Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At this time of year,  as regular readers know, I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the year slipping away, in terms of its busin ess/fina ncial news. Last year, for example, stories with a bearing on the financing of the war in Ukraine were dominant.  This year ... not so much. With the single exception of July that particular war stays outside of this list. The war in Gaza, and the question of "what next in financial/business terms for that fraught tract of land," does make an appearance.  But Sino-American economic relationships dominate the list this year.   I'll break matters down by month as usual, and as is my habit I will avoid assigning priority among the various monthly champions.  Each is tagged with a theme but each is a news story, NOT a theme.  Each is a story about some "who" doing some "what" at a where and when.     January.  Sino-America economic relations I.    The new President of the US and c...

  A year-ending thought.   I've been thinking about an old medieval French term, with Latin roots: "liege".  At a King Richard's Fair, one costumed character may bow to another and call him "my liege". It is akin to saying "my lord," but not exactly, and a variation is to say "my liege Lord" -- which makes sense in a feudal system, where there is only one particular Lord to whom I owe allegiance - the rest are more or less a matter of indifference to me, a humble serf or page or whatever -- so you can be a lord without being MY lord, or you can be my liege Lord.    And, thinking thus, I experienced a bit of a semantic epiphany. Liege.  Allegiance. The second syllable in the second of those words sounds a lot like the first of those words.  The gravest of sins, the one that gets you assigned to the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest final circle of the Inferno according to Dante, is betrayal. Betrayal, specifically, of one to whom the s...

 I only recently encountered a brief discussion of the Jamesian will to believe in the context of climate change.  It appears as a chapter in an anthology, Philosophical Tools for Climate Change (2024), prepared at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.  One odd feature of this book is that, although all the other chapters have an author credited by name on the table of contents, the will-to-believe chapter goes uncredited.  So I don't know to whom we owe it.  The anonymous author chiefly wants us to recall James' point that some choices are forced.  They are (as we say in the 21st century) binary.  Either I act in a certain way or I don't. Either I attend my usual religion service this weekend or I don't.  There may be many reasons why I don't -- difficulty with transportation, loss of the underlying beliefs, conversion to a different set of beliefs and attendance at another service. Whatever.  But if someone is interested in whet...

 In recent days, a lost manuscript from the files of Dr. Watson has come to  my attention.   After Watson’s honorable discharge from Her Majesty’s forces he retired to London and, as everyone knows, he became the roommate of an eccentric detective at 221B Baker Street. The new file reveals that on a certain Christmas day while residing there, Watson received a note from a young lady down the street (102A Baker) asking for a Christmas rendezvous. Delighted at the prospect, Watson hastily explained the matter to Sherlock Holmes, showed him the calling card from “Ellie,” and headed out.  Just a few minutes later, a crestfallen Watson returned.  Sherlock Holmes was seated in his easy chair, smoking from his famously bent calabash pipe. He said, “I expected the round trip would take you a little longer, my friend. No matter, the plum pudding is waiting for you.” This, as it happens, was the first time on that sacred day that the two men had had the leisure for ...

  I saw a report that Rob Reiner's son, allegedly his father's murderer, has hired "famed defense attorney Alan Jackson".  I have to say, I have never heard of a defense attorney of that name.  Whoever he is, he toils under the disadvantage that it is such a common name.  Both the surname and the given name are aggressively ordinary.  Perhaps more to his taste, the famed defense attorney has the same name as a genuinely famed country music vocalist, pictured above. THAT Alan Jackson is known for "Chattahoochee," "I'll Try," and perhaps best known of all, "It's 5 o'clock somewhere."  This post plainly isn't going anywhere, so I think I'll close it down. After all, it's five o'clock somewhere. Time to clock out.  

  The bullet-point presentation of Cartesian philosophy.  I have in earlier posts sought to summarize others of the Great Thinkers of the philosophical canon in five tenets per head.  Today we take on Rene Descartes.  In some respects, this may seem an idiosyncratic take on Descartes, and it is a take I would be prepared to modify in the face of appropriate contrary explanations, but it is honestly and painstakingly arrived at.   That said: Rene D was trying to tell us ..  1. That if we try to doubt everything that can be doubted we will end up forced to a choice between accepting the existence of a benevolent God (a postulate that can guarantee the reliability of our senses and our reason), OR accepting solipsism.  2. Having accepted God for this purpose, we don't really have much day-to-day use for Him.  The physical world is a mechanism, just matter in motion where objects push each other around and can be exhaustively understood in those ...

The US administration has now decided to let Nvidia export its advanced H200 semiconductors to the People's Republic of China. A think tank that keeps track of such things, the Institute for Progress, says that the H200 is approximately six times as powerful as the previously most advanced chip the US has been exporting to the PRC. The usual (bipartisan) policy has been to try to keep China behind the cutting edge on such chips, given our competitive situation with them with regard to AI, and for that matter given the potential for a military showdown in which computer sophistication could well play a part.  There was a time when I would have hailed such a decision.  As a sort of laissez-faire reflex.  What business does the US government have telling Nvidia they can't sell to willing buyers? Heck, there is a neat legend surrounding Nvidia and how it was founded after a late-night BS meeting in a Denny's restaurant. Sort of like the legends of how firms that would be Gian...

  As promised yesterday. “Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs; I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary. He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses.” Thomas Reid, being rather grouchy and Chestertonian. 

   Hume on causation.  We may define a cause to be ‘An object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac’d in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter.’ If this definition be esteem’d defective, because drawn from objects foreign to the cause, we may substitute this other definition in its place, viz. ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it, that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’  Treatise of Human Nature.  This may lead you to reply: Huh?  By "object" in the above I think we should generally understand "event." The object of the touch of a lit match to kindling is both precedent and contiguous with the ignition of that pile of kindling. There may be exceptions, as where the kindling is wet so the fire-setti...

The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars.  India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries.    The public danger posed by heat waves may be under...

The philosophical novel is alive and well as a literary form, and a venue of philosophizing. I think of John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION (1986), Rebecca Goldstein, THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM (1993), David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST (1996), E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014), and John Irving, AVENUE OF MYSTERIES (2015).  But let us go back to Wallace.  I included INFINITE JEST in my little list above because it is explicitly philosophical, built as it is around the challenging notion that "the truth shall set you free. But not until it is finished with you." Confronting reality may indeed set us free from the impediments of our preferred delusions.  But it is painful to let them go.  Separately, an earlier book of Wallace's, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, make an intriguing use of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a use that justifies the title.  BROOM starts with the news that an elderly woman is missing from her retirement home.  The missing person was once, in her youth, a stud...

The good news: 2024 YR4 is no longer considered a threat to the earth. The bad news: its course suggests it may strike the moon. The consequences of a moon strike are under active discussion, as is the matter of what the human species might do about it before the predicted time (December 2032).  Some background? Late in 2024, astronomers discovered a building-sized asteroid, 2024 YR4, on a course that made collision with Earth possible. They at first estimated that as a 3% possibility of a collision. It was not the human-extinction threat beloved by science fiction screenwriters, but it could have created widespread damage wherever on land it might hit, or generate a tsunami in the event of an ocean impact.   More recent data about 2024 YR4 suggests that, though the Earth is safe, the prospect of a hit on the moon is respectable, about 4%, or 1-in-25.  Some scientists are concerned that a l unar impact could increase the meteoroid flux by up to 1,000 times, flooding...

  I vented here not long ago about the difficulty I was having upgrading my driver's license, instead of merely renewing it: getting it renewed into a "Real ID" with the star in the corner that will allow me to take airplane flights without fuss or an extra charge. I am happy to inform you that the hold-up, whatever exactly it was, has been resolved in my favor.  I have the new license in my wallet now -- it has a gold star in the top right corner, just like in the sample above. There is also (again as in the sample) a pale black-and-white drawing of a bird in the middle, just to the right of the photo.   I don't think that is there for every state, it may be a Massachusetts thing. Anyway: nobody has given me a gold star since elementary school.  Happy day!  

What the bleep is happening to Bitcoin, and why?  Its value hit a historic peak on Monday, October 6. A bitcoin was worth $123,857 that day.  Of course since I called that a "peak" you have probably already figured out that the value has come down since.  Pretty dramatically, too. On Monday, Oct. 20 that was down to $110,245. On November 6. $103,976.  Then came the big drop. Before Thanksgiving, the value got as low as $86K before beginning to claw its way back up.   Here's a link: Bitcoin value real time chart - Google Search In part the problem is the Federal Reserve. Bitcoin speculators want interest rates down?  Why? Because higher interest rates tend to support to dollar, and Bitcoin is likely to prove the beneficiary of a flight from the dollar.  If I can't get much of an income stream from just owning US bonds, I may well sell the bonds (for dollars, naturally) and then convert those dollars into the dominant cryptocurrency.  This impu...

When I was young (back when 'analog clocks' were known simply as ... 'clocks') I had a tough time learning how to tell time on them. The adults around me kept saying "big hand" this and "little hand" that. Sorry: one of them was long but thin. Is that big or little? The other one was short but thick. Is that little or big? I didn't really get over this until I started narrating it to myself in more explicit terms. "The fat short one tells the hour, the long thin one tells the minute." That is still my rule as a writer -- explicitness and clarity even at the expense of concision. So everyone can understand that the photo I've included here indicate that ten minutes have passed since 10 o'clock not that fifty minutes have passed since it was 2 o'clock!

  In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (PNAS), scientists at the Carnegie Science Institute claim that chemical signs of photosynthesis, and so of life, have shown up in rocks at least 2.5 billion years old. Vegetative life existed on earth that far back. Until now, photosynthesis was generally traced back only to 1.7 billion.  "Good for the scientists," you might say, "it clearly helps make them stand-outs within their special field of study.  But should it matter to the rest of us?" I submit that it should.  One reason is that as one pushes back the dating of the earliest emergence of life, one shortens the amount of time for the chemical, pre-biological evolution that may have been necessary to get the history of life underway. How long a span of time is necessary for life to emerge on a planet, when circumstances (such as the distance to the nearest sun, the size of that sun, etc.) are amenable? There is only one case ...

  In his classic book, PRAGMATISM, William James tells a story about a squirrel.  Or, maybe it is about something else.  You decide.  He asks us to consider an argument among camping buddies in the Berkshires. It seems that a squirrel had gotten itself positioned on the trunk of a tree so that the tree was in between its own body and the body of one of the campers, on the other side.  The camper, wanting to catch sight of the squirrel, started walking around the tree. The squirrel (randomly so far as we can tell, not out of anti-observer animus) moved around the tree to which it clung, in such a way as to keep itself on the opposite side from the man. When they had each travelled in this way 360 degrees around the tree, an intriguing question arose.  Had the man at this point gone round the squirrel? James noted that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree.  This was enough for some of the disputants -- he had gone roun...