Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Big companies and big advertising agencies see the Super Bowl as a chance to break through the fog and set themselves apart. So the event has seen some very creative ads over the years. This year the ads seemed mostly ... meh. The best of them was one of the first: Sprint had a very expensive looking ad with an 'artificial intelligence' theme. That's a still from it above. The robots who have come to full sentience mock their human inventor for the fact that he isn't smart enough to switch to Sprint. Well ... if you didn't see it, I can only say, you gotta be there. It is funny. What makes it stick in my mind even more than its intrinsic humor is that two of its competitors in the wireless phone market ... dropped the ball, no pun intended. Verizon, at half time, wrapped itself in a saccharine way around the nobility of 'first responders.' And near the end of the third quarter, T-Mobile tried to make a point about human equality by showing us a lot...

It was a fascinating nail-biter of a football game. I was hoping for a Patriots win, out of boring old predictable regional loyalty. But I can't be all that unhappy. The game was hard fought on both sides, and the Eagles eked it out the old-fashioned way, by winning the war in the trenches. Until very near the end of the game neither quarterback had been sacked. I haven't looked into it, but I'm pretty sure that is rare, for football games generally or Super Bowl games in particular, for there only to be one sack and for that to come as the decisive end-of-game event. When one refers in football terms to "the trenches" one refers to the front lines of offense and defense, where soldiers of each team stand literally shoulder to shoulder. In this game the offensive lines held up bravely against everything their opponents could throw at them, giving their QBs time to do their thing. Thus the significance of the absence of sacks, and of that one final exce...

Let's go back to the letter to which I linked you yesterday. The gist of it was this: Jenkins made reference in her work to a paper called "What is Romantic Love?" which she cited as his and used as a foil for her own ideas. She took it from an online forum: Soble, Alan (unpublished manuscript) What Is Romantic Love? Retrieved from  http://forums.catholic.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9934&d=1300009573  Accessed March 13, 2011. In time she learned that this paper was not his. It was a paper by some anonymous undergraduate student in philosophy, and the paper itself criticizes Alan Sobel in the third person, so that might have been her first clue. Of course people do sometimes get tricky and criticize themselves in the third person. So it might have been his anyway. But in the world of might-have-beens, she also 'might have' simply checked with the purported author.  Anyway ...   She emailed him an apology, saying " I am so sorry for ...

Carrie Jenkins is a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia who has built a reputation in the philosophy of romance and relationships. She is a defender of polyamory, the view that the maintenance of intimate relationships with more than one partner is a moral and appropriate life style. This is always defended with the proviso that the partners are not kept secret from one another.  After all, polyamorous person who allows him/herself to be thought to be a monogamous person by any of the partners is of course, a cheater and a skunk -- I don't understand Jenkins to dispute that. Anyway, there is some question as to whether Jenkins is to a sufficient extent a lover of the practice of scholarly rigor. There is, fittingly, a triangular story here. I learned of the recent dust-up about Jenkins from Brian Leiter's blog. Leiter himself holds to a philosophical position I like to think of as "Menshevik." He is an old school leftist who see social ...

I thought briefly that I had found a contemporary philosopher whose views on ethics and meta-ethics checked all four key boxes. An ally all down the line. The four, as regular readers of this blog may remember, are: cognitivism, intuitionism, consequentialism, pluralism. These represent the views that, respectively: some ethical judgments constitute knowledge; one important source for this knowledge consists of quasi-sensory non-inferential primary recognitions ("intuitions"); the right is logically dependent upon the good; and there exists an irreducible plurality of good. Francesco Orsi seemed to believe all of these propositions. Here's his website and a link to one relevant paper: https://sites.google.com/site/francescoorsi1/ https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/3 What was better: Orsi is a young man. Born in 1980. A damned child! Has no memories of the age of disco! So I emailed him asking if I was right that he believed all of those things. His ans...

This year, the gentleman delivering the Democratic Party's rebuttal to the President's State of the Union address bore (for most Americans) an unfamiliar face, but a very familiar surname: Joseph Kennedy III. The Family Tree: This Joseph Kennedy is the son of Joseph Kennedy II and Sheila Kennedy, nee Rauch. He is thus the grandson of the late Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States who was largely responsible for the imprisonment of Teamsters President James Hoffa in 1964. That of course makes him the great-grandson of Joseph Kennedy (I), and the great-nephew of President John Kennedy. The leadership of the Democratic Party needs fresh faces. The old crowd, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (70 years old) and Senator Chuck Schumer (67) needs to make room for new blood. Bernie Sanders isn't properly a Democrat at all but wouldn't improve the demographics if he were. This generation's Joseph Kennedy, though, is just 37. ...

Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...