Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

"  ‘Concrete reality’ contrasts with ‘abstract reality’: some hold that numbers and concepts are real things, part of reality, but are abstract entities rather than concrete entities. One quick way to characterize concrete reality is to say that to be concretely real is to be capable of entering into causal relations."     That is Galen Strawson. Note the careful wording: this is a "quick way" of distinguishing  concrete  from abstract. Strawson is not presuming to offer it as a definition.    This quote shows Strawson preparing to set out metaphysical views of his own, he is here speaking NOT in a history-of-philosophy context. But it brings to mind that, as my friend Henry has mentioned in comments on this blog, Strawson has set out a view of Humean notions of causation in which Hume's view is not what it has commonly been taken to be. Hume meant, Strawson says, only that our experience of causation is limited to correlation, not that the fact of ca...

Dropping these here as a convenient place to keep them. The issue of ranked choice voting versus first-past-the-post voting is a hot one in Canada right now -- its profile has been raised by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who appears remorseful about not having done anything to  move the country in the ranked direction. Here is some literature on the controversy.  Martin Horak (2021) Adopting Ranked-Choice Voting in London, Ontario .  Michael Cowan (2025), “Ranking Bad: The Chemistry of Ranked‑Choice Voting.” ResPublica: Undergraduate Journal of Political Science. Rivard & Lockhart (2022), “Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada.”   Canadian Journal of Political Science. Examines how voters use expectations about government formation to guide their choices. Highly relevant because strategic voting is one of the main behaviors RCV aims to reduce . Donovan, Todd, Caroline Tolbert & Kellen Gracey (2019). “Self‑Reported Underst...

First, the closing ceremony went off on Sunday 22 without a hitch. Indeed, it was inspiring. The ceremony was designed as a tribute to Italian culture, and well as a hand-off to the not-so-far-away site of the next winter games, (2030), the French Alps  Second, this was so far as I can remember the first Olympics in which there was a public controversy that involved the rules of curling. Curling is the odd sport in which some of the athletes seem to busy themselves sweeping dust out of the way of a sliding rock. Even at Olympics time, that best of all times for recognizing odd sports, the outside world usually manages to ignore these guys. A controversy over curling?  Third, the location was not so much spread out (as they always are), it was split.  Two distinct hubs. The Milan area got the ice events, the Cortina area got the snow events. There are about 410 kilometers, or 250 miles, between the two cities.  Fourth, indulge my old-man moment. Why do the winter gam...

On February 4th in this blog I wrote about the three models of PhD education in philosophy, as per Brian Leiter.  I passed along Leiter's comment to the effect that one of the models, by working too hard to integrate substantive philosophical work with history-of-philosophy work, ends up doing strange things like positing an inferentialist Hegel.  I noted that I didn't know what an "inferentialist" was or is. That is where we pick up today. A friend wrote to me to say that I could ASK Leiter. I did so, and he replied with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on theories of meaning (philosophical semantics). Theories of Meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) It appears that there are three combatants in the field of the theory of philosophical semantics: the classical, the internalist, and the inferentialist. To be clear, these are not different theories of meaning. They are a level of abstraction up from that.  They are different theories about wha...

 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...