Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Some thoughts from a veteran of political-science classes of the late 1970s. We learned of the difference between two foreign-policy  realisms: classical and structural. Classical versus structural.  Classical realists took the policy maker himself to be the chief object of interest/study. Machiavelli was the font of this approach. James Burnham was a self-conscious adherent. A classical realist won't talk, without qualifications, of a state (a city, in the font's context) as having goals, but will think of the people and  factions who hold or are contending for power - a city's Prince or those who would be Prince -- have goals, and their goals become those of ‘the state’ when they achieve positions of command. Those decisions may involve deliberate absorption of the state by a neighbor, or even indifference as to whether the state survives or not.  Structural realism speaks of states as having goals, determined by their history and systemic features of their decision maki

term "NAV lending" has become quite the buzzword in the finance press of late. I should know -- I've done some of the buzzing myself. So let me start here from the beginning. What the heck is NAV lending? NAV stands for "net asset value." This is, roughly, a synonym for the balance sheet value: the value of an enterprise once its liabilities have been subtracted from its assets. There are lots of other ways in which the value of an entity may be measured. For example, one may look to the income statement rather than the balance sheet. But NAV sticks to the balance sheet.  More specifically, NAV lending is, as one practitioner of the craft has said, "senior ranking debt which is secured against a diversified portfolio of private equity assets and therefore benefits from multiple cashflows to ensure repayment." But what it is NOT is asset backed lending. It is not a mortgage, or a car loan with repo rights. The security is the balance sheet, not a parti

I had a rather strange experience involving a grocery list recently.  When I got to the store, I was in my usual methodical way working through the list, when I noticed a word I couldn't read on the list, though it was sitting there, plainly in my own handwriting.  I puzzled over it for at least five minutes, which is rather long if one is standing in a store aisle and other shoppers are impatiently moving around you with their carts. The word was "slutty." My S.O. and I have joked about the fact that olive oil is marketed as either Virgin or Extra Virgin. We are each incapable of picking up any taste distinction in products cooked with olive oil that might  correspond to the degree of virginity.  So ... I figured my list out and bought the olive oil. End of story. It was strange that I had to puzzle it out, though. It is as if I had repressed a (rather mundane but sexual) effort at humor. Or I'm just getting forgetful in my old age.  

 Just a brief book note. Those of us who are but dabblers in medieval social philosophy know of "just war" theory as a body of thought that stresses proportionality and discrimination in the pursuit of war, and has something to do with the "principle of double effect."  It is one thing for a nation to go to war for bad (illegitimate) reasons. It is another for a nation to go to reason for legitimate reasons, which one branch of just war theory elucidates. But, separately, there is the question of how war is conducted, and the body of theory dating to Aquinas discusses the just conduct thereof as an issue distinct from its legitimacy.   James Dubik "reconsidered" this body of thought, not to reject it but to develop its intuitions further, in a 2016 volume. Here is a review:    Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory (usnwc.edu)

 Yesterday, I discussed a certain passage in Anna Aragno's contribution to an anthology about Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem,  a book published by Routledge last year.  I'd like to discuss something that bugs me about that contribution a bit more here.  Aragno has written the book's chapter nine, entitled "A Revised Psychoanalytic Model of Mind and Communication in Body-Mind Continuity." The essay begins with a quote from Freud dated 1937, "For in the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock." That sentence does support Aragno's general argument, as I laid it out yesterday. It supports it so conveniently that I naturally want to pursue the matter.  Unfortunately, the source of that quote is not obvious. Aragno's endnotes reference five works of Freud, none of which was published (or translated into English) in 1937. So she has created a bit of a mystery.  Googling the quote got me no res

  "Without Piaget's ... genetic-epistemology, arriving on the heels of Freud's death, or the integration of semiotic mediation,the fundamental continuity between body and mind, and therefore the translation from unconscious to conscious modes of thought, remained highly polarized and mired in physicalist metaphors describing, but not explaining, the functional/formal shifts in organization of a multi-tiered, polysemic, sign-infused psyche." I believe I've already mentioned in this blog the anthology in psychoanalysis and the mind-body problem published recently by Routledge. The above passage is drawn from that anthology, from an essay by Anna Aragna. The passage is quite difficult to follow (and no, not because I have removed it from a context that would otherwise have been illuminating -- it just IS.)  But, abstracting where I can from the jargon, what I gather is this. Aragna sees the "fundamental continuity of body and mind" as both a premise and a p

The FDIC board moved last Thursday to settle a  multibillion-dollar question: should it create a  special assessment to repair losses that it incurred because it has been backstopping uninsured depositors in recent regional bank failures? The FDIC keeps telling us that it is rescuing bank customers, not bank managements. Well and good -- but it is doing so by ignoring the insurance limits, which have always seemed to be an important component of the system that brought the FDIC into existence. A bank customer with more than the insured amount in a bank account is not a very sympathetic figure.  In the recent bank turmoil, this decision to ignore [one cannot say "this ignorance" -- the FDIC official know how the insurance system works!] created a $23 billion hole in the agency’s deposit insurance fund. By law, those losses need to be filled through a fee levied on banks. So the real question last Thursday morning was: How much is enough? There was of course intense lobbying on

  Is it just me, or is it difficult for anyone else to bat away the feeling that George Santos is Donald Trump's mini-me. This makes perfect sense if we are all in fact characters in a gigantic Simulation created by computer programmers in some other world, the prime world.  Their algorithms are complex, but recognizably fractal. Donald Trump's character arc could not appear just once: it had to appear in an oddly overlapping way and in miniature.  Even Santos' drag-queen persona seems to be a miniaturization of Trump's time in show business, as the decisive CEO telling apprentices "you're fired." His life as a real-estate wheeler-dealer was nothing like the Hollywood fantasy of board room re-hashes and confrontations. It was a drag show. Publicly owned exchange listed businesses have the sort of big board room portrayed in those scenes. Trump has never run one of those, and didn't have such a room available. So the television production company creat

  Here is a full list of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners. Here are the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners : NPR One of them seems extraordinary enough to be worthy of discussion in the august forum you are now perusing: the Pulitzer for biography. it went this year to G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. A distinguished historian, Beverly Gage, wrote the work. Viking published it. I've never read a word of it, and don't plan to. I have to say the prize committee's praise of it sounds quite off-putting to me.  Gage is praised for "a deeply researched and nuanced look at one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history that depicts the longtime FBI director in all his complexity, with monumental achievements and crippling flaws."  It sounds to me like the prize committee has suffered from a crippling attack of both-sidesism. I would imagine his life did have lots of "complexity," heck in the drag-demonizing 2020s his fashion choices al

Nate Chastain has been convicted of fraud and money laundering. He profited from his insider knowledge of which NFTs would be featured on OpenSea. If the second sentence in that short paragraph might as well be in Greek to your ears, allow me to translate. NFTs are "non-fungible tokens." This means that they are a now-faded financial fad, sort of like the tulips of the cryptocurrency realm. That is all you need to know about the term. OpenSea is an online marketplace for the trading of NFTs created in 2017. Daily trading volume there hit an impressive record of $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022. But that has dropped 99 percent over the following four months, and it has not recovered since. (As I say, this is a faded fad.) But OpenSea also contains a b log and newsy features. And there the opportunity for chicanery yawned. Chastain was in a position to know which NFTs would be featured on the newsy portions of the site, and to take a position on those NFTs on the trading portions of

  There was once a novel called "The Mouse that Roared." I believe it was made a movie at some point.  Nowadays, though, the phrase suggests Disney fighting back against DeSantis' effort to feed them to the MAGA mob as some sort of sacrificial mouselamb. And the mouse is roaring for real.  I'm delighted.  I'm also delighted as a contrarian that large corporations seem to be the strongest force for preserving this republic from a fascist takeover: 1) Dominion Voting Machines pressed its rights, and Smartmatic may yet do so, in a way that suggests the pseudo-journalism spelled almost like the appropriate word "Fix" cannot and will not have everything its own way; 2) As the anti-abortion forces have trued to move on from their victory over DOBBS to far more comprehensive victory, the forces of Big Pharma have stepped in to stop them; 3) And now Disney may end up thwarting De Santis' efforts to turn himself into the political heir of the Big Orange guy. 

  I don't believe what follows, but I will quote it without further comment now just for the heck of it.  This is from Grant Allen, in GENTLEMEN'S MAGAZINE, 1878.  The differences between one nation and another, whether in intellect, commerce, art, morals, or general temperament, ultimately depend, not upon any mysterious properties of race, nationality, or any other unknown or unintelligible abstractions, but simply and solely upon the physical circumstances to which they are exposed. If it be a fact, as we know it to be, that the French nation differs recognizably from the Chinese, and the people of Hamburg differ recognizably from the people of Timbuctoo, then the notorious and conspicuous differences between the are wholly due to the geographical position of the various races...the great permanent geographical features of land and sea.... We cannot regard any nation as an active agent in differentiating itself. Only the surrounding circumstances can have any effect in such

  Instead of working on today's blogpost, I'll simply use something I've already written. It appears in Quora, where one poster asks, "What are some famous writers who have had a negative view of lawyers, like Shakespeare did?"  Well ... "as" would work better than "like" there. But that was not the big problem. The problem was ... Shakespeare didn't. So far as we know. This is what I wrote in response to that poster: So far as I know, Shakespeare did NOT have a negative view of lawyers. He does have a character in one play say “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But that character is a member of an unruly mob. The Bard clearly did not mean for us to sympathize with the statement. Many writers do have negative views of lawyers. It should not be too difficult for you to find real examples. I suggest you leave Shakespeare out of it. Guess I told HIM. I was about to go on and discuss an equally famous Dickens line, but that might

What do Bigfoot enthusiasts want? The folks happily theorizing about Bigfoot, or Nessie, or the Kraken, are generically known as Cryptozoologists, and the beasts are Cryptids.  So: what do they want? Do they want the existence of their sought-after creature to be at least securely documented and universally acknowledged?  I think not. That would take the aura of loveable strangeness away from them. They would just be boring natural animals.  On second thought: some of them MAY want that. But if so, they also surely want to be acclaimed as the discoverer, the man (or, rarely, the woman) who got the definitive goods on Bigfoot or whomever. Mostly, though, they want the supernatural. They don't want to be biologists sans phrase. That would be a bit like being told that the object of your crush just wants "to be friends."  

This is something rare in the history of this humble blog: a post from a guest blogger.   I give you the thoughts of Paul D. Van Pelt. Neither he nor I have any responsibility for the illustrative cartoon, though. Genius is an unassuming noun, consisting of three vowels and three consonants. The word is  useful in its' brevity and can refer to all manner of facility with concepts, ideas, facts, numbers  and algorithms. When used in reference to itself, the word is elegant; when used by those  who only believe it describes someone they know of, it is empty rhetoric. Few geniuses are  notable in their lifetimes. Clever people rarely turn out to be geniuses, and, strange as it may  seem, a genius is rarely clever. Clever people who disguise themselves as geniuses are  called charlatans. Even so, they may be well-remembered by historians and public  intellectuals: facility with language gains traction in the public market and political genres.  Genius is, at once, a gift and a burden.