Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 This will be my last post on this blog in this month.  And this has been so poignant, so fascinating, so philosophically packed a month that I thought I could most fittingly end it with a rumination on months of January I have known as a resident in New England for most of my days on this planet.  Heck, even when I have lived for periods outside the charmed circle of New England it has seldom been further away than Poughkeepsie.  Or Staten Island.  So ... what do I think about this mythically two-faced moment of a month in this recurrent trip of ours around the sun?  It sucks. 

 A friend commented, privately, upon my comment a few days back on Descartes and Spinoza and how they made their livings.  I said that Spinoza's living as a lens grinder does have a bearing on his philosophy and briefly explained why.  Lenses made possible both the infinite and the infinitesimal, through both the telescope and the microscope.  The world made possible by such instruments and the sciences they enable could indeed be deified. My friend found this unsatisfying.  But ... there is no accounting for taste. What is a tad more biting ... he noted accurately that I had offered no explanation at all of how the material circumstances of Descartes' life had any connection tohis philosophy. Here, then, is that explanation.  Descartes sold real estate, which he appears to have inherited, and to have used the proceeds to buy bonds, supporting himself thereafter as a coupon clipper. Consider those two sorts of asset: real estate and bonds.  Real estate...

 As the new year rolled in, many scholars and observers of the Supreme Court expected a quick opinion on the Trump tariff case. The courts below have held that the president does NOT have the authority he is claiming here. The oral arguments did not seem to advance the administration's cause.  So: if there is to be a decision striking down the tariffs, AND that decision would have complicated consequences in terms of working out the rebates, THEN it stands to reason SCOTUS will want to get the deed done quickly, lessening the complication.  The constant payment of these tariffs constitutes a tick-tick-tick that a court contemplating such a decision may want to shorten.  Yet as of this writing -- no tariff decision.  January's opinion days have come and gone, with no opinion on this subject.  Some are whispering that perhaps the outcome is not so clear-cut -- perhaps a court so much molded by President Trump will find a way to accommodate him.  I disagr...

 Such efforts tend to go in circles. Today's reform is to undo yesterday's reform, and tomorrow's reform will be to recreate the one that we undid today.  It doesn't work day-to-day though.  But year by year and decade by decade. This is one conclusion one draws from the book REFORMING THE WORLD BANK: TWENTY YEARS OF TRIAL -- AND ERROR by David A, Phillips, The"20 years" number in the subtitle indicates that Phillips focuses especially upon the period 1986 -- 2006, beginning with the appointment of Barber Conable, a former member of the US House of Representatives.  That was a time of great concern about Latin American indebtedness to the big New York and London banks, and worry about what a wave of defaults would do to those institutions. That concern led to the Baker plan in the middle of the decade, followed by the creation of "Brady bonds" to allow debt relief short of open default.  In this fraught context, Conable immediately hired an outside c...

  A questioner in Quora asked what we, other Quorants, see as the most recent breakthrough in philosophy.  I replied: An important breakthrough took place through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, which we might call “Taking the Subject Seriously Again” or TSSA. It can also be rendered “Taking SubjectIVITY Seriously Again”. The human subject, and its subjectivity, was nearly written out of the higher echelons of philosophical and psychological consideration in the middle of the 20th century, by behavioralism, hard determinism/incompatibilism, “strong AI” and related developments. There were no people finding the world, so the Wittgensteinian phrase “the world as I found it” ceased to be meaningful. There were only objects, though some objects oddly talk as if they are subjects. Daniel Dennett, who passed away recently, was very much of the anti-subjectivity persuasion. It was a cause drenched with nostalgia through much of his working life BECAUSE of the TSSA breakthrough. Figures li...

 The administration of President Donald Trump has made many of us eager to cheer on virtually any check or balance as it appears, even as we were briefly cheering on the old neoconservatives of and around the Cheney family (yes, the old torture caucus), insofar as it limited Trump's reach. It served a human and humane purpose.  Anyway, the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank (the third central bank in the history of our country) has come to the fore of late.  The political hack's instinct is often to advance the cause of inflation, in part because it assists net debtors in relieving them of some of the net value of their indebtedness, and that can have stimulative effects in the marketplace and at the ballot box.  Also, if the nation-state itself is a debtor, as the United States certainly is on a world history record-breaking scale, then reducing the value of the currency on which its bonds were issued is a way of getting the ben...