Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There are three Elephant & Castle restaurants in Chicago. One of them, the better one, is in the Loop in downtown Chicago, on West Adams St. It had been until recently very much too long since I had had the privilege of eating there, but I corrected this, in delightful company, on September 20. Elephant & Castle derives its name from a legendary pub on the southern shore of the Thames, in London. That institution (sadly, no longer extant, though there is  still a subway stop at the spot that keeps the name) took its moniker from an Anglicization of the Spanish term for "the daughter of Castile." The Chicago E&C restaurants are efforts to create an English pub atmosphere. I haven't been in a sufficient number of the latter to judge whether they succeed in that, but I have always enjoyed my trips to the West Adams St. joint, as I did this time.   

In a series of posts in this blog I've discussed the basics of accounting, going through the varous items on the balance sheet. Today I will complete the overview by looking much more concisely at the other critical document, the income statement. -------------------------------------------- The income statement, also known as the profit-and-loss statement, represents a period of time, rather than the moment-in-time of the balance sheet. If all is working properly, the income statement should give investors an idea of the underlying processes that have made the present condition of the company what it is. One is pasted below. We won’t spend a lot of time on the income statement, simply because much of what we might say about it we’ve already said. The issues that arise in compiling an income statement look familiar to anyone who understands the latest balance sheet.   For example, the expenses part of an income statement should indicate the costs of goods sold (COG...

Recently I made the comment that I found the James-Lange theory of emotions very wise. Henry followed up, asking whether I was aware of contemporary work that supported that 1880s-era view. I said "yes," and offered this link: Luca Barlassina . That's an article published just this year by Dr. Barlassina, a scholar affiliated with Ruhr-Universitat Bochum's Center for Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution, written with the assistance of  Dr. Albert Newen, who has a chair at the same Center. Barlassina and Newen (B&N) title their paper "The Role of Bodily Perception in Emotion: In Defense of an Impure Somatic Theory." Some definition of terms is then in order. A "somatic theory" is one that says that the body [that is, to avoid triviality, the set of non-brain portions of the body] plays a critical role in causing emotions (not just in expressing them). B&N explicitly cite James as an early theorist of this sort and they add ano...

I love a good headline.  And I don't mean by this the usual examples, "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and so forth. I mean headlines where there is a central word that doubles as both verb and adjective, especially when the meaning shifts. I vaguely recall an example that said something like this: "FBI Links Bomb Plot, Sleeper Cell." The writer of the headline presumably meant that the FBI had discovered facts that connected a bomb plot to a particular "sleeper cell." If you presume that "links" is a verb, that flows nicely. But what if it is an adjective, telling us something about the bomb plot? If the headline writer reads his paper's sports section now and then, he knows that "links" is often employed as a synonym for the sport of golf, or more specifically for the lay-out of a course. Thus, perhaps the FBI has created a deep undercover sleeper cell that plans a strike against somebody's favorite "links...

Two days ago (as you reckon time, oh real-time reader of these prepared-for-vacation notes) I said that I am thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. Somewhat related to that ambition: I see that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a very high-profile social scientist, formerly an associate professor of political science at Harvard, has a new book out called   The Devil That Never Dies. From what I've heard it is not so much as history as a work of personal meditation on the past, present, and future of anti-Semitism.  It is also the object of a very sharply worded critique in the September 13th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Anthony Julius. Julius says that he is himself of Goldhagen's "party," that is, anti-anti-Semitism, but ... to do the good work of that party one has to be a "smart, truth-telling" participant in the "terrible struggle" against the enemies of the Jews. And this, Goldhagen is not. I shouldn't comment ...

To our earlier discussions in this blog of the various items on a balance sheet we must add this: many important liabilities and assets – important, that is, for the future of the company – never get on the balance sheet at all. The rules governing what may be kept “off book” generated a good deal of controversy associated with the demise of Enron at the turn of the millennium. Enron, you may remember, created special purpose entities (SPEs) and supplied these off-book entities with Enron stock. Then it dealt with those entities in ways that spruced up its own books.   The SPEs could be kept off book, under then extant rules, so long as 3 percent of their equity belonged to someone who was neither Enron nor an Enron “related entity.” The 3 percent figure may seem modest under the circumstances. But the point of it was that someone else had to be willing to put their own investment at risk. Indeed, as a matter of corporate law throughout the English speaking world, a ...

I'm thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. I'm not going to do that here, though. Instead, I'll just note for my own future convenience some names with which to conjure, and the year of at least one of their pertinent works. Hannah Arendt (1963) Stanley Milgram (1963) Nathan Eck (1967) Lucy Dawidowicz (1975, 1981) Christopher Browning (1992) Daniel Goldhagen (1996).