Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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...

  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...

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 ...

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."