Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Beyond the usual concern that the total or partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up the price of the stuff we put in our cars, there is a concern only slowly bubbling to public consciousness -- that it will also drive up the cost of fertilizer and accordingly of food. The traditional route for the manufacture of fertilizer is through what chemists call the Haber-Bosch process, which makes ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer in itself or can be combined with other stuff for more elaborate fertilizers.  There has been a lot of talk about moving beyond Haber-Bosch, finding alternative ways of making  ammonia and growing the world's food, in part precisely because natural gas is an input, and relatedly because CO₂ is a major byproduct of that process. A move toward alternative processes is a move toward a low or net zero carbon emissions world. It is certainly possible that even a partial blockage of Hormuz will kick-start the implementation of alternatives...

More on the novel, Andrew's Brain , by Doctorow.  We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew.  He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person. This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum.  And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person.  The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting.  Anyway: as the second chapter opens we ...

  I've been reading a short novel by E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014). Let me quote for you the opening paragraph: "I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist, but it isn't pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died." That paragraph throws us in the middle of things. It works from and, I think, presumes our familiarity with, a number of conventions. Andrew's job sounds like an academic one, and the paragraph primes us for a campus novel, where love triangles, ambitions successful or foiled, human tragedies, all play out amidst faculty, students, administrators with well-defined social roles.     The speaker may be addressing us, the readers, here.  Or he might be addressing a therapist -- not an unusual expository device in contemporary fiction.  We also cued up here have a rather ordinary-seeming love triangle.  A mi...

 Presidential authority as the commander in chief of the armed forces, under Article II of the US Constitution, is real and important, but it surely isn't all that President Donald Trump needs it to be for this war to be even remotely lawful.  To review six familiar points: (1) The US Constitutional reserves to Congress exclusively the right to "declare" war; (2) Probably because the framers considered the point too obvious to require stating, there is no specific statement that undeclared wars are illegal wars; (3) The courts have refused to make that inference leaving a gap in the whole notion of the checking of war powers, but (4) Congress, overriding President Nixon's veto, filled that gap with the War Powers Act of 1973, and (5) if Congress does not approve President Trump's action, then under the War Powers Act, the President will have to end hostilities within 60 days of starting them -- which would be by the end of April, but (6) nobody expects President T...

For a long time, much of the political appeal of  President Donald Trump has come from his professed opposition to “forever wars.”   One of his many explicit statements to this effect dates from his State of the Union address in 2019.  He said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  If you need a link for that: behold. Given his goal to make America “great again,” this language clearly amounts to a commitment to use his position as commander-in-chief to keep the United States out of endless wars. Yet here we are, with Trump once again the commander-in-chief and with his commitment to war with Iran open-ended. He began the attack on Iran at the end of February and throughout March he has put his renunciation of his earlier view front-and-center. He has used his own proprietary social-media platform, “Truth Social,” to explain to us that “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries fin...

  Ladies and gentlemen, behold the much-discussed Strait of Hormuz. The white space above is water, the greenish space is land.  To the left, the Persian Gulf -- to the right (east), the Gulf of Oman.  To the north, Iran.  To the south, Oman. At its tightest point, there are just 21 nautical miles between Oman and Iran. That is even smaller than the mileage between England and France at the narrowest part of the Channel. Within that span, only an even smaller portion is actually useful for large vessels such as oil tankers, about two lanes, each two miles wide, separated from each other by a 2 mile buffer zone.   Until a few days ago, roughly 20% of the world's oil supply was passing with regularity through the Strait of Hormuz.  The name of the strait comes from nearby Hormuz Island, and the name of that island may come from a corruption of the name Ahuramazda, the Supreme deity in Zoroastrian religion.   The closure of that strait for any l...