Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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The nature and source of evil II

I believe it was Bertrand Russell who asked: if there is a "problem of evil" why is there not a "problem of good"? His answer was that there is a problem of evil only for those whose premises make evil seem anomalous. Following up that thought: If I believed that the world is the creation of the evil Cthulhu, designed to make us miserable and mad, why are there good and joyful moments? Why does Cthulhu let Bach's music slip through into ontology? Why are we allowed to take and feel such pride in our child's growth and accomplishments, if we are supposed to be miserable? My guess is that different Cthulhu-ists have different opinions. Schopenhauer's Will might be thought to raise the same question. But he might say that the Will preserves its own existence by preserving our generational cycles, so allowing the pride of parenthood is a necessary price the Will must pay to continue to have humans whom it can torture. As to music? it may have played a ro...

The nature and source of evil I

The "problem of evil" in broadest terms is the problem of how to account for the existence of evil within systems of thought that would seem to exclude it -- that may identify reality with goodness in one way or another. Within Christian thought these efforts are generally called "theodicy.' But the problem precedes Christian efforts. Plato, for example, postulated a Form of the Good that is the most real of realities. This means that he starkly identified Good with Real, and THAT raises the question of -- why isn't it? Or not so much. When the neoplatonists came along a couple of centuries later and strove to put Platon's thoughts into more systematic form, tried to make linear treatises out of hints from not especially linear dialogs, they found this question staring at them. If the Good is the sun (Plato's metaphor in his culminating story of an escape from the cave) then evil is presumably the darkness: shade. Yet how decode this metaphor? What is...

Artificial Intelligence is mostly hype

I could have told them that at Ford. But I guess they had to learn it on their own. https://newrepublic.com/article/212671/data-centers-americans-hate-ai

If you want to get rid of a Susan Collins

On the off chance that anyone who has anything to do with the Democratic Party in Maine is reading this ... first, shame on you. I used to identify as a dissident Republican, way back when that meant John Anderson ... and in large part because of that autobiographical fact, I would love to see Senator Collins removed from public life. She is the master (too gendered?) -- the prodigy at pretending to be that sort of Republican -- but always backing down and falling in line when it matters. Her games playing helped give us DOBBS v. JACKSON effectively extinguishing the privacy right from the 14th amendment. [No, they haven't overturned GRISWOLD yet -- but I wouldn't want a test case on that to come before this court anytime soon.] Anyway it was important, my hypothetical Maine-Dem-operative reader, for you lot to come up with someone solid who could run against Collins this year. You had ONE JOB!!! Boy did you fail on that. And don't ask me...

A quote from Euler

Yesterday I paid tribute here to a great mathematician. Today I offer a quote from him. "To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as there are usually believed to be." The significance of that observation may not be obvious outside of some consideration of the history of math, the development of calculus in particular. But once we do a little grappling with that history, we see that Euler is making a point here that takes us back to ancient Greece. Back to Zeno, Achilles and tortoise. If Achilles is to catch up with the tortoise there must be a moment at which the difference between them is zero. One way of looking at the problem is to ask what is the next lower number -- one really really close to zero but still a positive number! Euler here is saying "That is the wrong way of looking at it." Or, "don't create my...

Paying tribute to a great mathematician

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was surely one of the most prolific of great mathematicians. Among his contributions, we need to mention two, each of which comes down to us as a single letter: the letter e and the letter i . If we were literally to "pay"tribute, we might do so in increments of $2.72, rounding up a bit the value of irrational e. We'll get to that. First: biography. Euler was born in Basel, Switzerland, so his life and work might fittingly be considered a riposte to the old anti-Swiss jibe (originally from The Third Man ) that Switzerland has produced nothing for all its years of peace and democracy, nothing more than the humble cuckoo clock. Since Euler’s day and because of his work, i has stood for the simplest of the numbers that Descartes had called “imaginary.” This i refers to the square root of -1. We don’t need to bother ourselves further with the question “ what is the square root of -1?” It is i , by stipulation. Also since Eul...