Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I've written a few posts here about my theory of a recent but receding golden age in philosophy, the period roughly from 1880 to 1920.   Consider this comment an addition to that line of thought.  I have been reading a book by Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918), a German philosopher within the neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth century.  The book that drew my particular interest is his PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY [Philosophie des Geldes] published in 1900, squarely in the middle of the golden age I've postulated. I will introduce the book here, and in tomorrow's post I hope to come at it from a different angle.  The first thing that one has to know about Simmel's philosophy of money is that it is NOT a theory of economic value in the manner of Ricardo or Marx. Simmel was about 25 when Marx died -- he was of a later generation but within the same broad Germanic tradition. Still, he was not doing economic theory in the way Marx was. He was doing epistemology, appl...

SPOILER ALERT -- I am about to talk about the documentary "You Can See Everything," concerning Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos case.  If you plan to see it and are looking to be surprised by disclosures DON'T READ FURTHER. Still on board?  Okay, you have been warned. The first half of the movie proceeds as you might have heard.  The protagonist, Nathan Fielder, fills in the viewers quickly on why Holmes was convicted of securities fraud, and he takes her up on her offer to live with her and her domestic partner, Billy Evans.  He will be able to "see everything" about their lives in the month leading up to her incarceration, and she will talk to him on a regular day-to-day basis about how she got there.  Among the subjects of discussion: her long relationship with Sonny Bulwani, both personal and professional: according to the government's theory of the case in the separate trials of Bulwani and Holmes, they were co-conspirators against the defrauded stockh...

As I believe I have suggested here before, we are at a moment in the history of the North American economy where there are two paths forward, and both of them entail some pain.  One path involves the continued growth of general (or "generative") artificial intelligence, a system that could render irrelevant most of the apps on many of the world's phones and devices, and destroy the companies that have made their income from those apps, and the other companies that have invested and lent too much in them. The destruction of the whole app-based ecosystem -- THAT is what is at stake on this path. Will the world be more than sufficiently compensated or condoled for that loss by the benefits that the growth of GAI will supposedly bring? The other possible path involves a bust and/or long pause in the development of GAI and the continued thriving of the apps ecosystem.  That involves pain, too, since a lot has been invested there.  Again: will the pain be collateral to a greate...

As I write these words, the execution of the "Fort Hood shooter," Major Nidal Hasan, is set for December 3.  By firing squad.  It feels strange to write this, or for this to be news, but: it appears that the execution of Major Hasan will NOT be televised.  Wise comments by Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine: Arguments about capital punishment aside, turning it into a livestreaming event would have been a terrible, multifaceted mistake. For one thing, there’s the matter of public decency. For another, the footage would surely have ended up on the screens of minors.  But there are more important considerations. Jihadists aren’t deterred by seeing one of their own put to death. It whets their appetite for terrorism—not because, as the left would have you think, they want vengeance but because they’re jealous of the martyr. For them, there’s no higher calling than to die in the service of killing infidels.  All fine points. Another point: The non-televising of thi...

I found the following online. I'm afraid I can't offer a named source. But I leave it here for any one of my readers who may wonder why James Bond demands that his martinis be shaken, not stirred.  ----------------------------------------------    This specific preference wasn't a quirk of the cinematic Bond; it originated in Ian Fleming's 1953 debut novel, Casino Royale . When Bond orders his signature drink—later named the "Vesper"—he demands a highly specific recipe: "Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel." A traditional stirred Vesper is an incredibly potent, boozy concoction. By demanding it shaken, the ice violently shatters and melts into the drink, causing significant dilution. This waters down the alcohol content, allowing the spy to maintain his wits and keep a sharp edge while appearing to match his adversaries drink...

I was planning on writing something about pragmatism and the Suncor case here.  But I won't.  I'll start my inquiries further back.  Let us begin with a notorious comment by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in "The Path of the Law" (1897). Holmes and the guiding spirit of this blog, William James, certainly knew each other well, in part because their fathers were friends. James and Holmes Jr. seem to me to have been frenemies.  Still.... The comment I have in mind is a definition of law from the lawbreaker's point of view. Law is "the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious." That is, indeed, what one usually means when asking a lawyer" what is the law about X?"  One means "I have done X, or I am asking for a friend -- what will happen to me/my friend?" What does James say?  Look to Lecture VI of Pragmatism and you find this:   Common-Law judges sometimes talk about the law , and schoolmasters talk about...

I mentioned Tuesday of this week that Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize this year for work capturing neutrinos at the South Pole.  Why does that matter? As background, consider that neutrinos (unlike, say, electrons) have no electric charge and virtually no mass.  They are everywhere, passing quickly through us and anything else with little interaction. This justifies the nickname "ghost particles". They exist because supermassive black holes (and certain other bodies) create them and fling them out.   Again: what do we learn from catching such a ghost in polar ice?  We learn in what direction and how quickly it is moving when it hits the ice.  Furthermore, whatever line it has been moving on when it did so, we know that it has been on precisely that line, without any swerving or bouncing about, for a looooooong time.  Detect one, as Astronomy mag says in its treatment of the Nobel, and it points right back to its origin.  Scientists will often b...

  Continuing my train of thought from yesterday.  (Please look back at yesterday's post before telling me this one makes no sense.)  So: Suncor wants the Supreme Court of The United States to find that climate change policy must be federal policy, so Boulder has no business bringing a state law based suit against Suncor or ExxonMobil.  That understood: how did arguments go?  Chief Justice Roberts expressed skepticism about the preemption argument. He said it is not uncommon to base state law litigation on actions taken in whole or part in other states. He wanted to know: what makes this case special? Sarah Harris, the solicitor general for the US (here because the administration is taking Suncor's side) replied that if Boulder prevails it would ban the production of fossil fuels anywhere in the country. Roberts appeared unpersuaded. "That's a question of relief" to be raised in the context of the lawsuit if the lawsuit is allowed to proceed, not an argument agai...

  And on its very first day hearing arguments, the notorious "first Monday in October," the justices heard a potentially momentous case out of a Boulder, Colorado state court. Plaintiffs in the state court dispute want to hold two big hydrocarbon-marketing concerns (Suncor and ExxonMobil) liable for their role in climate change and for obscuring that fact that climate change is underway from the general public.  Samuel Alito has recused himself from the case, apparently because he is heavily invested in the petroleum industry. It is worth observing here that the plaintiffs do have a right to move forward with this dispute, according to Colorado's own Supreme Court.  That court ruled that Boulder's state-law claims were not preempted by any federal statute. If the US Supreme Court does not reverse that, the Colorado court's decision stands.  In this case, that means "tie goes to the runner," a 4-4 split in Alito's absence, which seems quite possible, ...

In his 1907 book PRAGMATISM, William James makes one use of the expression "cosmic weather," an expression he likely picked up from his friend Chauncey Wright, a Metaphysical Club member.  James writes (in Lecture 3) that according to a certain materialistic view of things, all that happens in time is arbitrary and pointless, just the doing and undoing of cosmic weather. James uses it as a throw-off phrase, but tracing the idea back through Wright we can see that it had significance for Wright in the context of astronomy. Gravity draws bodies together, thermodynamics disperses heat from centers to margins. Coming together is balanced by coming apart. Great structures like galaxies come together, disperse, and come together again. There is no progress to it all, Wright thought.  Astronomy, and cosmology, have changed a good deal since Wright's day, or James'. The general view now is that there is a progression (in an amoral sense), not just a lot of aimless cycles.  Th...

A random memory.  My mother went through a phase of believing that what I needed were lessons in transcendental meditation. She had seen some newspaper article about TM, when it was all the rage, and she thought it would be good for what ailed me.   She had a lot of such phases. I generally resisted. There was reason for this, other than sultry passive-aggressive rebellion.  There was that, too.  But the chief reason I balked at TM was the sense that it would badly backfire on me.  I would start, become attached to it, and then in another swing of her own phases my mother would decide to stop it, and I'd be getting lectures about how much time I was wasting with this silly pose and mantra.  In time, she did forget about the wonderfulness of TM and she did pass on to something else, as I had expected. Mom died about ten years ago, and I offer this recollection of course with regret for the fact that we never really managed to communicate honestly with o...

W illiam James once offered the following summary of his critique of Hegelian philosophy: 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different qualities...

  President Trump loves announcing deals.  Especially deals that mean someone has invested in US based products.  This turns attention, after all, to the single most traditional (and academically respectable) argument for tariffs.  You can go to Broadway and pay good money to see an actor playing Alexander Hamilton expound the argument metrically. The argument is "we, the good people of country X, ought to be able to produce Y for ourselves.  We cannot, at present, because the cheap influx of Ys from other countries makes it unprofitable.  Tariffs mean either that the people of country X will start doing the job for themselves or that the companies creating Y overseas will buy/build factories here, the products of which shall be free of the baleful tariff."   So it is no wonder that Trump loves announcing deals with people or institutions of other countries in which they seem to be saying that they will do that in the US. It confirms the Hamiltoni...

A prominent philosopher has just received a MacArthur Award, a/k/a a "genius grat".  The MacArthur Awards -- half a million US dollars with no strings attached to an individual thought to show such originality and promise that he or she ought to have the freedom that sort of cash can provide -- has gone to Felipe de Brigard, a philosopher working on mind/body issues.   Specifically, Felipe de Brigard works at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina. (Go, Blue Devils!)    Felipe De Brigard | Duke Institute for Brain Sciences   He is the author of an article on "Vitalism in the age of AI," which sounds intruging from its title but sounds rather deadening from its abstract.   Vitalism in the age of AI - PubMed Apparently, he is in dialog with such scholars as Anil Seth and Andy Clark on the issue of whether consciousness is "substrate independent." I have never before heard of any of the three of them,...

Godzilla, in yesterday's entry, brought our attention to east Asia and we will stay there today. Hackett Publishing has come out with a book with the title I've just given this blog post. Again (as with the Godzilla movie), I haven't partaken myself, and I'm working simply from a review.  It turns out that the Korean peninsula has produced a distinctive school of neo-Confucianism, and eight individuals within that line are featured in this anthology.  Jeong Dojeon and Gwon Geun kicked off this party in the late 14th and 15th centuries. Seo Gyeongdeok and Yi Eonjeok seem to have been more original figures than their precursors. They have the air not of people bringing something Chinese into a new place, but of people making something new out of it.   A third group in the 16th century broadened the issues that such philosophizing covered, focusing among other things on the role of emotions in causing behavior. There was a fourth and final group (final at least in the c...

  No, I'm not going to do a review.  Haven't seen the movie.  But I did read a review by Owen Glieberman that struck me as fascinating. Glieberman says the problem with the recent movie Odyssey, is that Christopher Nolan kept the gods out of it.  The gods are primordial forces, and Homer without his gods is a much less interesting story teller. BUT ... he continues, if you do want to see the embodiment of primordial forces, creatures very akin to Homer's gods, on a movie screen:  THAT is what Godzilla movies are for. The puny humas trying to avoid destruction in a world like this are, well ... very much like Odysseus and his men seeking to sail between rocks and a whirlpool because of the anger of Poseidon. Fair point, Mr. Gleiberman     Godzilla Minus Zero Review: An Even Grander Clash-of-the-Titans Sequel

 Not for the first time, I am thinking today about this odd song. The lyrics tell a story about two people, a couple, who are so bored with each other that they try to cheat on each other but, through lucky happenstance, end up making a rendezvous with ... each other.  Oh, what jolly fun. It is tricky to figure out the logistics, though. Our (male) protagonist is reading a poem placed in the personal ads. He replies to it, with a poem of his own, that ends, "I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon and cut through all this red tape/ At a bar named O'Malley's, Where we'll plaaaaan our escape." So, on the day this second poem appears in the newspaper, our two discontented settled-down folks must both see it.  Or there would be no meeting at O'Malley's.  They take the day after THAT to be the relevant "tomorrow."   They live together (that is obvious from the opening lines, where the man is lying in bed reading the paper while his wife lies besides...

  I said something in my September 25th entry into this blog about THE WEIGHT. Specifically, I spoke about the movie's back-story, and the underlying reality of FDR's confiscation of privately held gold in a determined demonetization of the historically value-measuring metal.  And I said that I enjoyed the movie.  But I didn't say much more about what happens in the movie, or what I liked about it (other than the subject matter). Here are some further points.  First, the back story didn't really matter all that much to the action.  A gaggle of sympathetic convicts had to get gold from point A to point B in order to win their freedom.  Without knowing or caring about the history you can 'get' that.  The distance between A and B was in rugged terrain, in the mountains of Oregon.  Our heroes encounter and overcome obstacles to their success, both natural and human, and the movie's style is half-way between prison break on the one hand and heist movi...

The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff.    What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced.  So, private persons were ordered to tu...

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ------------------------------------ I won't try to explain it but I think the phrase "the world" as used in this lovely quote means something other than "everything that is the case."  I think the sentiment is simultaneously Platonic and anti-Platonic.  The world means "the cave." To be "broke" means to agree to take an interest in the trivial shadow-show on the wall of the cave. To "be brave" is to insist on searching for the light of the sky.   "The cave breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not watch the shadow show it kills. It kills the ...

Looking over a pamphlet produced by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, William Galvin, concerning 2026 ballot questions. One here is fascinating, and not something of which I have heard in any of the press coverage of the coming vote. Question 7, "Single Family Homes." Apparently, there is a view that local zoning has been too restrictive for the construction of single family residences on small lots, and this is contributing to the housing shortage in general. So, enough yes votes on question 7 will create a new law that will instruct municipalities not to ban, or require a special permit for, the use of land or structures for a single-family residence in any zoning district that allows residences, with some caveats.    The idea is that in affluent suburban communities in general, families with Big Homes and Big Lots of land around them don't want neighbors with smaller homes on smaller lots.  It ruins the property values.   If the zoning ordin...

It is amusing, and sad, that the academic world now has its own variant of the Nigerian Prince scam. You've surely seen the latter, dear reader, "Greetings. I am the widow of a wealthy Nigerian Prince. Please help me unlock my husband's vast fortune, which I will split with you.  All I need is some of your valuable US bank account data...."   Book Carnival seems a lot like that.  For professors.    Scam watch: “Book Carnival” – Leiter Reports

The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy.  What does the phrase mean?  Do humans have it?  Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it? One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing.  Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X?  Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question?  In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al,  appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it.  This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all.  But of late neurologists have been looking...

  A friend told me this joke sometime in the 1990s. Excuse the techno archaisms.  Various scientists combined their efforts to formulate in proper computer programming form the question "Does a God exist?".  They asked the question to the most sophisticated computer and software available.  The answer came back, "data insufficient."  The team then connected this computer to a lot of other powerful computers and beefed up its data storage. They asked the same question. The answer came back, "data insufficient." Then they combined all the electrical energy available on planet earth with all the knowledge, fed it all in with this computer as the center.  They asked again, "Does a God exist?" Comes the response.  "Yes ... now."    Seemed funny. So How Exactly CAN AI Kill Us All? Experts Explain What That Viral Anthropic Tweet Is Referring To

  No, he appears not to have said that.  A rumor has circulated online in recent days to the effect that President Trump has threatened to turn off the water to Niagara Falls, a natural landmark famously shared by the U.S. and Canada, unless Canada agreed to pay a "100% tariff." The rumor is generally accompanied by an ALLEGED screenshot of the "Truth Social" posting that in turn includes these words,   We have the control. We have the valves. We can reduce the flow, or shut it down completely, and we will if necessary. Canada has been taking advantage of the United States for decades, getting a world-famous natural resource basically for free while insulting our country and making it harder for American businesses.   Snopes has looked into it and has concluded that the screen shot is a fake and the rumor it supports is just false. Perhaps it was an effort at satire gone awry,  Anyway, for the curious, the chief executive of the United Staes does not "have...

  Not surprisingly, the US goes its own way on much journalistic lingo, using terms distinct from those employed in the same context by the rest of the English speaking world. Consider the "sidebar". Often, for a important story, there is material that is pertinent to an understanding of the story but that does not QUITE fit into it. A story, after all, is a narration, not a data dump.  Anyway, the additional material that bears upon a story is often carried separately, by its side, or within a outline (a "box") nearby.   In the US, this is called a "sidebar." In rest of Anglophone, it is a "boxout".  Consider also the "subhead". This is an often italicized bit of material below the headline but before the lead paragraph ("lede graf").  In the US -- subhead.  Rest of world -- standfirst.  And the "copy editor"? This is the last person between the journalist writing a story and the general public about to read it.  Th...

It has been twenty-five years since airplanes, hijacked by terrorists, struck each of the two towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, and a third struck the Pentagon. A fourth flight crashed in a rural field in western Pennsylvania, apparently because passengers resisted the hijackers/terrorists.  One odd thing about the 25th year commemorations -- they arrive as our ears are still ringing with the 250th anniversary of our independence as a nation.  This means the period SINCE that terrorist attack represents one tenth of the period of our existence as a nation. THAT fractional amount will only increase with time. This makes me feel old. The point?  Just that once changes are underway they can proceed with dizzying speed and a quarter century zips away. Whoosh. Some of the changes that were set in place by the attacks of September 11 2001 are moving at dizzying speed even now.  The United States responded by declaring a "War on Terror." What this turned ...

A little more than a year and a half ago I offered on this blog a precis of a book by two political scientists, Buzan and Waever, that offered a round-the-world tour of security issues on a region by region basis as of 2003. Indeed, I wrote several posts on the subject through January and February of 2025. Today, I would like to quote from something that appears early in that work that seems to me to have held up well in 2026, twenty-three years after the Buzan and Waever publication. The issue is why "premodern states" are under pressure to conform to "international standards".  "For premodern states, the threat from globalisation is broadly defined by an inability to measure up to international standards of good governance. The danger is either that they will be demoted in the ranks of international society to some sort of trusteeship status, no longer recognised as legally equal and capable of self-government, or that they will simply be neglected and allow...

  A little more than three years ago I wrote here about a book by Stephen Bates , of the University of Nevada, called AN ARISTOCRACY OF CRITICS (2020). It concerns a commission of intellectuals convened during the Second World War at the instigation of press maven Henry Luce to look into philosophical and practical questions concerning freedom of the press.  The aristocracy issued a report in 1947, four years after its creation, entitled A FREE AND RESPONSIBLE PRESS. As the title implies, much of it is taken up with the responsibilities an institutional press must bear in order to earn its continued freedom.   I'm writing about the Bates take on that report now because on another look at the book I've found an odd mistake. In his introduction (on p. 4) Bates mentions, in justifying his concern with the 1947 report, various indexes of its continuing influence through subsequent decades. One of these, "In a key First Amendment ruling, the Supreme Court quotes the commi...

  Pauline Kael (pictured) passed away on September 3, 2001.  It had been a slow news summer (a fact that was about to change in a very rude way in another week, but no matter), and Kael's death received a lot of attention. I'll add a bit more now at a quarter century distance.  One great Kael passage reads thus:  If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, i...

Aviation leasing and Aviation lending. The names sound similar, but aviation leasing represents a very different financing play from aviation lending.  Aviation lending means lending money with an interest in someone's airplanes as collateral. This has become a big deal of late. It is a very different play from investment int he equity of an airline. Airlines are very dubious investments. Three events in my lifetime have made THAT very clear: the deregulation of the industry in the US under President Carter, the close-down of the whole industry as a national security matter in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the severe limits placed on the industry around the world for epidemiological reasons during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In each case investors have taken beatings. But beneath the booms, the busts, and the crises, that afflict the companies, there are the assets. It is very easy to move these assets from one place to another -- since that is the point of them -- but i...

There is stuff on the surface of the moon that was put there at the end of the 1960s.   Stuff that was put there not by robots but by frail organically-evolved human beings. Put or left there by members of a species that only three score and six years before had been struggling with the basics of heavier-than-air flight.   A baby born at the time of the Kitty Hawk flight [where liftoff and touchdown were separated by all of 260 meters] would barely have qualified for social security by the time that Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. THAT span represents one of the most extraordinary feats of recorded history.  Let us take a moment to be amazed. And understanding of the deniers.  It is still difficult to wrap one's head around. Perhaps it is just easier to deny.  Wow.        And yet it happened.  Wow. 

 Tim Curry?  Oh, noooo. A lot might be said about the late Tim Curry, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Amadeus, Spamalot, and so forth.  What I wish to say is simply that he passed away on August 25. The very same day that Dolly Parton shuffled off this mortal coil.  If [let us not ask why] you wish to leave the world weeping, you wish to get a big send-off, funeral orations, bloggers exhuming every discoverable fact about your life and death for a month to come -- if you wish any of that, dear reader, try to put some space between your death and that of a Dolly Parton.   She has taken all the oxygen out of the eulogistic room.  Rest in peace, TC.