Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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Start with something simple and true

There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true. I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject. When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true. Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze. I'm not an expert on the field. I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me. [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.) So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity. "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, w...

Software bankruptcy filings on the way

And this could be big... in a bad way. Most adults remember the period 2007-08. The great global financial crisis of those years arose because mortgages and mortgage derivatives were the horse that the whole of the developed world's economies rode upon. That horse was over-loaded and in due course it died. What is the horse now? On some accounts, a certain sort of software firm, one in the business of selling "software as a service", or SaaS for short, has taken on that role. Equities in these companies, the "app" economy if you will, are the new mortgages. Loans to those companies are the new mortgage derivatives. It is all, again, an overburdened horse. But what will general artificial intelligence (GAI) do to them? Could its very generality make most of the specific apps that are so important today seem obsolete and pointless? How much wealth will be destroyed if that is the case? Do we face a SaaSpocalypse? The St Louis ba...

Has any philosopher "continued Nietzsche's work"?

Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a fascinating and powerful thinker whom I do not think I discuss enough in this place. But someone asked a question on Quora thus: whether there was anyone who continued Nietzsche's work in something akin to the way in which Hegel continued that of Kant. There are many ways I might have gone about answering it. To be quite honest, the querent actually mentioned how "Kant" had continued the work of "Hegel". That is a chronological absurdity of course, so I presume that Kant (1724 -1804) and Hegel (1770 - 1831) were simply reversed in the question by typographical haste. If as I suspect the querent meant to ask about a continuance of Nietzsche in the manner of the continuance of Kant by Hegel, we also have to consider what kind of continuance THAT is. I infer that the querent meant not someone calling him/herself a Nietzschean and dedicated to exegesis of a Master, but someone who continued-with-a-difference. So I repl...

Book note: Neurocognitive foundations of mind

Routledge has published a 14 essay collection of work b y some renowned neuroscientists. NEUROCOGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF MIND. https://www.routledge.com/Neurocognitive-Foundations-of-Mind/Piccinini/p/book/9781032602981 Consider that title. It is NOT saying that the mind simply IS the cognitive consequence of neurology. It is saying that there is genuine cognitive activity going on at different levels, and that the cognitive activity we recognize as ourselves is distinct from but dependent upon cognitive activity at a more primal level, neutral. The latter is, as the title sounds, foundational re the functioning mindful brain in its environment. Gualtiero Puccinini and colleagues call this an "integrationist" view as distinct from autonomism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. The mind can be neither reduced to nor is it autonomous from the body. The book appears to have begun as a conference at the University of Turin in ...

Literary Emergentism

Tried to make a regular post here. Going all haywire. C'est la vie.

More about the World Bank

Back in late January I wrote here about a book by David A. Phillips that examined efforts at re-organizing the World Bank. Phillips, who worked at the Bank for 14 years himself, looks with especial care at a 20 year period, 1988 - 2008. He ends up quite disenchanted. I continue to read the book in small pieces. In chapter 8, Phillips quotes Gavin and Rodrik thus: "There is something more than a little schizophrenic about an agency that preempts potential private lenders because they are allegedly too risk averse (a main rationale for Bank lending), then demands that its loans should be senior to any other, thereby shifting most of the risk onto private lenders." Yes, you might say, "rings true, but who are Gavin and Rodrik?" The answer, M. Gavin and D. Rodrik are the co-authors of an article in the American Economic Review in 1995, "The World Bank in Historical Perspective." That's what I get from a footnote in Phillips book. Can I dig a ...