Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Fifty five years now Since Gaye asked "what's goin' on". We still can't answer. 

One of the reasons  I must keep these posts short is: I've got shit to do.  

  Just a fleeting thought: I've got a busy week going. These posts will prove it. 

Sheila and Marty always seemed, to their mutual friends, an odd pairing.  Sheila, who in her youth had attended Columbia and Christ Church, Oxford, had nearly completed a doctoral thesis at the latter about Ezra Pound, ("the performance of madness in the Cantos" was how she described its subject to Marty) and she had gathered around her a circle of almost equally erudite friends.  Then there was Marty. Amongst them he was always getting the references wrong and the pronunciation disastrously so. He knew nothing about Pound except for Pound's fascistic broadcasts. But he was an actual working author (of technical manuals, mostly) and he occasionally did mention that Sheila, for all her talk of writing as Pound understood it, as Art, had never published ... anything anywhere.  And most places they went, Rowan (Marty's beautiful border collie, whose name had been  selected by his sister for its pure Scottishness) went along .   [Other stuff in here. Sheila and...

  Perhaps it is a great movie I don't know. I may never know.  I suspect I'm not going to see it until it ends up on small screens.  But THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA II has this to its credit.  It has inspired some fine writing amongst critics.  I'll just quote here one example, from SALON, where senior culture writer Coleman Spilde raves about it.  But “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t here just to make easy money by force-feeding audiences IP slop in the form of Miranda Priestly one-liners; it’s using its existence to issue a mass-scale warning about the future, stressing the worth in fighting tooth and nail to preserve what we hold dear — in cinema, in publishing, in every element of life being disemboweled by rapacious tech bros in fleece vests. Dug.

Last week I quoted from a 19th century article by Chauncey Wright, mentor of the Harvard-based Metaphysical Club, concerning the beginnings of self-consciousness in humans.  He compared it with flight in birds. I'll try to elucidate. "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one." The bracketing is mine, the parenthesis is Wright's.  Our observing angel presumably is aware of mental activity in a range of animals  -- stimulus is followed (often after some gap in time as if for deliberation) by response.  Monkey sees some food out of reach. Monkey looks around, sees a long stick, uses it to extend his reach for the food.  But then a particular "naked ape" appears who ha...