Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  A questioner in Quora asked what we, other Quorants, see as the most recent breakthrough in philosophy.  I replied: An important breakthrough took place through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, which we might call “Taking the Subject Seriously Again” or TSSA. It can also be rendered “Taking SubjectIVITY Seriously Again”. The human subject, and its subjectivity, was nearly written out of the higher echelons of philosophical and psychological consideration in the middle of the 20th century, by behavioralism, hard determinism/incompatibilism, “strong AI” and related developments. There were no people finding the world, so the Wittgensteinian phrase “the world as I found it” ceased to be meaningful. There were only objects, though some objects oddly talk as if they are subjects. Daniel Dennett, who passed away recently, was very much of the anti-subjectivity persuasion. It was a cause drenched with nostalgia through much of his working life BECAUSE of the TSSA breakthrough. Figures li...

 The administration of President Donald Trump has made many of us eager to cheer on virtually any check or balance as it appears, even as we were briefly cheering on the old neoconservatives of and around the Cheney family (yes, the old torture caucus), insofar as it limited Trump's reach. It served a human and humane purpose.  Anyway, the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (the third central bank in the history of our country) has come to the fore of late.  The political hack's instinct is often to advance the cause of inflation, in part because it assists net debtors in relieving them of some of the net value of their indebtedness, and that can have stimulative effects in the marketplace and at the ballot box.  Also, if the nation-state itself is a debtor, as the United States certainly is on a world history record-breaking scale, then reducing the value of the currency on which its bonds were issued is a way of getting the ben...

The year 1842 saw the publication of Lays of Ancient Rome, a collection of poems by Thomas Macaulay.  The best known of these poems/lays is "Horatius," about three men -- with Horatius as their captain, in the center, holding off the massed Etruscan army on a bridge just wide enough for --- three men. Death is near certain for each of the three as they take up their position.  But Horatius encourages his comrades at either arm, and himself, with these famous words, "For how can man die better than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his father and the temples of his gods?" -------------------------------- I was thinking of these words of late when I was scratching a canine companion of mine on the back of her neck. I thought that maybe they could be reworked ever-so slightly in a way more suitable to my quiet life.  So, let us try this. For where can dog lie better than on her family's porch With the scratches of her father, and the nearby heater's scorch...

  Finally we conclude our business with the Hesse novel.  It is quite short -- really a novella rather than a novel. So we do it no harm with this 'mere' three posts. In the second of these posts we discussed Emil Sinclair's relationship with Pistorius. I'll move on here, as Sinclair did.  In time, Sinclair learns Pistorius' limitations.  Pistorius deserves credit for understanding that the existing religions are inadequate, he fancies himself the priest of a new one but ... his mind and conversation keeps moving backward, not forward, so he is incapable of effectively being the harbinger of something new.  "He knew too much of Egypt, of India, of Mithras, of Abraxas. His love was attached to ideas with which the world was already familiar." They have a falling out.  Sinclair grows tired of Pistorius' "piecing together ... of religious forms which had been handed down." He tells Pistorius as much, and the two men part.  Sinclair is now 18, it...

One of the usual jests about the study of philosophy is that you need a "day job," that philosophy doesn't undergird any remunerative employment.  I recently saw a post on QUORA that constitutes a species of this genus. Someone asked, "What kind of jobs did philosophers like Rene Descartes and Spinoza do when they weren't philosophizing?"  What was their day job?  Descartes was well born, and at one point in his life he sold real estate, presumably inherited, and invested it in bonds, which allowed him to be comfortable for years thereafter.  In later years, when he was famous for his philosophy, he supplemented his bond income with tutoring and, apparently, some military engineering.  Spinoza was not as fortunate in his birth. He made a living grinding lenses.  But it is worth noting that this activity was not unrelated to his philosophizing. Lenses, the microscope and the telescope, were at the time opening new worlds. A lens grinder was at a critical jun...

I mentioned on this blog back on December 23, Alan Jackson is both the name of a country music singer and the name of a somewhat-less-famous criminal defense attorney.  The lawyer of that name has represented both Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.  So I gather he's on the rolodex of show-biz folks. Most recently, he was in the news last month as the attorney for Nick Reiner, son and allegedly the killer of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner. This month we learned that he has quit that cause. Here's a link to a discussion in a show-biz news source.  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/nick-reiner-power-lawyer-alan-jackson-1236466498/   Everyone is being hush-hush about the reasons for the withdrawal.  My guess?  the money fell through.  One could spin a story about this, were one untethered to facts and an acknowledgement of one's own ignorance. One could suppose, in those hypothetical circumstances, that the younger Reiner (bot...

Some thoughts on an evolving theory of history and sovereignty. 1) Human existence depends on the right amount of water. Ideally, not too much would fall from the skies, and not too little -- humans prefer the temperate condition between drowning and desertification.  2) Even in temperate zones, though, the right amount of rain, water from God's hand, cannot be relied upon - so aqueducts, irrigation, dams, water storage, and other risk management exercises regarding water become a necessary force.  There develops an authority for this situation,  large and powerful enough to maintain wide horizons both geographical and chronological. 3) We may for convenience call this water management institution The State or sovereign and we may for simple pragmatic reasons consider it a legitimate institution, though taxes (gasp!) and some degree of central planning are necessary.  4) Here we start developing the metaphor. In the commercial world, the ease or difficulty of turning...

  Resuming my way through Hesse's text. The central consciousness of this book, Emil Sinclair, has a conversation when he is ten with a slightly older schoolmate, Demian.  The conversation concerns a Bible lesson, about Cain and Abel.  Demian takes what seems to Emil a shockingly heterodox view: that Cain is the protagonist  of the story. "The strong man kills a weaker one," in a story loosely expressing a moment in history when "a race of fearless and peculiar men" had made their presence known in a way quite embarrassing to their contemporaries. Demian avows that his sympathies lie not with the embarrassment but with the fearless sources thereof.  Soon thereafter, a crisis passes because Demian does Emil a favor I will not describe here. Emil and Demian are thereafter no longer in regular contact.  Emil tells his father, in a confessional spirit, that he has heard that there are people who declare Cain to be better than Abel.  Dad (a pastor) is a lit...

I described this book in this blog less than one year ago, as one of the landmark works of a neglected golden age of intellectual activity in the western world, the period from 1880 to and including 1920. Hermann Hesse is best known in the Anglophone world anyway for a very different work, SIDDHARTHA. But that wasn't published until 1922, a little bit outside of the somewhat arbitrary limit of the golden age in question.  And its force may be lessened by its universality. DEMIAN was published in 1919. Its subtitle is THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH and ES has the narrative voice. I am in possession both of an English and (through an accident I will not discuss) a Spanish language translation of the original German text.  Hesse, who was born in 1877, did not pass away until 1962.  He wrote a forward to this book, again getting into character as Emil Sinclair, quite late in life, in 1960.  The third paragraph of that forward begins this way: "Authors, in writing no...

Just a quick book note.  Not exactly hot off the presses (a 2018 publication date) but still new-ish as philosophers reckon the passage of time. A work on epistemology rom Oxford University Press, FALLIBILISM by Jessica Brown.  Here is the description, lifted straight from the publishers' website copy: What strength of evidence is required for knowledge? Ordinarily, we often claim to know something on the  basis of evidence which doesn't guarantee its truth. For instance, one might claim to know that one sees  a crow on the basis of visual experience even though having that experience does not guarantee that there  is a crow (it might be a rook, or one might be dreaming). As a result, those wanting to avoid philosophical  scepticism have standardly embraced "fallibilism": one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence  that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Despite this, there's been a persistent  temptation to end...

 My dogs seem to have very different approaches to dog toys. They share the same (large) set of (small) toys -- generally plushy and squeaky. To the younger dog, Angus, they are a tool for play with his hu-Dad. Angus will bring a toy to me hoping I will throw it and he can fetch and return.  What fun! To the older dog, Lena, the same toys are materials for contemplation, She wants nothing more than a quiet corner to which she can retreat with one of them and make it squeak, as if that is a meditation aid while she contemplates the world of forms.  They are, in other words, the Aristotle and Plato of dogs and doy-toy lovers. I think of Angus stretching a paw out toward the world in front of him, while Lena points a paw upward, indicating that such is the location of a heaven of squeaks.

One of the most frequently used textbooks in political philosophy these days is by WIll Kymlicka, a professor at Queen's University in Toronto. Photo of Kymlicka here.  Here, just for nothing, is its table of contents: 1. Introduction 2. Utilitarianism 3. Liberal Equality 4. Libertarianism 5. Marxism 6. Communitarianism 7. Citizenship Theory 8. Multiculturalism 9. Feminism If you're looking for me to say something profound about that ... I got nothing.  But if you've got a kid or grandkid in college going for a political science degree, he or she will probably have either that table of contents or something similar in front of nose.    

Long time readers of this blog will recognize the name Sabine Hossenfelder. I have referred to her and ideas she has championed with some regularity. I am sad to report that attempts have been made to silence Dr Hossenfelder and happy to add that she has resisted them, and appears likely to continue saying what she means for some time to come.   Hossenfelder has a doctorate in theoretical physics from Goethe University Frankfurt.  Her dissertation, in 2003, looked at microscopic black-hole production. Lately, she has acquired some prominence as a nemesis of what she considers bullshit in the world of science and of physics in particular.  She believes that physics as an academic field of research has guided itself into a dead end, where bullshit creation is incentivized. Recently, for example, a distinguished scientific journal published a paper about the mathematical modeling of 'warp drive' as a way to get near and/or past the speed of light. The paper was then pic...

 It has been 245 years today since the "mutiny of the Pennsylvanian line," an important though now often overlooked moment in the history of our war for independence.  It happened on the first day for a new year, 1781. The year would eventually see Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown and the effective end of the war, but that was not obvious on the first of its days. The "Pennsylvania line," the human contribution of the state of Pennsylvania to the fighting of the war, had hundreds of soldiers who had signed up three years before under contracts in which they offered their service for "three years or during the war." The wording was ambiguous.  Did it mean they were enlisted until the first-to-occur of the elapse of three years or the end of the war? or the later-to-occur?  Three years having passed, many of the soldiers took the view that they had completed their obligation. Their officers took the view that they were in for the duration.   On this day...