Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Recently I discussed the evolution of pre-human primates, bringing the story up until about 3 million years ago.  Today, I'll say something about the timeline since then.  Three million years ago the most human-like species around was the australopithecus (southern apes).  There has been a lot of focus in recent years on Australopithecus Afarensis. Afarensis had a variegated diet, adapted it seems to plants both of the forest and the savanna. It likely ate meat too, judging from the stone tools it had available.  The heel bone was adapted for bipedality. Did the afarensis give rise to homo-something-or-other? The transition, if there was one, is difficult to pin down, but the two species have a close relationship of some sort. An abstract from a paleontological paper written in 2015, concerning the discovery of a partial mandible with teeth from circa 2.8 MYA,  reads in part:  " This specimen combines primitive traits seen in early  Australopithecus  with derived morphology ob

Psychologists at the University of Barcelona have reached a conclusion that matches intuitive expectations: they have found that people who believe in pseudosciences such as astrology and water dowsing generally require less evidence before reaching a conclusion than do those who are skeptical of the claims of such "sciences."   Psychologists Javier Rodríguez-Ferreiro and Itxaso Barberia conducted their experiment on undergraduate psychology students, most of them women. One of the tests they conducted involved a jar with blue and red beads. The undergraduates were told the jar was either “mainly red beads” or “mainly blue.” They were presented with a small box of beads. They were asked to guess which of the two jars the beads in that box had come from. If the box had ten beads and eight of them blue, they would reasonably guess that they came from the jar of mainly blue beads. If the box had five beads and three were blue, they'd be gullible to conclude that there was mo

Akhil Reed Amar is one of the outstanding scholars of our country's constitutional history.  Here is his blog:  Welcome (akhilamar.com) His latest book is THE WORDS THAT MADE US (2021). I'll just leave you today with a link to a review of that book.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/books/review/the-words-that-made-us-akhil-reed-amar.html

Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but he may not be such much longer.  In the mother country, it seems, being caught in a blatant lie to Parliament is considered bad form in a PM. It likely shows a lack of the imagination necessary to talk around an uncomfortable fact rather than simply denying it.  Anyway, Johnson has been caught in a blatant line to the House of Commons:  denying that he hosted parties at 10 Downing Street that violated the lockdown orders his govt was applying to, well, the common folk. He did in fact host such parties.  This carries a particular kick because of the poignant impact such orders have had upon many families. Tearing families apart, and keeping loved ones out of the rooms where patients were dying of Covid, so that last good-byes have to be said through a screen. And rather than obey such laws in the less demanding matter of refraining from parties, Boris enjoyed himself.  Until now. In coming weeks he may have to hold parties (

 Basic timeline for the development of primates -- with highlights selected from an intentionally anthropocentrc point of view: up to three million years ago. The earliest primates, called the Plesiadapiformes, are said to have speciated out of the Euarchonta very soon after the dinosaur-eliminating Comet struck, about 66 million years ago (MA). Soon after (63 MA) the Plesiadapiformes differentiated into the so-called wet-nosed and the dry-nosed primates. We will ignore the wet-nosed in what follows. The dry nosed are represented on today's earth by both the Great Apes and us humans. One distinctive feature of the dry-nosed branching? It can't metabolize vitamin C. We, and millions of years of ancestors, have had to include fruits bearing that vitamin in our diets.  We then skip forward to 30 MA. Around this time some of the dry-nosed primates made it to South America. Perhaps the area was connected with Africa here: but on one hypothesis that wouldn't have been necessary -

 I have a strange way of peeling an orange. I usually manage to get the peel off in one piece, but it almost never looks like the continuous spiral I'm going for. As in the picture you see here.  No such luck.  Mine usually ends up looking like the letter "Y."  At some point, my peeling forks, and since I am determined to get it off in one piece, I proceed with both forks.  Does this happen to anyone else? 

  Adam Pautz, a philosopher at Brown University, has written PERCEPTION, a new book from Routledge. I gather from the review in NOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS that Routledge takes it there are four distinct schools about perception, which he regards as roughly synonymous with human experience. He categorizes these schools as different answers to the following fill-in-the-blank question: "To have an experience with a certain character (that is, to have an experience of a certain type) just is to ____________________."   First there is "naive realism." This holds that to have an experience of a certain character just is to  experience the actual character of material things, e.g., the redness and roundness of the tomato.   Then there is "sense datum theory." To have an experience of a certain character just is  to be aware of  non-material  objects, viz., sense data, generated by neural processes in the brain. Thirdly, there is "internal physical stat

  Trump endorses autocratic Hungarian leader (msn.com) I never asked Trump his opinion on who should be running Hungary. Has anyone? Especially -- oh, I don't know -- anyone living in Hungary?  This brings to mind Nassim Taleb's term, "skin in the game." Trump has no skin in the Hungarian game. Should Orban perpetuate his hold on power and should that bring disaster to great numbers of people in Hungary: would that harm Trump? Not at all. Just more souls thrown under the bus of his ego.  that will be enough for today. 

The Greek philosopher Xenophanes said that if horses could hold pencils they'd draw gods that look like horses. Question: suppose Xenophanes could test his hypothesis. Suppose, say, a horse could be fitted with relevant prosthesis and taught how to draw. How would Xenophanes know which resulting figures is a horse and which is a god that is supposed to look like a  horse? Would the horsey artist put halos above some of the drawn horses, like medieval artists identifying the saints?  

   So we return to last week's subject: why not accept the views of Wesley Salmon? There is an obvious motive in their favor. They exclude much of what we intuitively think of as "magical thinking." If I do X over here and Y happens waaaaay over there: is this enough to dub X the cause of Y? Salmon says emphatically no. It is not even enough to assert that as a coherent hypothesis. One needs spatio-temporal continuity. X was in contact with A which was in contact with B ... which produced event Y way over there.  Enough with the magic thinking. Do your homework! Come up with at least a hypothetical continuity! That is what Salmon has to say to us. And it seems useful advice. "Useful," remember, is a word of high praise from a pragmatist.  But, gravity remains the great conundrum here. It certain seems that the sun is acting upon the earth across a vacuum, and independent of anything passing from the one location to the other. Einstein tells us to think of this a

 So ... stop me if you've heard this one. Thomas Aquinas walked into a bar and ordered a lot of mead.  The bartender said, "You really plan to drink all that? You have problems?" Because in jokes bartenders are always eager to hear your problems. Aquinas said: "Yes, I just lost my manuscript. An important one, too. I called it the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. It was going to be the definitive explanation of Catholic philosophy, incorporating Aristotle's best insights into the body of our faith. It was brilliant. I must have been inspired by God to write it." Bartender says, "And now it's gone?" Aquinas, "Yes, and I can't help but wonder what message God is trying to send me. Why would he inspire me to write a great work like this and then let me lose it???" Bartender, "Maybe he was just trying to say, 'You win Summa, you lose Summa.' P.S. Next week I'll get back to the issue of cause and effect.

 Yesterday I wrote about cause and effect through the prism of the work of Wesley Salmon, late of the University of Pittsburgh.  Many philosophers have disagreed with Salmon, for example with his emphasis on spatio-temporal continuity. Why should we presume to rule out of court the very possibility of action at a distance?  One philosopher who seems willing to rule action at a distance back in, for example, is Philip Kitcher. Kitcher places "causation" within the broader term "explanation," and he has a unificationist theory of what explanation means. We generally explain X by placing it in a larger category, unifying it with other phenomena so that X is just an illustration of X(1). Then we explain X(1) in the same fashion, perhaps a generation later with reference to X(2). So, for example, Franklin explained lightning by calling it "electricity," an example of the same shock we get when we walk on a shag rub then touch a metallic doorknob. Some decades l

  Philosophers continue to debate issues of causation. It is no longer so much a matter of "refuting Hume." Nowadays, it may be for many more a matter of "refuting Wesley Salmon."  So I will say something today about philosopher of science Wesley Salmon (1925 - 2001), affiliated with  the University of Arizona early in his career, and the University of Pittsburgh later.  Before Salmon turned his attention to the subject, philosophers of science had coagulated around the proposition that scientists don't actually use any idea of causation. Practicing scientists get along well enough with correlation, the thinking went, so the philosophers who write about what they do, can do likewise.  But when Salmon delved into the thinking and writing of scientists, he didn't find that at all. He found causal claims to be ubiquitous, and a great concern with how any phenomenon under study, to use a Salmonesqe expression, "fits into the causal nexus" of the world.