Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I don't know about you, dear reader, but there are some of us who feel some excitement on the morning of 'decision days' in June.   The US Supreme Court is typically trying to clear its dockets ahead of its summer break, and this is when the hotly contested cases and the publicly most awaited make their appearance. Hence the fun.  "Is today the day they release their birthright citizenship decision? or a re-affirmation of central bank independence? or the weapons-for-the-stoners case?" Last Thursday did turn out to be the day for the weapons-for-stoners case. That came out right, as far as concerns the parties directly involved, though the precedential significance seems to be small. This morning? It is another announced decision day and the excitement is back. Okay, nerdy perpetual law student fun....  

  As you may have noticed, dear reader, I have for a long time been presenting new blog posts every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Yet today is Thursday and this is the first post this week.    My apologies if you are disappointed.  I hope to be back to a regular schedule next week. 

I just realized something.  I've always been kinda nerdy, but I've never fit in even among my fellow nerds.  Why not?  Perhaps because Dante's DIVINE COMEDY was for me what THE LORD OF THE RINGS was for the 'normal' nerd. Hmmmmm. 

The coalition that put Donald Trump into office twice is coming unravelled. That judgment is of the jigsaw-perceiving sort.  One of its pieces is the recent Republican Party primary in Iowa.  https://www.wsaw.com/video/2026/06/03/lahn-wins-iowa-gop-governor-race-turek-takes-democratic-senate-primary/   "Make America Healthy Again," a loose grouping itself, of people who read Ivan Illich and those who just want to be able to drink unprocessed (raw) milk without governmental interference, of people who are sure vaccines cause autism and those who believe pesticides are destroying the food, from the granola eaters on the left to the granola eaters on the right including some who have made that transition personally -- MAHA ending up (as that acronym suggests) more-or-less aligned with MAGA during the last presidential election campaign. This year, in the mid-terms, that alignment has come apart.  In the Iowa Republican primary for Governor, MAHA backed Zack Lahn, w...

  I noted yesterday, that in writing his work on collective choice Sen had apparently read not only the work of John Rawls (which was inevitable), but responses to Rawls about the humans-only nature of the deliberations Rawls imagines behind the veil of ignorance. We are supposed to imagine ourselves as ignorant of our social class, race, and native intelligence, but presumably cognizant of the fact that, when the veil is lifted, we will turn out to be humans.  The responses wondered why the species barrier is that strong. What piques my interest is that Sen refers to these critiques (he does not source them specifically -- admittedly it is a bit of a digression from the main line of his thought) as half in jest and half serious.  Hmmmm.  Has Peter Singer written in response to Rawls? If he has, (and I'm too lazy to look into it right now) then I can easily imagine Singer making the point Sen emphasizes in dead earnest, utterly without jesting.  What Sen sees...

  Amartya Sen, an economist/philosopher, was born in November 1933 and he is still with us. He may be the single most important philosopher alive.  One of his works is COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. Or, perhaps, you might count this as two of his works.  The first book of that title was published in 1970, then a much expanded and re-written version appeared in 2017. I'd like today to quote a bit from the 2017 edition, in which Sen is with some sympathy discussing the work of John Rawls.  He says (this is a footnote): A half-jocular, half-serious objection to the criteria of fairness of Rawls and others often runs like this: Why confine placing oneself in the position of other human beings only, why not other animals also? Is the biological line so sharply drawn? What this line of attack misses is the fact that Rawls is crystallizing a rule of fairness that our value system does seem to have, rather than constructing a rule of fairness in vacuum based on notion...