Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I said something in my September 25th entry into this blog about THE WEIGHT. Specifically, I spoke about the movie's back-story, and the underlying reality of FDR's confiscation of privately held gold in a determined demonetization of the historically value-measuring metal.  And I said that I enjoyed the movie.  But I didn't say much more about what happens in the movie, or what I liked about it (other than the subject matter). Here are some further points.  First, the back story didn't really matter all that much to the action.  A gaggle of sympathetic convicts had to get gold from point A to point B in order to win their freedom.  Without knowing or caring about the history you can 'get' that.  The distance between A and B was in rugged terrain, in the mountains of Oregon.  Our heroes encounter and overcome obstacles to their success, both natural and human, and the movie's style is half-way between prison break on the one hand and heist movi...

The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff.    What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced.  So, private persons were ordered to tu...

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ------------------------------------ I won't try to explain it but I think the phrase "the world" as used in this lovely quote means something other than "everything that is the case."  I think the sentiment is simultaneously Platonic and anti-Platonic.  The world means "the cave." To be "broke" means to agree to take an interest in the trivial shadow-show on the wall of the cave. To "be brave" is to insist on searching for the light of the sky.   "The cave breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not watch the shadow show it kills. It kills the ...

Looking over a pamphlet produced by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, William Galvin, concerning 2026 ballot questions. One here is fascinating, and not something of which I have heard in any of the press coverage of the coming vote. Question 7, "Single Family Homes." Apparently, there is a view that local zoning has been too restrictive for the construction of single family residences on small lots, and this is contributing to the housing shortage in general. So, enough yes votes on question 7 will create a new law that will instruct municipalities not to ban, or require a special permit for, the use of land or structures for a single-family residence in any zoning district that allows residences, with some caveats.    The idea is that in affluent suburban communities in general, families with Big Homes and Big Lots of land around them don't want neighbors with smaller homes on smaller lots.  It ruins the property values.   If the zoning ordin...

It is amusing, and sad, that the academic world now has its own variant of the Nigerian Prince scam. You've surely seen the latter, dear reader, "Greetings. I am the widow of a wealthy Nigerian Prince. Please help me unlock my husband's vast fortune, which I will split with you.  All I need is some of your valuable US bank account data...."   Book Carnival seems a lot like that.  For professors.    Scam watch: “Book Carnival” – Leiter Reports

The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy.  What does the phrase mean?  Do humans have it?  Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it? One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing.  Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X?  Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question?  In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al,  appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it.  This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all.  But of late neurologists have been looking...