Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  August 5th is a noteworthy moment in sports history.  It was 22 years ago today that women competed in a marathon for the first time in the history of the Olympics.  This was at the 1984 games in southern California. The winner was Joan Benoit, a US runner, pictured here. She crossed the finish line two hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds after setting out.. The silver medal went to a Norwegian runner named Grete Waltz.  And the bronze? Portugal's Rosa Mota. What makes this something more than a generic glass-ceiling-breaking story is the physical comeback story attached to it.  Benoit had suffered an injury to her Achilles tendon earlier that year.  Her restoration to top -- Olympic winning -- fitness was extraordinarily quick.  She is still alive and so far as I know well.  God bless her. And us mortals might spare her a good thought on this day. 

  I didn't say much about the pandemic during the pandemic, even here in my hobby blog. I don't believe I've even commented on the much discussed question, for example, of whether Dr. Fauci was a national deliverer or a fraud.   Now I can and will say though: he might have been both. But for purposes of narrowing the field a bit, let's discuss the respect in which he might have been a fraud.  Fauci did a good deal during the pandemic to persuade Americans that Covid-19 had its origin in China's wet markets -- places where fresh (newly dead) animals are sold for food in open air settings.  But the diaries help make it clear that he did not believe this to be the origin.  He understood that the real origin of Covid-19 had a very likely tie to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in Wuhan, China.  Comer and Jordan say, "Excerpts of emails we are making public today reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things .... the potential that COVID-19 leaked fr...

In yesterday's post I quoted Jorge Ortega y Gasset summarizing a lecture he gave that itself displayed his equivocal attitude toward the phenomenological movement of the early 20th century, led by Husserl.  Husserl believed in the great bracketing -- precisely of the question of Being.  He thought the whole Cartesian question, about an evil demon creating a matrix for a Hollywood movie just to confuse me about which century I'm in -- Husserl thought all that could be just set aside.  We give ourselves plenty to think about if we simply focus on the world that does appear to us, and the selves that appear to our own introspection.  Ortega y Gasset admired Husserl's synthetic/intuitive thinking, as opposed to the sort of "conceptual-abstract thinking" that may be left homeless by such a bracketing, But he said that in order to get this right  " it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system by and in itself ....human life." As a sema...

  Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset gave a lecture at the University of Madrid in 1925.  This is how he later recalled that lecture.  "I stated my theme—some of my students would be able to remember—saying literally: 1 st , it is necessary to renew, from its roots, the traditional problem of Being; 2 nd , this has to be done with the phenomenological method insofar and only insofar as this means  synthetic or intuitive thinking , and not merely conceptual-abstract thinking as is the traditional logical way of thinking; 3 rd , but it is necessary to integrate the phenomenological method, adapting to it a dimension of  systematic thinking  which, as is known, it does not posses;4 th , and finally, in order that a systematic phenomenological thinking may be possible, it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system  by  and  in itself ....human life."  That is a complicated multi-part thought that bears study. A ...

Recently saw PRESSURE, a movie about the meteorology behind the D-Day landings at Normandy in 1944.  It was somewhat fictionalized, a docudrama rather than a documentary. But if you want the underlying story without the fictionalization, go to   The Real Story Behind 'Pressure,' a WWII Drama About James Stagg's D-Day Weather Forecast  (Smithsonian).  General Eisenhower had to make the call, "we go" or "we hold until the storm passes." Or maybe "we look for a window within the storm." And he had to make it in epistemological circumstances that we have to work to recreate today. After all, they didn't have satellites in orbit conveying detailed information about every cloud around the globe.  They had weather stations, high-altitude balloons, lots of detailed historical records that experts could pore over without finding decisive patterns for a particular call-- and guesswork. Lots of guesswork. The hero of the story is James Stagg, a Scot...

I want to say something about a MOU, but not about the one you probably have in mind.  The cease fire MOU that US President Donald Trump and Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian signed in mid-June is now, all agree, defunct.  What the above headline refers to, though, is an MOU between Iraq and Syria, signed July 17.  Those two countries are moving toward an agreement to restore the Kirkuk-Baiyas pipeline to functioning condition. As the above map indicates, the pipeline in question runs from the heart of Iraq to the shore of the Mediterranean. This will enable a lot of petroleum to reach world markets whatever is going on with the Strait of Hormuz. Or the Red Sea either.  The pipeline was constructed in the period 1950-52 by Bechtel. It hasn't been operating since the period of the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s, when Syria took Iran's side. It hasn't been operable since hits by US bombs in 2003. Collateral damage in the US/Iraq war. The bomb strikes and the maintenance iss...