Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

You are looking for a second consecutive day at a fossil-disclosed jungle cat inspired by thought experiments over whether p was true already in ancient times.  I go back today to the issue raised in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy in an article earlier this year by Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop.   The point is not to settle the issue of what is free will and is it real.  The point, rather, is in logical analytical fashion to render clear "previously underappreciated constraints on defenses of closure-based arguments against the existence of free will."  Who are they?  Lampert is affiliated with the University of Vienna, apparently a postdoctoral researcher there.  Waldrop's affiliation is with Notre Dame. They seem often to have worked together.   As I understand it, they are saying that various promising arguments against free will require a principle of closure, and that whether they have such a principle available in the sens...

In the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop recently offered a rather confusing argument about free will.  They didn't argue for it or against it precisely, but sought to outline what a solid argument for it or against it might look like.  They seem sure that no sound argument to either conclusion has appeared yet, despite the voluminous attempts. "Free will and intensional operators" is the title of their article, in the February 2026 issue. As one might expect, the phrase "intensional operators" plays a big part in their discussion. So does the word "closure".  They don't really define what they mean by [epistemic] closure in this context, but I expect that it means here that for any domain of discussion X, the domain is closed if and only if we can safely add to our knowledge by taking the enatilment of what we know as also ... known. [This is different from causal closure.]  Free will, for Lampert and Waldrop,...

The safe return of Artemis, with its four astronauts, reminded me of my boyhood  and the thrill of following the Gemini and Apollo flights. Some time in the school year that began around Labor Day 1969, a friend and classmate of mine named Pat showed me a poem he had written on how inspired he was by space exploration, and especially by the safe return of the Apollo 11 astronauts after their landing on the moon. It was a well-written poem for a 6th grader.  But he had chosen a picky critic.  I noted that he had described the return of this flight as a thing happening in spring.  Chiefly because thing and spring rhyme.  I pointed out, "the moon flight took place in July."  He thought about it and said he was not going to try to change the masterpiece. After all, thing and spring rhyme so nicely.  Well, they do. The following couplet also rhymes: It is hard to surpass the cosmic-sized bummer Of not having a rhyme for a flight in mid summer. Anyway: I am...

Just a book note today. I've heard good things about this one.  Brenda Wineapple, KEEPING THE FAITH (2026), concerning the Scopes Monkey trial still reverberating in our national consciousness after a century. Wineapple is a former faculty member at Sarah Lawrence and at present teaches in the MFA program at Columbia. She also has a world-class enviable surname.  Here's the link.  https://www.americamagazine.org/books/2026/01/15/review-the-scopes-monkey-trial-and-church-state-tensions/ [The above photo is of Clarence Darrow.]

 In finance journalism, the acronym HOTS stands for "Heard on the Street," the somewhat opinionated and somewhat gossipy column made famous, and made into a mover of markets, by Dan Dorfman in the 1960s.  Someone would advance the history of this branch of journalism if he could only write a comprehensive history of this column, from its earliest days in the 1930s to and through Dorfman's day to the notorious reign there of Foster Winans in the 1980s.  Anyway, Jonathan Weil writes it now. Weil, whose expertise as a forensic accountant has long given an edge to his journalism, defends the management of Blue Owl, a large alternative asset manager that specializes in private credit.  Private credit funds typically act as non-bank lenders to mid-market businesses. Blue Owl in particular has become controversial of late for its relative illiquidity. Specifically, it has lent a lot of money to firms on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, also known as the app econom...

Archeologists report the discovery, on an old papyrus manuscript, of verses they attribute to Empedocles, previously unavailable to us moderns.  The finding, days ago, didn't happen out in the field in Indiana Jones fashion. It appears to have happened in an office. Specifically, at the French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo. It sounds as if somebody may have done the field work years ago, but the pertinent papyrus has been stored away, significance unrecognized, and only just now has been recognized as what it is.  What IS it?  Let us start with who is the author. Empedocles is one of the pre-Socratics, generally associated (though not geographically) with the Ionians: Thales, Anaximander, etc. Like the others of that school he is -- or has until now been -- known entirely through the fragments of his work quoted by later authors. He expounded a theory of "Love" and "Strife" as two cosmic forces, the former always mixing the (four) elements, the latte...