Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Routledge has published a 14 essay collection of work b y some renowned neuroscientists. NEUROCOGNITIVE FOUNDATIONS OF MIND.  https://www.routledge.com/Neurocognitive-Foundations-of-Mind/Piccinini/p/book/9781032602981      Consider that title. It is NOT saying that the mind simply IS the cognitive consequence of neurology. It is saying that there is genuine cognitive activity going on at different levels, and that the cognitive activity we recognize as ourselves is distinct from but dependent upon cognitive activity at a more primal level, neutral.  The latter is, as the title sounds, foundational re the functioning mindful brain in its environment.   Gualtiero Puccinini and  colleagues call this an "integrationist" view as distinct from  autonomism on the one hand and reductionism on the other. The mind  can be neither reduced to nor is it autonomous from the body. The book appears to have begun as a conference at the University of Turin in ...

  Tried to make a regular post here. Going all haywire. C'est la vie.     

 Back in late January I wrote here about a book by David A. Phillips that examined efforts at re-organizing the World Bank.  Phillips, who worked at the Bank for 14 years himself, looks with especial care at a 20 year period, 1908 - 2008. He ends up quite disenchanted.   I continue to read the book in small pieces. In chapter 8, Phillips quotes Gavin and Rodrik thus: "There is something more than a little schizophrenic about an agency that preempts potential private lenders because they are allegedly too risk averse (a main rationale for Bank lending), then means that its loans should be senior to any other, thereby shifting most of the risk onto private lenders."  Yes, you might say,  "rings true, but who are Gavin and Rodrik?"  The answer, M. Gavin and D. Rodrik are the co-authors of an article in the American Economic Review in 1995, "The World Bank in Historical Perspective." That's what I get from a footnote in Phillips book.  Can I dig a li...

  I indicated in a late January post in this blog what I thought the Supreme Court was going to do about tariffs.  I said that it would likely affirm the decisions in the courts below striking down the tariffs, but that as to remedy it would find a way to allow the administration to avoid rebates.  I was right as to the questioning of the permissibility of the sweeping tariff powers the President sought to assign to himself here. I was wrong as to remedy.  As you surely all know by now, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 reading upheld one of the central pillars of our constitutional system, the unique role of the legislature in matters of taxation. And noted the obvious point that tariffs ARE taxation.  What did it say about remedy? Nothing, really. It left the matter open for further litigation, with the implication (I submit) that the importers who have been paying these charges since "Liberation Day" have a claim. The litigation is already underway. THAT I did not e...

A new collection of the writings of Henry James Jr. on fiction as an art, published by NYRB Classics, has drawn my attention.  A reviewer of the collection quotes HJ saying, "The old superstition about fiction being 'wicked' has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed  towards any story which does not more or less admit it is only a joke.”  Some of James’s eminent contemporaries were casualties of the notion that fiction was a moral embarrassment — that its very falsity amounted to a sort of nefarious deception. In the novels of Anthony Trollope, for instance, James detected “a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe."  Becca Rothfeld, reviewing this collection for WaPo, wonders whether we are to take this as a banner James was raising on behalf of his own work.  Come into my tent, he would be saying and get fiction that is not apologe...

"  ‘Concrete reality’ contrasts with ‘abstract reality’: some hold that numbers and concepts are real things, part of reality, but are abstract entities rather than concrete entities. One quick way to characterize concrete reality is to say that to be concretely real is to be capable of entering into causal relations."     That is Galen Strawson. Note the careful wording: this is a "quick way" of distinguishing  concrete  from abstract. Strawson is not presuming to offer it as a definition.    This quote shows Strawson preparing to set out metaphysical views of his own, he is here speaking NOT in a history-of-philosophy context. But it brings to mind that, as my friend Henry has mentioned in comments on this blog, Strawson has set out a view of Humean notions of causation in which Hume's view is not what it has commonly been taken to be. Hume meant, Strawson says, only that our experience of causation is limited to correlation, not that the fact of ca...

Dropping these here as a convenient place to keep them. The issue of ranked choice voting versus first-past-the-post voting is a hot one in Canada right now -- its profile has been raised by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who appears remorseful about not having done anything to  move the country in the ranked direction. Here is some literature on the controversy.  Martin Horak (2021) Adopting Ranked-Choice Voting in London, Ontario .  Michael Cowan (2025), “Ranking Bad: The Chemistry of Ranked‑Choice Voting.” ResPublica: Undergraduate Journal of Political Science. Rivard & Lockhart (2022), “Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada.”   Canadian Journal of Political Science. Examines how voters use expectations about government formation to guide their choices. Highly relevant because strategic voting is one of the main behaviors RCV aims to reduce . Donovan, Todd, Caroline Tolbert & Kellen Gracey (2019). “Self‑Reported Underst...

First, the closing ceremony went off on Sunday 22 without a hitch. Indeed, it was inspiring. The ceremony was designed as a tribute to Italian culture, and well as a hand-off to the not-so-far-away site of the next winter games, (2030), the French Alps  Second, this was so far as I can remember the first Olympics in which there was a public controversy that involved the rules of curling. Curling is the odd sport in which some of the athletes seem to busy themselves sweeping dust out of the way of a sliding rock. Even at Olympics time, that best of all times for recognizing odd sports, the outside world usually manages to ignore these guys. A controversy over curling?  Third, the location was not so much spread out (as they always are), it was split.  Two distinct hubs. The Milan area got the ice events, the Cortina area got the snow events. There are about 410 kilometers, or 250 miles, between the two cities.  Fourth, indulge my old-man moment. Why do the winter gam...

On February 4th in this blog I wrote about the three models of PhD education in philosophy, as per Brian Leiter.  I passed along Leiter's comment to the effect that one of the models, by working too hard to integrate substantive philosophical work with history-of-philosophy work, ends up doing strange things like positing an inferentialist Hegel.  I noted that I didn't know what an "inferentialist" was or is. That is where we pick up today. A friend wrote to me to say that I could ASK Leiter. I did so, and he replied with a link to the Stanford Encyclopedia's article on theories of meaning (philosophical semantics). Theories of Meaning (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) It appears that there are three combatants in the field of the theory of philosophical semantics: the classical, the internalist, and the inferentialist. To be clear, these are not different theories of meaning. They are a level of abstraction up from that.  They are different theories about wha...

 A little bit retro here. The Republic of India experienced a terrible heat wave, and more than 700 heat deaths, in 2024. Frequency and intensity of heat waves in the country have increased steadily over decades. With regard to the monetary measurement of the 2024 heat wave: there was a loss of 247 billion potential labor hours, chiefly in the construction and agricultural sectors, amounting to a cost of $194 billion dollars. India is sometimes regarded as a climate-change anomaly. In a fortunate way. At one scientific conference on the subject, researchers presented a world map on which the degree to which an area’s 2024 temperatures deviated from historical baseline was illustrated by color, from deep red to white. The scientists acknowledged they didn’t know why India was strikingly pale. The pattern is paradoxical: India is subject to devastating summer heat waves, but on an annual basis it is warming more slowly than other countries. The public danger posed by heat waves may b...

  The story of the first half was: Both teams had great defenses. The Patriots had no offense at all because the offensive line was remarkably weak. So nobody could score touchdowns, but the Seahawks could score field goals.  In the second half, the Patriots offense made some efforts to rally, without much effect.  Indeed, in the game as a whole, Patriots quarterback Drake Maye was sacked SIX times. [If the Seahawks had been able to sack him one more time they would have tied the Super Bowl record.]  Of course each sack has a penumbra.  For every sack in a game, that is, there are plays in which the QB was about to be sacked but got off a hurried pass, inevitably incomplete, to avoid it. The dominance of the Seahawks' defensive line against the Pats offensive line could hardly have been more complete. Congrats to the Pacific Northwest, which has its regional champion. My understanding is that the gamblers' spread was 4.5 points. If you gave up those points in or...

The Super Bowl went off as advertised again this year. The New England Patriots were back in the Big Game, after an absence and rebuilding efforts given the departure of Tom Brady after the 2019 season. Patriots fans will have to take what solace they can from the fact of their participation in their first Super Bowl since Brady's departure. They are back to the big stage, though not yet back to victorious form there. I will discuss the game itself tomorrow. Today, the spectacle. There were, as there always are. lots of expensively produced television ads. As usual, these ads mirror American obsessions, especially the obsession as of late with artificial intelligence and whether it is destined to replace the natural human sort. There were a couple of commercials plugging Anthropic's AI system, Claude, and Anthropic's promise to keep Claude ad free. These, for me, were the stand outs of the show. Good nerdy humor, right up my alley, and the humor was pertinent to the pro...

I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism.  Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself.  Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition. One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher...

At a moment when the President of the United States uses the old blacks-look-like-monkeys meme for hahas, and enhances the indignity of it by blaming it on an aimless aide ... we need Eddie Murphy's wisdom.    Weekend Update: Eddie Murphy on the First Black Astronaut - SNL - YouTube

I think of this as "proper names" week. Each of the four posts this week will have a proper name in the title.  Yesterday's, of course, is already "in the books". The proper name in the title of yesterday's post was, of course, Frank Sinatra. The proper name used in today's, and in the posts of the next couple days, will be violations of the Frank Sinatra rule.    Today we discuss a recent book about analytic philosophy by Christoph Schuringa.  As a Christopher who generally drops the "er" at the end of that given name when called upon to give my signature, I highly approve of his spelling.  Schuringa wrote a book, published last year by Verso, entitled A SOCIAL HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY. Its point is that most of what we think we know about analytic philosophy is wrong. The term "we' here can refer to anyone without an academic position who might nonetheless read a book with the phrase "analytic philosophy" in the title...

Just thinking about the sort of "introduction to journalism" course one can take at any decent four year college, or perhaps in the context of an associates' program. They generally teach that the first sentence should cover all the Ws: who, what, where, when, and why. "The chief of the Smallville fire department personally rescued a small cat from a chimney in the Soapsy neighborhood Saturday afternoon in response to a 911 call." Good lede.  [Yes, journos generally spell it 'lede' for the same reason that a certain Zeppelin is described as 'led'. The spelling 'lead' -- as an alternative to led or lede -- can be confusing.]   The italicized sentence is a good lede.  The rescue of the cat is the what.   Who rescued the cat? The chief (identified here by role not by name). Where ? a chimney in the Soapsy neighborhood. When ? Saturday afternoon. Why ?  In response to a 911 call.  Of course the rest of the story can expand on any or all of t...

A scandalous matter now forgotten, even among historians of philosophy, the "Leslie affair" may be a turning point of some significance in the debates over causation in Anglophonic philosophy.  John Leslie (1766 - 1832) was a Scottish mathematician and physicist. In 1804 he published a book on  the nature and properties of heat that earned him some favorable attention among the cutting edge scientists of the day.  In 1805 the University of Edinburgh decided to make him professor of mathematics. BUT ... there was surprising kickback from church officials on the ground that Leslie had said positive things about David Hume and about Hume's understanding of causation as the mere fact of constant and invariable sequence.   The establishment saw this notion as a danger to the accepted religion, and specifically to any cosmological argument for the existence of God as a First Cause.  Causation has to mean something, some REASON WHY some sequences are invariable, f...

Isn't it past time we flush this ugly fellow out of our national politics and conversation, now? I don't mean President Trump.  For now I'll give him a bye.  The guy we need to flush at long last is ... Elon Musk. Seen in the photo here with one of his exes, the actress Talulah Riley, best known for Westworld.   Musk busted pleading to visit Pedo Island in Epstein files The world's richest man repeatedly sought to arrange a visit to "Little St James," aka Epstein's island or Lolita island. In particular, in November 2012, Epstein emailed Musk in expectation of such a visit, asking about logistics, "how many people will you be for the heli to island?"  The future head of the US Department on Government Efficiency responded, "Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?" Musk had divorced Talulah in March of that year. Plainly though  they had not cut each other off entirely: they would remarry in...

  Brian Leiter has made the point that there are three distinct models of doctoral education in philosophy, with regard to the English-speaking world. He calls them by their most distinguished representatives: Princeton, MIT, Pittsburgh. They are distinguished from one another by how they regard the history of the field. Is the history of philosophy itself a matter of doing philosophy?  On the Princeton model, history is treated as important, but distinct.  The department will incorporate courses on the great historical schools and interests.  There will be other course, though, about contemporary hot topics in Anglophone/analytic philosophy.  This two-track model is dominant in the US, and it has exemplars elsewhere, as at Oxford and Toronto. On the MIT model, Leiter continues, "the focus is almost entirely on contemporary research in analytic philosophy, with one or no lines set aside for history of philosophy." Finally, on the Pittsburgh model, "the history o...

  The Supreme Court of the United States receives between seven and eight thousand certiorari petitions each term. It grants arguments in ... about 80 of them each year. The math is simple: this means that somewhat less than 1% of cases that one or more parties seek to take to the Supreme Court actually get its full attention.   What this means, in turn, is that control of the US Supreme Court is not the be-all and end-all of judicial politics.  Most cases will remain decided the way courts below that have decided them.  It is an important fact.  The Biden administration was diligent in filling as many of those seats as possible. That is what has kept alive some hope that we will return after the Trump has gone to a world somewhat like the one he disrupted. I mean not to idealise the pre-Trump United States but simply to state the obvious: Trump has done a good job of making us nostalgic for the old republic.  The courts, especially the lower courts, a...

 This will be my last post on this blog in this month.  And this has been so poignant, so fascinating, so philosophically packed a month that I thought I could most fittingly end it with a rumination on months of January I have known as a resident in New England for most of my days on this planet.  Heck, even when I have lived for periods outside the charmed circle of New England it has seldom been further away than Poughkeepsie.  Or Staten Island.  So ... what do I think about this mythically two-faced moment of a month in this recurrent trip of ours around the sun?  It sucks. 

 A friend commented, privately, upon my comment a few days back on Descartes and Spinoza and how they made their livings.  I said that Spinoza's living as a lens grinder does have a bearing on his philosophy and briefly explained why.  Lenses made possible both the infinite and the infinitesimal, through both the telescope and the microscope.  The world made possible by such instruments and the sciences they enable could indeed be deified. My friend found this unsatisfying.  But ... there is no accounting for taste. What is a tad more biting ... he noted accurately that I had offered no explanation at all of how the material circumstances of Descartes' life had any connection tohis philosophy. Here, then, is that explanation.  Descartes sold real estate, which he appears to have inherited, and to have used the proceeds to buy bonds, supporting himself thereafter as a coupon clipper. Consider those two sorts of asset: real estate and bonds.  Real estate...

 As the new year rolled in, many scholars and observers of the Supreme Court expected a quick opinion on the Trump tariff case. The courts below have held that the president does NOT have the authority he is claiming here. The oral arguments did not seem to advance the administration's cause.  So: if there is to be a decision striking down the tariffs, AND that decision would have complicated consequences in terms of working out the rebates, THEN it stands to reason SCOTUS will want to get the deed done quickly, lessening the complication.  The constant payment of these tariffs constitutes a tick-tick-tick that a court contemplating such a decision may want to shorten.  Yet as of this writing -- no tariff decision.  January's opinion days have come and gone, with no opinion on this subject.  Some are whispering that perhaps the outcome is not so clear-cut -- perhaps a court so much molded by President Trump will find a way to accommodate him.  I disagr...

 Such efforts tend to go in circles. Today's reform is to undo yesterday's reform, and tomorrow's reform will be to recreate the one that we undid today.  It doesn't work day-to-day though.  But year by year and decade by decade. This is one conclusion one draws from the book REFORMING THE WORLD BANK: TWENTY YEARS OF TRIAL -- AND ERROR by David A, Phillips, The"20 years" number in the subtitle indicates that Phillips focuses especially upon the period 1986 -- 2006, beginning with the appointment of Barber Conable, a former member of the US House of Representatives.  That was a time of great concern about Latin American indebtedness to the big New York and London banks, and worry about what a wave of defaults would do to those institutions. That concern led to the Baker plan in the middle of the decade, followed by the creation of "Brady bonds" to allow debt relief short of open default.  In this fraught context, Conable immediately hired an outside c...

  A questioner in Quora asked what we, other Quorants, see as the most recent breakthrough in philosophy.  I replied: An important breakthrough took place through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, which we might call “Taking the Subject Seriously Again” or TSSA. It can also be rendered “Taking SubjectIVITY Seriously Again”. The human subject, and its subjectivity, was nearly written out of the higher echelons of philosophical and psychological consideration in the middle of the 20th century, by behavioralism, hard determinism/incompatibilism, “strong AI” and related developments. There were no people finding the world, so the Wittgensteinian phrase “the world as I found it” ceased to be meaningful. There were only objects, though some objects oddly talk as if they are subjects. Daniel Dennett, who passed away recently, was very much of the anti-subjectivity persuasion. It was a cause drenched with nostalgia through much of his working life BECAUSE of the TSSA breakthrough. Figures li...