Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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Summer of '69

I've been thinking for no good reasons about the lyrics to the Bryan Adams classic "Summer of '69." [And I'm glad that Adams is still vital and touring.] Two prominent "slanted rhymes" caught my attention. The first of them comes right at the start: Got my first real six string, bought it at the five and dime Played it 'til my fingers bled, was the summer of sixty-nine. Of course "dime" and "nine" don't exactly rhyme. A small point, like a fork's tine. But soon we get another slightly slated rhyme when the lyrics are describing youthful doomed ambition. Me and some guys from school had a band and we tried real hard Jimmy quit Jody got married, Should've known we'd never get far. Now, "hard" and "far" don't exactly rhyme either. Other rhymes in the song are simple and unslanted, like "ever" and "never". But those two slants right upfront got me to wondering. Did Adam...

Dark Energy and the knights of the razor

Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist (she did a doctoral thesis on black hole production) and a prolific science popularizer, discussed in her blog recently whether physicists have any good reason to posit the existence of "dark energy." About the turn of the millennium, physicists determined that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They didn't know why, so they proposed a "dark (otherwise unobservable) energy" that was driving this acceleration. There is a key paper by Chevalier and Polarski in the International Journal of Modern Physics from 2001. But the simple idea, once postulated, didn't stay simple. Theorists were soon explaining why dark energy has to be understood to be "evolving," and competing scenarios for that evolution themselves evolved. Now quite recently, a group of mathematicians have looked at the numbers and have decided that this work may all have been a wild goose chase. There need be no dark energy ...

A Semantic Vestige of the Parthian Empire

The Parthians were the folks who ran a large part of what we now call Iran as the Hellenistic kingdom in the region, the Seleucids, was fading away. The Parthians were known for a trick they perfected in heated battles, when it was necessary for some part of their line to make a retreat. They learned to fire a terrible volley of arrows in one direction while moving in the other -- creating what later writers would call a "covering fire" that kept their foes at bay while they could re-organize. This sort of volley became known for a long time as a "Parthian shot," although in English that got simplified and dumbed down over time into ... "parting shot."

Senator McConnell

Mitch McConnell is effectively out of the action. The only evidence he is still alive available to the public seems to be a "proof of life" photo arranged for just that purpose, and that seems something that could easily be faked with a little ingenuity. I understand that there is a key deadline coming up: August 3. If McConnell is found incapable of performing his duties as Senator before that date, a special; election would be called. But if McConnell is still Senator on August 3 and departs for incapacity thereafter, there would be no special election and the seat would simply remain vacant until January. McConnell is not running for re-election. The Republicans of Kentucky nominated Andy Barr to replace him in a May primary and Barr has the advantage over Democratic contender Charels Booker. I suspect we will know more by then. The Republicans generally would expect to be able to keep the seat were any special election held -- maybe just get Barr into o...

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...