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Showing posts from December, 2024

A nightmare: a fantasy

Just suppose that, from some distant foreign country closely allied with the United States, we were all to learn one day -- suddenly and as an intrusion on our own domestic concerns -- that the country's (elected) President had ordered into existence a system of martial law, and pursuant to that order that he had prohibited meetings of his country's elected legislature until further notice.    Suppose his happens not now, but sometime soon after Jan. 20, 2025. It might easily spiral into a serious matter affecting the interests of the US.  Consider, for example, that there might be US military bases there -- there might continuously have been military bases there since a war in the early '50s.  Perhaps the situation becomes violent, and the violence spreads out beyond the capital city.  A couple or nearby foreign countries, which had been enemies of this country, and of the US, in this earlier war, are watching closely to see how far this goes. The President cal...

Kitaro Nishida

I am reading a book by Kitaro Nishida, a Zen-tinged Japanese philosopher who was prominent a century ago.  An Inquiry into the Good.   That title reminds me a bit of Spinoza calling his masterwork Ethics. Spinoza had ethical points to make, but wanted to ground that in comprehensive premises about the world and our place in it. Nishida likewise has a (quite Zen) conception of the good to convey, but wants to start at the beginning.  The beginning is a very Jamesian place, as Nishida acknowledged. His beginning is the fuzzy boundary between cognitive psychology and epistemology.  "As psychologists say, we can will a movement simply by recollecting a past memory; if we direct our attention to the memory, the movement will follow naturally.  From the standpoint of pure experience the movement itself is but a continuation of the sensation of movement in recollection....We tend to think of the will as some special power, but in fact it is nothing more than the experi...