Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The origin of life on earth -- a lasting scientific mystery -- may have a lot to do with alkaline hydrothermal vents.  These are geysers - like vents found in the ocean floor. Marine biologists have long noted that they create the sort of  chemically rich and energy intensive environment around them that mimics the electrochemical conditions found in cells.  So ... maybe (thinking that thought in reverse) the cells of the world are indeed to this day mimicking that sea floor environment.  In this context, with the vents themselves offering abundant energy, scientists can model the creation of RNA molecules, some of which prove to be self-replicating, although in a highly imperfect fashion.  Does it make sense to call this already "life"? Probably not.  Call it "proto-life" if you will. There is some irony here, though. We often think of life as paradigmatically bound up with the absorption of sunlight. Light, through photosynthesis, becomes plant mat...

Moving from the lofty epistemologyical/metaphysical realm of yesterday's quote to the  questions of national character. A thought from a wise French observer of our country.   I  accost an American sailor and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidentally, and on a particular subject, from an uninstructed man, I recognize the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns. [ Democracy in America Vol. II, Part One, Chap. 8.]

The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe once wrote the following: F or years, I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: 'I see a packet. But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?' ... I always hated phenomanlism and felt trapped by it. I couldn't see my way out of it but I didn't believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein's classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought "I have got this, and I define 'yellow' (say) as this" being effectively attacked. Phenominalism is in essence, George Berkeley without the God. The tree was not there in the Quad yesterday, except in some hypothetical sense -- if some perfceiving being HAD been there, he/she would have seen.... What e...

Today's random memory takes us back to October 1974, when I turned 16.  As was then the rite of passage, [maybe not so much now?], Mom and Dad instructed me in a period of weeks on the basics of driving a car.  My chief memory of this involves the signal lights, and how utterly unperceptive on the subject I had been in my 16 years of life.  Adding up my time in cars would surely have summed to a plural number of those sixteen years.  I might have paid a bit of attention. But I hadn't. I knew that drivers did something involving a lever that turned on a light telling other drivers where you were turning. I also was sort-of-aware going in that this lever did not have to be used a second time to turn the light back off. But I suspected there was a timer involved. Signal left, then turn left and after X seconds, the light will go off ... no?  Oh, wait, you mean there is no timer, the light goes off when and because I turn the wheel the other way?  Who knew?...

Whitney Houston's ballad, "The Greatest Love of All" has never received the parody it deserves.  I am not up to the job, but this first verse might suggest the parody-able to a greater artist than myself.  I believe cliches belong together -- String them up and let them lead the way Don’t force sense upon them like a ball and chaaaaain. Let your ears feel bromides to make it easier Empty words will lap up all our sense inside Everybody’s searching for their devo People need cha-os to revert to I never sunk quite so low as a raw cliche -- cannot depend on "darns" When I must hit the broad siiiide of barns.

In QUORA, I found this question,  What's the historical significance of Peter Abelard’s treatise "Sic et Non," and why is it often translated as "Yes and No"? It is an odd question, worth the expressive tilt of a yorkie's head, since there is nothing ambiguous or difficult about the translation.  "Yes and No" is simply what "Sic et Non" means. I wrote a brief reply while under the impression that the querant who has asked was a confused human being.  I there acknowledged another possible translation, "Thus and Not Thus," but said that was awkward as a matter of idiomatic English. I have since realized that this silly question was from an algorithm, not a confused person.  QUORA relies ever more on unintelligent algorithmically generated "questions" designed to spark controversy and hits.    I will note here, dear human readers, that I was influenced in this answer by the common use of "sic" as a way of ackno...

  There was a lot of speculation, not too long ago, that Justice Alito would be leaving after the end of the October 2025 session of the US Supreme Court. The idea was: (1) that Alito wanted to be replaced by Trump, so he would want to get out while Trump still controlled the Senate and could still secure a younger Alito clone as replacement for the retiring Alito, and (2) that Alito has a new book coming out, October 6th, and he would want to be free to do a book-selling tour at that time.  Of course if Alito is still a Justice as the new October 2026 session goes underway, book selling opportunities will be constrained. So went the speculation.  But when Justices do retire on the basis on such calculations, they generally do so right after the final gavel of the old session falls -- this year, that gavel fell on June 30th.  Yet Alito made no such announcement. Quite the contrary, early this month he told The Wall Street Journal that he is "here for another term." ...

My quote from Brandom about inferentialism earlier this week has me thinking.  Consider the following inference.  If a flower bed contains only geraniums and violas then it contains no roses. This flower bed contains only geraniums and violas. Thus, this flower bed contains no roses.   That seems straightforward although it is more Stoic than Aristotelean, and to some minds the "if ... then" of Stoi logic sounds question begging.  Could we put it in more categorical syllogistic form if we wanted to? I suppose so.  We would want to make explicit the premise that the different types of flowers are mutually exclusive: that is, a geranium is reliably not a rose. Couldn't there be a hybrid?  I have no idea, but I'm presuming any hybrid gera-rose would be neither geranium nor rose. Even with a gera-rose, every flower in this flower bed has been identified as to type, and in each case the type is non-rose.  Reasoning as process of elimination. Just think...

  I turned on CNN on the morning of August 7th.  Yes, I do sometimes get news from the television, rather than the net.  Boomers endure! Anyway: I turned it on and was immediately hit with the release of the July jobs numbers. Dismal.   Of course the administration keeps telling us the economy is great, best ever, and that anything negative anyone might say about the US economy is fake news. Even when their own flunkies provide the numbers. This is from their Bureau of Labor Statistics.    Employment Situation Summary - 2026 M07 Results There is, admittedly, something Orwellian in the wording of the report itself. It says, "Both nonfarm payroll employment (-23,000) and the unemployment rate (4.1 percent) changed little in July."   The number, 23,000 nonfarm jobs lost in one month, is startling.  But it is covered by a soothing word.  That change is "little".  Betweem a bureaucrat's startling numbers and his soothing words -- be...

  As a graduate of Enrico Fermi High School, I see myself  as only one degree of separation away from all things Fermi. Accordingly.... Consider the Fermi paradox. If there are intelligent life forms in this galaxy, aside from those of Earth ... where is everyone?  Why haven't we unequivocally heard from them?  This is NOT a paradox in the traditional sense of the term.  It is simply a question and, given the premises, a good one.  One answer: the universe is actually hostile to the development of intelligent and tech capable life. There is one and only one contrary example because ... miracle. A God who performs miracles.  If you believe that, you have a lot of questions to answer, and I will leave you there.  Supernatural miracles notwithstanding, it seems much more likely there is someone out there.  And this leaves us with the unanswered question. Of course, one answer is that techie civilizations come into existence, yet don't last very ...

  I only quite recently learned a new philosophical word, "inferentialism".  It is the view, especially associated with Robert Brandom, that a concept derives its meaning from its use in a network of inferences, and that accordingly a word or expression has its meaning only because and when users can employ it within such a network. This is a contention within the philosophy of language that has consequences in philosophy of mind and epistemology. That is Brandom above, with a parrot.  A creature that can use lots of words ad phases but has no real skill at inference. If you tell your parrot "it is raining today," he may or may not pick it up and say back to you "it is raining today." He will surely not say, "so you better be careful when you go for a drive tomorrow on those wet roads."    Importantly, this is a non-representational theory.  The phrase "it is raining" does not derive its meaning from the drops of hydrogen bonded with ox...

  To my mind, one of the most intriguing of the ancient Greek philosophers is the second of the great Eleatics, Zeno of Elea.  But ... does he still matter?  C ome, let us reason together.  If the fastest of warriors, Achilles, can not catch up with a tortoise, then something is of course very wrong with the way we understand our life in the world.  That is of course Zeno's point.  He was defending an Eleatic monism, a sort of Hellenic gaslighting that told the world nothing is as it seems, so he was committed to saying that since the apparent world is illusory, something crazy must be true.  Maybe this is irrelevant now, because we live in the thought world that Leibniz and Newton gave us with the development of calculus. The central idea is that of a converging series.   Consider continuously compounding interest.  You probably have bank accounts that earn it.  You do not regard this as a mystery.  But how can that be compute...

  The campy old television cartoon The Jetsons always portrayed George as working for Spacely Sprockets. His work consisted of occasionally pressing buttons that started or stopped sprocket manufacturing machinery.  For the record, a "sprocket" is a wheel-shaped object with teeth that mesh with a chain or belt. [If they mesh with each other directly, they are "gears".]  A sprocket sounds like a very old-fashioned 19th century sort of thing. But here in the early 21st century, there are large sprocket making corporations, such as JT Sprockets, which manufacture them for motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles. Indeed, in 2026 we are closer to the 2060s when the events of the cartoon are set then we are to the 1960s when it was created, and for all we know George's boss, Mr Spacely, may be a youngster now toiling, just out of high school, at a JT Sprockets facility. The importance of sprockets in the day-to-day life of that cartoon's world is a running gag. Geor...

  August 5th is a noteworthy moment in sports history.  It was 22 years ago today that women competed in a marathon for the first time in the history of the Olympics.  This was at the 1984 games in southern California. The winner was Joan Benoit, a US runner, pictured here. She crossed the finish line two hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds after setting out.. The silver medal went to a Norwegian runner named Grete Waltz.  And the bronze? Portugal's Rosa Mota. What makes this something more than a generic glass-ceiling-breaking story is the physical comeback story attached to it.  Benoit had suffered an injury to her Achilles tendon earlier that year.  Her restoration to top -- Olympic winning -- fitness was extraordinarily quick.  She is still alive and so far as I know well.  God bless her. And us mortals might spare her a good thought on this day. 

  I didn't say much about the pandemic during the pandemic, even here in my hobby blog. I don't believe I've even commented on the much discussed question, for example, of whether Dr. Fauci was a national deliverer or a fraud.   Now I can and will say though: he might have been both. But for purposes of narrowing the field a bit, let's discuss the respect in which he might have been a fraud.  Fauci did a good deal during the pandemic to persuade Americans that Covid-19 had its origin in China's wet markets -- places where fresh (newly dead) animals are sold for food in open air settings.  But the diaries help make it clear that he did not believe this to be the origin.  He understood that the real origin of Covid-19 had a very likely tie to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in Wuhan, China.  Comer and Jordan say, "Excerpts of emails we are making public today reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things .... the potential that COVID-19 leaked fr...

In yesterday's post I quoted Jorge Ortega y Gasset summarizing a lecture he gave that itself displayed his equivocal attitude toward the phenomenological movement of the early 20th century, led by Husserl.  Husserl believed in the great bracketing -- precisely of the question of Being.  He thought the whole Cartesian question, about an evil demon creating a matrix for a Hollywood movie just to confuse me about which century I'm in -- Husserl thought all that could be just set aside.  We give ourselves plenty to think about if we simply focus on the world that does appear to us, and the selves that appear to our own introspection.  Ortega y Gasset admired Husserl's synthetic/intuitive thinking, as opposed to the sort of "conceptual-abstract thinking" that may be left homeless by such a bracketing, But he said that in order to get this right  " it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system by and in itself ....human life." As a sema...

  Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset gave a lecture at the University of Madrid in 1925.  This is how he later recalled that lecture.  "I stated my theme—some of my students would be able to remember—saying literally: 1 st , it is necessary to renew, from its roots, the traditional problem of Being; 2 nd , this has to be done with the phenomenological method insofar and only insofar as this means  synthetic or intuitive thinking , and not merely conceptual-abstract thinking as is the traditional logical way of thinking; 3 rd , but it is necessary to integrate the phenomenological method, adapting to it a dimension of  systematic thinking  which, as is known, it does not posses;4 th , and finally, in order that a systematic phenomenological thinking may be possible, it is necessary to start out from a phenomenon which may be a system  by  and  in itself ....human life."  That is a complicated multi-part thought that bears study. A ...

Recently saw PRESSURE, a movie about the meteorology behind the D-Day landings at Normandy in 1944.  It was somewhat fictionalized, a docudrama rather than a documentary. But if you want the underlying story without the fictionalization, go to   The Real Story Behind 'Pressure,' a WWII Drama About James Stagg's D-Day Weather Forecast  (Smithsonian).  General Eisenhower had to make the call, "we go" or "we hold until the storm passes." Or maybe "we look for a window within the storm." And he had to make it in epistemological circumstances that we have to work to recreate today. After all, they didn't have satellites in orbit conveying detailed information about every cloud around the globe.  They had weather stations, high-altitude balloons, lots of detailed historical records that experts could pore over without finding decisive patterns for a particular call-- and guesswork. Lots of guesswork. The hero of the story is James Stagg, a Scot...

I want to say something about a MOU, but not about the one you probably have in mind.  The cease fire MOU that US President Donald Trump and Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian signed in mid-June is now, all agree, defunct.  What the above headline refers to, though, is an MOU between Iraq and Syria, signed July 17.  Those two countries are moving toward an agreement to restore the Kirkuk-Baiyas pipeline to functioning condition. As the above map indicates, the pipeline in question runs from the heart of Iraq to the shore of the Mediterranean. This will enable a lot of petroleum to reach world markets whatever is going on with the Strait of Hormuz. Or the Red Sea either.  The pipeline was constructed in the period 1950-52 by Bechtel. It hasn't been operating since the period of the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s, when Syria took Iran's side. It hasn't been operable since hits by US bombs in 2003. Collateral damage in the US/Iraq war. The bomb strikes and the maintenance iss...

  I've been thinking for no good reasons about the lyrics to the Bryan Adams classic "Summer of '69." [And I'm glad that Adams is still vital and touring.] Two prominent "slanted rhymes" caught my attention.  The first of them comes right at the start:  Got my first real six string, bought it at the five and dime Played it 'til my fingers bled, was the summer of sixty-nine.  Of course "dime" and "nine" don't exactly rhyme. A small point, like a fork's tine. But soon we get another slightly slated rhyme when the lyrics are describing youthful doomed ambition. Me and some guys from school had a band and we tried real hard Jimmy quit Jody got married, Should've known we'd never get far. Now, "hard" and "far" don't exactly rhyme either.  Other rhymes in the song are simple and unslanted, like "ever" and "never". But those two slants right upfront got me to wondering. Did Adam...

Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist (she did a doctoral thesis on black hole production) and a prolific science popularizer, discussed in her blog recently whether physicists have any good reason to posit the existence of "dark energy." About the turn of the millennium, physicists determined that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They didn't know why, so they proposed a "dark (otherwise unobservable) energy" that was driving this acceleration. There is a key paper by Chevalier and Polarski in the International Journal of Modern Physics  from 2001.   But the simple idea, once postulated, didn't stay simple.  Theorists were soon explaining why dark energy has to be understood to be "evolving," and competing scenarios for that evolution themselves evolved.   Now quite recently, a group of mathematicians have looked at the numbers and have decided that this work may all have been a wild goose chase.  There need be no dark energy ...

The Parthians were the folks who ran a large part of what we now call Iran as the Hellenistic kingdom in the region, the Seleucids, was fading away.  The Parthians were known for a trick they perfected in heated battles, when it was necessary for some part of their line to make a retreat.  They learned to fire a terrible volley of arrows in one direction while moving in the other -- creating what later writers would call a "covering fire" that kept their foes at bay while they could re-organize. This sort of volley became known for a long time as a "Parthian shot," although in English that got simplified and dumbed down over time into ... "parting shot."  

Mitch McConnell is effectively out of the action. The only evidence he is still alive available to the public seems to be a "proof of life" photo arranged for just that purpose, and that seems something that could easily be faked with a little ingenuity. I understand that there is a key deadline coming up: August 3.  If McConnell is found incapable of performing his duties as Senator before that date, a special; election would be called. But if McConnell is still Senator on August 3 and departs for incapacity thereafter, there would be no special election and the seat would simply remain vacant until January.   McConnell is not running for re-election.  The Republicans of Kentucky nominated Andy Barr to replace him in a May primary and Barr has the advantage over Democratic contender Charels Booker.  I suspect we will know more by then. The Republicans generally would expect to be able to keep the seat were any special election held -- maybe just get Barr into o...

I believe it was Bertrand Russell who asked: if there is a "problem of evil" why is there not a "problem of good"? His answer was that there is a problem of evil only for those whose premises make evil seem anomalous.   Following up that thought: If I believed that the world is the creation of the evil Cthulhu, designed to make us miserable and mad, why are there good and joyful moments?  Why does Cthulhu let Bach's music slip through into ontology? Why are we allowed to take and feel such pride in our child's growth and accomplishments, if we are supposed to be miserable? My guess is that different Cthulhu-ists have different opinions. Schopenhauer's Will might be thought to raise the same question.  But he might say that the Will preserves its own existence by preserving our generational cycles, so allowing the pride of parenthood is a necessary price the Will must pay to continue to have humans whom it can torture. As to music? it may have played a ro...

The "problem of evil" in broadest terms is the problem of how to account for the existence of evil within systems of thought that would seem to exclude it -- that may identify reality with goodness in one way or another. Within Christian thought these efforts are generally called "theodicy.'  But the problem precedes Christian efforts. Plato, for example, postulated a Form of the Good that is the most real of realities.  This means that he starkly identified Good with Real, and THAT raises the question of -- why isn't it?  Or not so much. When the neoplatonists came along a couple of centuries later and strove to put Platon's thoughts into more systematic form, tried to make linear treatises out of hints from not especially linear dialogs, they found this question staring at them. If the Good is the sun (Plato's metaphor in his culminating story of an escape from the cave) then evil is presumably the darkness: shade.  Yet how decode this metaphor? What is...

  I could have told them that at Ford.  But I guess they had to learn it on their own. https://newrepublic.com/article/212671/data-centers-americans-hate-ai

  On the off chance that anyone who has anything to do with the Democratic Party in Maine is reading this ... first, shame on you.  I used to identify as a dissident Republican, way back when that meant John Anderson ... and in large part because of that autobiographical fact, I would love to see Senator Collins removed from public life.  She is the master (too gendered?) -- the prodigy at pretending to be that sort of Republican -- but always backing down and falling in line when it matters.  Her games playing helped give us DOBBS v. JACKSON effectively extinguishing the privacy right from the 14th amendment.   [No, they haven't overturned GRISWOLD yet -- but I wouldn't want a test case on that to come before this court anytime soon.]  Anyway it was important, my hypothetical Maine-Dem-operative reader, for you lot to come up with someone solid who could run against Collins this year.  You had ONE JOB!!! Boy did you fail on that. And don't ask me...

  Yesterday I paid tribute here to a great mathematician. Today I offer a quote from him.  "To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero.  Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as there are usually believed to be."  The significance of that observation may not be obvious outside of some consideration of the history of math, the development of calculus in particular.  But once we do a little grappling with that history, we see that Euler is making a point here that takes us back to ancient Greece.  Back to Zeno, Achilles and tortoise.  If Achilles is to catch up with the tortoise there must be a moment at which the difference between them is zero. One way of looking at the problem is to ask what is the next lower number -- one really really close to zero but still a positive number!  Euler here is saying "That is the wrong way of looking at it." Or, "don't create my...

Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) was surely one of the most prolific of great mathematicians. Among his contributions, we need to mention two, each of which comes down to us as a single letter: the letter e and the letter i . If we were literally to "pay"tribute, we might do so in increments of $2.72, rounding up a bit the value of irrational e.  We'll get to that. First: biography. Euler was born in Basel, Switzerland, so his life and work might fittingly be considered a riposte to the old anti-Swiss jibe (originally from The Third Man ) that Switzerland has produced nothing for all its years of peace and democracy, nothing more than the humble cuckoo clock.    Since Euler’s day and because of his work, i has stood for the simplest of the numbers that Descartes had called “imaginary.” This i refers to the square root of -1. We don’t need to bother ourselves further with the question “ what is the square root of -1?” It is i , by stipulation.    Also since Eul...