I trust you all had a Merry Christmas

Years ago someone asked on Quora if anyone could sum up each of the decades of the 20th century in 10 words or less. I took up the challenge. I will now offer you those ten concise summaries plus two more, one for each of the first two decades of the twentieth century. My apologies for the America-centered taste of the result. But have another glass of eggnog and enjoy it.

1. A canal in Panama shows off Yankee power to awe.

2. The Great War smashes sunny Edwardian optimism.

3. Stock prices can go up forever, can they not?

4. Trade barriers destroy the industrial base, introduce years of depression.

5. Another war, even worse than the last, splits the atom.

6. Two superpowers face off: no one presses the button.

7. Mao reasserts himself in China: Americans go to the moon.

8. The demise of gold and currency fixes: all values float.

9. Amid the demise of Lenin's experiment, Germany re-unites.

10. You say "internet" a lot: what does it mean?

NEW CENTURY

1. From attack on New York: open-ended "war on terror"

2. The rise of cryptocurrencies brings blockchain tech along. Fun!

Comments

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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