Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...

I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism.  Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself.  Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition. One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher...

At a moment when the President of the United States uses the old blacks-look-like-monkeys meme for hahas, and enhances the indignity of it by blaming it on an aimless aide ... we need Eddie Murphy's wisdom.    Weekend Update: Eddie Murphy on the First Black Astronaut - SNL - YouTube

I think of this as "proper names" week. Each of the four posts this week will have a proper name in the title.  Yesterday's, of course, is already "in the books". The proper name in the title of yesterday's post was, of course, Frank Sinatra. The proper name used in today's, and in the posts of the next couple days, will be violations of the Frank Sinatra rule.    Today we discuss a recent book about analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa.  As a Christopher who generally drops the "er" at the end of that given name when called upon to give my signature, I highly approve of his spelling.  Schuringa wrote a book, published last year by Verso, entitled A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Its point is that most of what we think we know about analytic philosophy is wrong. The term "we' here can refer to anyone without an academic position who might nonetheless read a book with the phrase "analytic philosophy" in the title...

Just thinking about the sort of "introduction to journalism" course one can take at any decent four year college, or perhaps in the context of an associates' program. They generally teach that the first sentence should cover all the Ws: who, what, where, when, and why. "The chief of the Smallville fire department personally rescued a small cat from a chimney in the Soapsy neighborhood Saturday afternoon in response to a 911 call." Good lede.  [Yes, journos generally spell it 'lede' for the same reason that a certain Zeppelin is described as 'led'. The spelling 'lead' -- as an alternative to led or lede -- can be confusing.]   The italicized sentence is a good lede.  The rescue of the cat is the what.   Who rescued the cat? The chief (identified here by role not by name). Where ? a chimney in the Soapsy neighborhood. When ? Saturday afternoon. Why ?  In response to a 911 call.  Of course the rest of the story can expand on any or all of t...

A scandalous matter now forgotten, even among historians of philosophy, the "Leslie affair" may be a turning point of some significance in the debates over causation in Anglophonic philosophy.  John Leslie (1766 - 1832) was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. In 1804 he published a book on  the nature and properties of heat that earned him some favorable attention among the cutting edge scientists of the day.  In 1805 the University of Edinburgh decided to make him professor of mathematics. BUT ... there was surprising kickback from church officials on the ground that Leslie had said positive things about David Hume and about Hume's understanding of causation as the mere fact of constant and invariable sequence.   The establishment saw this notion as a danger to the accepted religion, and specifically to any cosmological argument for the existence of God as a First Cause.  Causation has to mean something, some REASON WHY some sequences are invariable, f...