Mary Shepherd is 'having a moment' and I am out of sympathy. Yes, I agree that many women have been written out of the history of philosophy because the history is written by men. I agree that it is worth our while to reverse this trend and recover the contributions of neglected women where we can. But Mary Shepherd, an early 19th century British thinker best known for an essay on the relation between cause and effect, doesn't really fill the bill here. In response to Hume, Shepherd wrote thus: "We cannot imagine a beginning of existence to be wholly unconnected with any thing that went before it; and this is sufficient to refute the notion, that causes and effects are only conjunctions, or sequences observed by the experience of mankind." She thus infers the necessity of causal relations from our inability to imagine the contrary. This sort of thing reminds me of the scenes in The Princess Bride, where the bad guy Vizzini keeps assuring his confederates that ...
Softbank, the great Japan based holding company (not a bank), has agreed to buy Ampere Computing, an important chipmaker based in California. According to a report from Reuters, this is an all-cash transaction, for $6.5 billion on the barrelhead. Now: I would not have you draw the conclusion, "the smart money is getting into chips, maybe I too ought to be getting into chips!" Softbank hasn't always been all that 'smart' in its use of money, I'm afraid. Softbank was, for example, a big investor in WeWork, the company that gave some excitement and Silicon Valley gloss to the idea of shared working spaces. The business plan was simple: enter into long-term leases for a lot of office space, and rent it at for shorter terms and higher rent. WeWork looked good in the period 2010-2019. It was a private company and could keep most of its cards close to its vest. Then it decided that there was money to be made in an IPO. But a public offering requires complia...