Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 A little bit retro here. The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars. India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries. The public danger posed by heat waves may b...

  The story of the first half was: Both teams had great defenses. The Patriots had no offense at all because the offensive line was remarkably weak. So nobody could score touchdowns, but the Seahawks could score field goals.  In the second half, the Patriots offense made some efforts to rally, without much effect.  Indeed, in the game as a whole, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye was sacked SIX times. [If the Seahawks had been able to sack him one more time they would have tied the Super Bowl record.]  Of course each sack has a penumbra.  For every sack in a game, that is, there are plays in which the QB was about to be sacked but got off a hurried pass, inevitably incomplete, to avoid it. The dominance of the Seahawks' defensive line against the Pats offensive line could hardly have been more complete. Congrats to the Pacific Northwest, which has its regional champion. My understanding is that the gamblers' spread was 4.5 points. If you gave up those points in or...

The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...

I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism.  Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself.  Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition. One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher...

At a moment when the President of the United States uses the old blacks-look-like-monkeys meme for hahas, and enhances the indignity of it by blaming it on an aimless aide ... we need Eddie Murphy's wisdom.    Weekend Update: Eddie Murphy on the First Black Astronaut - SNL - YouTube

I think of this as "proper names" week. Each of the four posts this week will have a proper name in the title.  Yesterday's, of course, is already "in the books". The proper name in the title of yesterday's post was, of course, Frank Sinatra. The proper name used in today's, and in the posts of the next couple days, will be violations of the Frank Sinatra rule.    Today we discuss a recent book about analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa.  As a Christopher who generally drops the "er" at the end of that given name when called upon to give my signature, I highly approve of his spelling.  Schuringa wrote a book, published last year by Verso, entitled A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Its point is that most of what we think we know about analytic philosophy is wrong. The term "we' here can refer to anyone without an academic position who might nonetheless read a book with the phrase "analytic philosophy" in the title...