Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

It has been twenty-five years since airplanes, hijacked by terrorists, struck each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and a third struck the Pentagon. A fourth flight crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers resisted the hijackers/terrorists.  One odd thing about the 25th year commemorations -- they arrive as our ears are still ringing with the 250th anniversary of our independence as a nation.  This means the period SINCE that terrorist attack represents one tenth of the period of our existence as a nation. THAT fractional amount will only increase with time. This makes me feel old. The point?  Just that once changes are underway they can proceed with dizzying speed and a quarter century zips away. Whoosh. Some of the changes that were set in place by the attacks of September 11 2001 are moving at dizzying speed even now.  The United States responded by declaring a "War on Terror." What this turned ...

A little more than a year and a half ago I offered on this blog a precis of a book by two political scientists, Buzan and Waever, that offered a round-the-world tour of security issues on a region by region basis as of 2003. Indeed, I wrote several posts on the subject through January and February of 2025. Today, I would like to quote from something that appears early in that work that seems to me to have held up well in 2026, twenty-three years after the Buzan and Waever publication. The issue is why "premodern states" are under pressure to conform to "international standards".  "For premodern states, the threat from globalisation is broadly defined by an inability to measure up to international standards of good governance. The danger is either that they will be demoted in the ranks of international society to some sort of trusteeship status, no longer recognised as legally equal and capable of self-government, or that they will simply be neglected and allow...

  A little more than three years ago I wrote here about a book by Stephen Bates , of the University of Nevada, called AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020). It concerns a commission of intellectuals convened during the Second World War at the instigation of press maven Henry Luce to look into philosophical and practical questions concerning freedom of the press.  The aristocracy issued a report in 1947, four years after its creation, entitled A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS. As the title implies, much of it is taken up with the responsibilities an institutional press must bear in order to earn its continued freedom.   I'm writing about the Bates take on that report now because on another look at the book I've found an odd mistake. In his introduction (on p. 4) Bates mentions, in justifying his concern with the 1947 report, various indexes of its continuing influence through subsequent decades. One of these, "In a key First Amendment ruling, the Supreme Court quotes the commi...

  Pauline Kael (pictured) passed away on September 3, 2001.  It had been a slow news summer (a fact that was about to change in a very rude way in another week, but no matter), and Kael's death received a lot of attention. I'll add a bit more now at a quarter century distance.  One great Kael passage reads thus:  If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, i...

There is stuff on the surface of the moon that was put there at the end of the 1960s.   Stuff that was put there not by robots but by frail organically-evolved human beings. Put or left there by members of a species that only three score and six years before had been struggling with the basics of heavier-than-air flight.   A baby born at the time of the Kitty Hawk flight [where liftoff and touchdown were separated by all of 260 meters] would barely have qualified for social security by the time that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. THAT span represents one of the most extraordinary feats of recorded history.  Let us take a moment to be amazed. And understanding of the deniers.  It is still difficult to wrap one's head around. Perhaps it is just easier to deny.  Wow.        And yet it happened.  Wow. 

 Tim Curry?  Oh, noooo. A lot might be said about the late Tim Curry, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Amadeus, Spamalot, and so forth.  What I wish to say is simply that he passed away on August 25. The very same day that Dolly Parton shuffled off this mortal coil.  If [let us not ask why] you wish to leave the world weeping, you wish to get a big send-off, funeral orations, bloggers exhuming every discoverable fact about your life and death for a month to come -- if you wish any of that, dear reader, try to put some space between your death and that of a Dolly Parton.   She has taken all the oxygen out of the eulogistic room.  Rest in peace, TC.