Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is my annual post on the top Financial stories of the year now ending. As usual, I do not try to rank them, merely listing one Big Story for each of the twelve months of the year. Each story is accompanied by a ( bold ) acknowledgement of the theme it may illustrate. But my emphasis is on the story, not the theme.  Something happened with a particular who-what-when-where structure in each of these twelve instances.  Despite all the storm-and-stress over the election campaign in the US, and the obvious financial significance of the result both within the US and without, you will not find much of that campaign in this post. It isn't even featured in the  November  entry. Yet four of our grafs are US-focused. They focus not on the racehorse of the campaign, but on the stakes. If there is a theme here, though, it is the significance of financial/economic sanctions in wartime. Most of the "western world" has sanctioned Russia for its assault upon the sovereignty of U...

Yesterday, I offered my summary of two powerful-seeming arguments against mind-body dualism in any form.  My plan was today, to give my reasons for concluding after a lot of deliberation on the point, that neither argument is as powerful as it appears -- and as it HAS appeared, historically, to many powerful minds from whom I have learned a great deal.  But on further deliberation, that has come to seem too ambitious for a single blog post.  I will wrote today about just the first of them ... here we go.  About continuity.   TL:DR version:  The emergence of an intangible mind out of evolving life is not a violation of a principle of continuity to whatever degree we actually need and (upon reflection) want such a principle. It is no more of a violation than a variety of other emergences of which we make no such commotion.  One intriguing and I think under-noticed fact is that the argument from continuity against the development of an intangible min...

  Someone asked at Quora for the best arguments against mind-body dualism. The following is a (slight) re-working of my response there.  The Quorant was not specific about whether he meant "substance dualism" or "property dualism". I will note for the record then, that property dualism was created in part as an answer to some of the standard objections of substance dualism.  I won't define those terms further now, though, because to my own mind there are two powerful arguments that must be rebutted by advocates of EITHER of the dualisms.  These are what I will discuss right now: the argument from evolutionary continuity and that from neurophysiology. First, continuity. If one accepts  the broad biological model that the human species has its origin in random variation from other primates, and the primate genus has its origin in random variations from non-primate mammals, etc. AND if one believes humans are distinctive in having a mind in principle distinct from ...

  I quoted, yesterday, the Ivyberry passage from Tennyson's 1880 poem, De Profundis. Today I'd like to say something about what it means, which I will do beneath the image of (21st century) London at Christmas.  Ivy berries (the phrase is not typically written as one word outside poetry) are symbolic of an ability to thrive even in difficult conditions.   In the context of this poem, ivy berries appear right after a reference to grapes. Tennyson is writing from out of the depths of his own experience as, at this time, a man of 71.  "Out of the depths," of course, is the literal English language meaning of the title. Anyway: young folk, strike out into the world! It is your own responsibility to choose between a life of leisure, drinking the fruit of the grape, and a more rigorous challenging life, symbolically drinking of the Ivyberry. W hatever you do, you will help express the fullness of God who is the fountain of which we are all but droplets.  Soon t...

Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And Ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world. From DE PROFUNDIS (1880) by Alfred Tennyson (1809 - 1892) ------------------------------------------------------------------- What was Tennyson trying to say here?  I'm feeling lazy, more interested in the grape than in the Ivyberry, so we'll make that the subject of our Christmas Day post. See you tomorrow!

Outgoing President Biden has made more appointments to the federal judiciary than incoming President Trump did in Trump's first term. Specifically, Biden has put 184 district court judges where they are today as of this writing. Trump appointed 174.   This is important, because most cases do NOT go up the appellate ladder at all.  The Supreme Court (where of course Trump got a pivotal three appointments) ends up taking a very small percentage of the petitions for review it receives. A little under 1 percent, so less than 80 out of about 8000. That is a matter of necessity. This is a big country, there is a heck of a lot of litigation. There is only one Supreme Court.  The upshot, then, is that although he only got to make one SCOTUS pick, Biden's other judicial appointments are an important legacy.  There are 673 active federal court judges across the country.  So (my quick arithmetic at work) Biden has appointed somewhat more than one quarter of them....

  Adams, one of our founding fathers, a president and the father of a president, a mammoth figure in US history, owned dogs while he was in the (newly constructed) White House.  That isn't surprising.  It is kind of an all-American kind of fact.  We might at some level be disappointed if he had NOT had at least one dog. But did you he name one of them "Satan"?  Perhaps for the perverse pleasure of training this pioneer White House pet? Instead of saying "heel" I guess Adams would say "get thee behind me."  [Matthew 16:23].  No, the above is not a picture of Adam's dog. ;-) It obviously has some features in common with our President-elect, though.

 So: as I indicated yesterday, Nishida says  that the will is free because it is not bound by natural law in choosing the good. [No, that isn't him in the attached photo.] So: what is the good?  I understand Nishida to be saying that the good is the actualization of potential.  So long as we are becoming who we really are, we are in the right.   How does this play itself out in particulars where we might really want to know what the good is?  Where telling us "it is what your real self would want" is no help?  Consider an example Jean-Paul Sartre would later evoke.  A young Frenchman has to decide whether to stay home and take care of his frail mother or leave her to her own devices and go join the resistance to the German occupation.  Telling him that he should actualize potential seems likely to be of little help.  But Nishida does seem to avail himself of the (very Jamesian) notion that human history is the working out of such co...

  At chapter 15 of Kitaro Nishida's book we finally pass into the discussion of ethics and "the good" within human conduct, the long-deferred but titular subject of it all. Nishida's definition of freedom of the will seems to steer directly into Kantian territory. End of chapter 17, "[The] unifying activity [of consciousness] is not a product of nature; rather, it is because of this unity that nature comes to exist. This unity is the infinite power at the base of reality, and it cannot be limited quantitatively. It exists independently of the necessary laws of nature. Because our will is an expression of that power, it is free and goes beyond the control of such natural laws."  A few chapters later, after a classification of all other ethical positions and his view of their errors, he gets to his own: goodness is the perfection of this will-beyond-natural law, and so the fullest expression of the underlying unity of consciousness. So at the end of chapter ...

  A few years ago now, somebody at Quora asked the broad and fascinating question, "How has Greek philosophy influenced Christianity?" I gave a brief answer, and one that I think is pertinent to this time of year.  Let's begin with Hanukkah, which actually begins at sundown on Christmas Day this year.  Hanukkah -- this is a quick and rough statement -- celebrates an uprising against Greek influence, as it manifested itself in the "abomination of Desolation" (pagan sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem).  So my answer brings in the Jews of the Second Temple period, the early Christians, and of course as requested ... the Greeks. In one mix. I hope I have stirred your curiosity.  Here is the answer:       Very deeply. And from the beginning. After all, the two cultures (of Judea and Greece) were merging           already in the time of the Seleucid Empire. In the second century BCE the Hellenizers pressed too hard ...

This comes under nice-to-know and -absurd-that-it-is-worth-saying.  My sympathy for organized religion, including that in which I grew up, grows lesser and lesser.  https://theconversation.com/ai-jesus-might-listen-to-your-confession-but-it-cant-absolve-your-sins-a-scholar-of-catholicism-explains-244468  

The murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, has been a compelling news story.  On the one hand, there was the excitement of a who-dunnit and a will-he-get-caught. On the second hand, there was and is the opportunity to pontificate about the health care and health insurance industries in the United States and their rage-producing dysfunction. UHC is the largest health insurance company in the United States. On the third hand, there is the opportunity to go "meta," to react to how other people, especially through these new-fangled social media lenses, are talking about the murder of Brian Thompson.  THAT has become a big deal, because it turns out the head of a private health insurance company -- especially one whose rates of coverage denial seem to have risen strikingly under his command -- is not a sympathetic victim. Who'd a thought? Thompson's company has actually pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to find reasons to deny claims. Hence the soci...

  Some context-free business history here.  The Adani Group is a conglomerate based in India and founded in  1988 by Gautam Adani.  It began as a commodities trading concern, with an especial interest in trading in the metals. But that didn't really stick as a core corporate identity.  Nowadays more than 60 percent of its income comes from coal related lines of business. This includes the mining of coal as well as the production of electricity in coal-fired plants.  It has engaged in aggressive expansion of late. So much so that in August 2022, CreditSights (a unit of Fitch, the big ratings company) warned that all the rapid expansion threatened the group's cash flow and credit metrics.  Since soon thereafter, the Indian securities regulator, SEBI, has been investigating Adani on suspicions that it is pumping up the value of its stock with accounting shenanigans. In May 2023, the country's Supreme Court effectively ordered Adani to wrap up its investig...

  Are we close to it?  What can be done about it?  The term comes from the name of a retired NASA scientist, Donald J. Kessler, known for a paper he wrote in the 1970s, "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt." It hypothesized that the amount of artificial debris in low earth orbit would in time reach a tipping point, creating a cascade effect where collisions cause smaller debris to float around, causing further collisions, ending with a sort of hollow and impassable sphere around the earth rendering further space usage and exploration impossible for generations.  NASA was impressed by his exposition of this threat, and Kessler had written himself into a promotion: he became the head of the Orbital Debris Program Office.   The term "Kessler syndrome" for this effect was  first employed a short time later by a NORAD employee. John Gabbard. The work of Kessler and Gabbard was popularized in 1982 by Jim Shefter, ...

Disney World in Florida acquired political resonance late in 2023 and early 2024 when many people (some sensible folks among them) thought the host state's governor, Ron DeSantis a plausible candidate for President of the United States. DeSantis was against Disney in a very loud and litigious way. This is odd because a state's governor usually takes a rather positive view of that state's largest employer. But DeSantis needed an example of what he called the "woke corporations" of the United States. Ideally one that he could kick around a bit as Governor of Florida. Disney served as such.  Perhaps because it gives generous health insurance benefits to its employees and their domestic partners, whether or not the partners are lawful spouses, and whether or not they are of the same sex as the employees. Gasp.  Horrors.  Contemplating this recently, I became curious about Disney World's energy consumption and carbon footprint. Does the power involved merely come f...

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 of 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 disruption goes. The Pr...

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...