surfing, I wondered how the subsequent years have treated them.  Their website is here: https://carboninfrastructurepartners.com/about/ -- you will find there a brief account of their own transition from JOG.  You won't find out what JOG originally stood for -- perhaps founders' initials played a role. It is not important.  What is important is that CIP describes itself as investing in companies with find creative ways to remove, reduce or avoid CO2 emissions.  If THIS is profitable there is hope for a sustainable capitalism.  So: is it?  Unfortunately, we don't have good public data on this yet. CIP closed on its first fund of the new post-JOG era, CIP Energy Fund I, in 2022. [By "...