Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Back in late January I wrote here about a book by David A. Phillips that examined efforts at re-organizing the World Bank.  Phillips, who worked at the Bank for 14 years himself, looks with especial care at a 20 year period, 1908 - 2008. He ends up quite disenchanted.   I continue to read the book in small pieces. In chapter 8, Phillips quotes Gavin and Rodrik thus: "There is something more than a little schizophrenic about an agency that preempts potential private lenders because they are allegedly too risk averse (a main rationale for Bank lending), then means that its loans should be senior to any other, thereby shifting most of the risk onto private lenders."  Yes, you might say,  "rings true, but who are Gavin and Rodrik?"  The answer, M. Gavin and D. Rodrik are the co-authors of an article in the American Economic Review in 1995, "The World Bank in Historical Perspective." That's what I get from a footnote in Phillips book.  Can I dig a li...

  I indicated in a late January post in this blog what I thought the Supreme Court was going to do about tariffs.  I said that it would likely affirm the decisions in the courts below striking down the tariffs, but that as to remedy it would find a way to allow the administration to avoid rebates.  I was right as to the questioning of the permissibility of the sweeping tariff powers the President sought to assign to himself here. I was wrong as to remedy.  As you surely all know by now, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 reading upheld one of the central pillars of our constitutional system, the unique role of the legislature in matters of taxation. And noted the obvious point that tariffs ARE taxation.  What did it say about remedy? Nothing, really. It left the matter open for further litigation, with the implication (I submit) that the importers who have been paying these charges since "Liberation Day" have a claim. The litigation is already underway. THAT I did not e...

A new collection of the writings of Henry James Jr. on fiction as an art, published by NYRB Classics, has drawn my attention.  A reviewer of the collection quotes HJ saying, "The old superstition about fiction being 'wicked' has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed  towards any story which does not more or less admit it is only a joke.”  Some of James’s eminent contemporaries were casualties of the notion that fiction was a moral embarrassment — that its very falsity amounted to a sort of nefarious deception. In the novels of Anthony Trollope, for instance, James detected “a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe."  Becca Rothfeld, reviewing this collection for WaPo, wonders whether we are to take this as a banner James was raising on behalf of his own work.  Come into my tent, he would be saying and get fiction that is not apologe...

"  ‘Concrete reality’ contrasts with ‘abstract reality’: some hold that numbers and concepts are real things, part of reality, but are abstract entities rather than concrete entities. One quick way to characterize concrete reality is to say that to be concretely real is to be capable of entering into causal relations."     That is Galen Strawson. Note the careful wording: this is a "quick way" of distinguishing  concrete  from abstract. Strawson is not presuming to offer it as a definition.    This quote shows Strawson preparing to set out metaphysical views of his own, he is here speaking NOT in a history-of-philosophy context. But it brings to mind that, as my friend Henry has mentioned in comments on this blog, Strawson has set out a view of Humean notions of causation in which Hume's view is not what it has commonly been taken to be. Hume meant, Strawson says, only that our experience of causation is limited to correlation, not that the fact of ca...

Dropping these here as a convenient place to keep them. The issue of ranked choice voting versus first-past-the-post voting is a hot one in Canada right now -- its profile has been raised by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who appears remorseful about not having done anything to  move the country in the ranked direction. Here is some literature on the controversy.  Martin Horak (2021) Adopting Ranked-Choice Voting in London, Ontario .  Michael Cowan (2025), “Ranking Bad: The Chemistry of Ranked‑Choice Voting.” ResPublica: Undergraduate Journal of Political Science. Rivard & Lockhart (2022), “Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada.”   Canadian Journal of Political Science. Examines how voters use expectations about government formation to guide their choices. Highly relevant because strategic voting is one of the main behaviors RCV aims to reduce . Donovan, Todd, Caroline Tolbert & Kellen Gracey (2019). “Self‑Reported Underst...

First, the closing ceremony went off on Sunday 22 without a hitch. Indeed, it was inspiring. The ceremony was designed as a tribute to Italian culture, and well as a hand-off to the not-so-far-away site of the next winter games, (2030), the French Alps  Second, this was so far as I can remember the first Olympics in which there was a public controversy that involved the rules of curling. Curling is the odd sport in which some of the athletes seem to busy themselves sweeping dust out of the way of a sliding rock. Even at Olympics time, that best of all times for recognizing odd sports, the outside world usually manages to ignore these guys. A controversy over curling?  Third, the location was not so much spread out (as they always are), it was split.  Two distinct hubs. The Milan area got the ice events, the Cortina area got the snow events. There are about 410 kilometers, or 250 miles, between the two cities.  Fourth, indulge my old-man moment. Why do the winter gam...