Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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...

 "The plan required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability." Or maybe (if like certain friends of the Dude you're not into the whole concision thing), "The plan, like all good plans, required a masterful combination of precision and adaptability: precision, because there is a future to control; adaptability, because there is a past to contain."   I woke one morning recently with that sentence, in those and other variants, in my mind pressing for escape. I either had to write something down or consign it all to the waters of Lethe as my day commenced. 

This is the first in a projected three-part series about the law of the excluded middle, a (disputed) logical principle according to which, for any well-defined  proposition, either the proposition is true or it is false.  Today I will explain the law in question and offer a classical argument for its validity. On another day (not tomorrow, I assure you): I will explain why I do not believe that argument is a strong one and why we might want to allow for violations of this LEM. When I get around to Part III, I will discuss how the dispute feeds into political philosophy and certain questions about the legitimate regulation of markets. So ... let us proceed.  When it seems that a proposition IS both true and false, or is neither, and in either case is in violation of this law, various remedies are available: the proposition in question might just be nonsense (as for example the claim that the Jabberwocky has a frumious Bandersnatch), it might embed a false premise (as for ...

 One great historic Swiss bank is in the process of phasing out another. Because of a complicated series of crisis through in the early  2010s, Credit Suisse faced failure by October 2012, when an Australian journalist tweeted about a "credible source" that had told him "a major international bank is on the brink."  That tweet was the last straw. People quickly figured out that Credit Suisse was the unnamed major bank, and  a classic 'run' ensued until the Swiss government forced CS to accept takeover by the other huge Swiss bank of equivalent stature, UBS. As I write, Credit Suisse is still a semi-autonomous branded entity under the UBS umbrella. But that is just a matter of time -- we are told the process of 'full integration' is underway and even the separate branding shall disappear in time. It is a fascinating story, aspects of which I covered for the AllAboutAlpha blog in the aforesaid early 2010s. I mention it now only because I'd like to...

One of the facts that lies in the background of constitutional history, and usually stays there, without being highlighted, is this: most of the founders of the United States shared a disdain for the institution of a "standing army" --that is, of a permanent professional military force maintained through peacetime and composed of full-time soldiers.  Their idealization of the "militia," and the reference thereto in the second amendment, arguably the second amendment itself, constitute the flipside of their anti-standing-army persuasion.  If you ask about the background and history of this conviction, you are generally referred to the build-up to the revolution, as the mother country built up its military presence (the "regulars") in the troublesome colonies. But a newly published paper makes the point that the vocabulary in which our founders expressed their conviction on point has a specific history within that Mother Country.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol...