Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  This turns out to be our week for Georg Simmel's philosophy of money. Today: can his views be understood as converging with Jamesian pragmatism?   Let us look again at the passage of Simmel's that I have been particularly discussing this week. "It is true that every value that we experience is a sentiment but what we mean by this sentiment is a significant content which is realized psychologically through the sentiment yet is neither identical with it nor exhausted by it.  Obviously, this category lies beyond the controversies about the subjectivity or objectivity of value, because it denies the relation of a subject that is indispensable for the existence of an 'object'."  That comment may have seemed mysterious at first.  I believe that I cleared it up yesterday when I put it into the context of the "objective value versus subjective value" dispute of his day about the foundations of economics.  To the extent the dispute was ever resolved by econ...

  I posted a thought about the Georg Simmel's book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY, published in Germany by Duncker and Humblot in 1900.  Today I'll add a bit about how that book came to be in English -- indeed, in American English -- where I can read it with ease. As distinct from the slog that getting through actual German would be for me, despite my two years of High School German classes!   The book began as a lecture delivered by Simmel in 1889 to a political science seminar at the University of Berlin, a seminar over which Gustav Schmoller presided.  Simmel then issued a series of articles on the underlying issue and the book emerged in due course. The first English translation?  It didn't happen until more than three quarters of a century later, a full 89 years since that first lecture  -- it was in 1978, brought out by Routledge, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby.  There have been more recent editions. But ... why the long delay?...

  I've written a few posts here about my theory of a recent but receding golden age in philosophy, the period roughly from 1880 to 1920.   Consider this comment an addition to that line of thought.  I have been reading a book by Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918), a German philosopher within the neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth century.  The book that drew my particular interest is his PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY [Philosophie des Geldes] published in 1900, squarely in the middle of the golden age I've postulated. I will introduce the book here, and in tomorrow's post I hope to come at it from a different angle.  The first thing that one has to know about Simmel's philosophy of money is that it is NOT a theory of economic value in the manner of Ricardo or Marx. Simmel was about 25 when Marx died -- he was of a later generation but within the same broad Germanic tradition. Still, he was not doing economic theory in the way Marx was. He was doing epistemology, appl...

SPOILER ALERT -- I am about to talk about the documentary "You Can See Everything," concerning Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos case.  If you plan to see it and are looking to be surprised by disclosures DON'T READ FURTHER. Still on board?  Okay, you have been warned. The first half of the movie proceeds as you might have heard.  The protagonist, Nathan Fielder, fills in the viewers quickly on why Holmes was convicted of securities fraud, and he takes her up on her offer to live with her and her domestic partner, Billy Evans.  He will be able to "see everything" about their lives in the month leading up to her incarceration, and she will talk to him on a regular day-to-day basis about how she got there.  Among the subjects of discussion: her long relationship with Sonny Bulwani, both personal and professional: according to the government's theory of the case in the separate trials of Bulwani and Holmes, they were co-conspirators against the defrauded stockh...

As I believe I have suggested here before, we are at a moment in the history of the North American economy where there are two paths forward, and both of them entail some pain.  One path involves the continued growth of general (or "generative") artificial intelligence, a system that could render irrelevant most of the apps on many of the world's phones and devices, and destroy the companies that have made their income from those apps, and the other companies that have invested and lent too much in them. The destruction of the whole app-based ecosystem -- THAT is what is at stake on this path. Will the world be more than sufficiently compensated or condoled for that loss by the benefits that the growth of GAI will supposedly bring? The other possible path involves a bust and/or long pause in the development of GAI and the continued thriving of the apps ecosystem.  That involves pain, too, since a lot has been invested there.  Again: will the pain be collateral to a greate...

As I write these words, the execution of the "Fort Hood shooter," Major Nidal Hasan, is set for December 3.  By firing squad.  It feels strange to write this, or for this to be news, but: it appears that the execution of Major Hasan will NOT be televised.  Wise comments by Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine: Arguments about capital punishment aside, turning it into a livestreaming event would have been a terrible, multifaceted mistake. For one thing, there’s the matter of public decency. For another, the footage would surely have ended up on the screens of minors.  But there are more important considerations. Jihadists aren’t deterred by seeing one of their own put to death. It whets their appetite for terrorism—not because, as the left would have you think, they want vengeance but because they’re jealous of the martyr. For them, there’s no higher calling than to die in the service of killing infidels.  All fine points. Another point: The non-televising of thi...