Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Last week I quoted from a 19th century article by Chauncey Wright, mentor of the Harvard-based Metaphysical Club, concerning the beginnings of self-consciousness in humans.  He compared it with flight in birds. I'll try to elucidate. "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one." The bracketing is mine, the parenthesis is Wright's.  Our observing angel presumably is aware of mental activity in a range of animals  -- stimulus is followed (often after some gap in time as if for deliberation) by response.  Monkey sees some food out of reach. Monkey looks around, sees a long stick, uses it to extend his reach for the food.  But then a particular "naked ape" appears who ha...

 I mentioned earlier that I have been reading Albert Schweitzer's work, PAUL AND HIS INTERPRETERS, a book of, and about, New Testament scholarship first published in 1912. I write today about a phrase in a footnote.  An untranslated German phrase that is here as the title of someone else's scholarly work in the field. Das Judentum in der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt . Feeding it into a translation algorithm, I learn that the monograph cited was titled: "Judaism in the pre-Christian Greek world."   Hmmm. I took two years of German in high school.  I'm pretty sure (even though I've had plenty of time to forget what I learned there, and have availed myself of the opportunity) that I never learned that "vor" works as the prefix "pre".   From now on, I'll know. 

  A few words from Chauncey Wright, famously of the "Metaphysical Club" that gave rise to the pragmaticism of Peirce and the pragmatism of James.   "The derivation of this power [self-consciousness], supposing it to have been observed by a finite angelic (not animal) intelligence, could not have been foreseen to be involved in the mental causes, on the conjunction of which it might, nevertheless, have been seen to depend. The angelic observation would have been a purely empirical one. The possibility of a subsequent analysis of these causes by the self-conscious animal himself, which would afford an explanation of their agency, by referring it to a rational combination of simpler elements in them, would not alter the case to the animal intelligence, just as a rational explanation of flight could not be reached by such an intelligence as a consequence of known mechanical laws, since these laws are also animal conditions, or rather are more material ones, of which our ange...

In the middle of last month I wrote a brief note here about Blue Owl, a large manager of alternative assets with a lot of money at stake in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space.  We come around to Blue Owl again, because days ago Brown University announced it is cutting its stake in Blue Owl Capital Corp., one of the broad Blue Owl family of entities-- roughly cutting that stake in half.  This bugs me because: 1) it is such a large shift that ... 2) there is likely a reason for it -- somebody at Brown knows something about Blue Owl, and  3) I don't know what they know.  Indeed, it is my job to know what is up at such places as Blue Owl, and it looks like I'm missing out on something big.   Also, to be clear: this is NOT a "divestment" from Israel.  There is a student group at Brown that presses for that, and they have had their Gaza Solidarity Encampment, but so far they have had no success in affecting Brown's portfolio, and I don't know of any Blue...

The name “Ammonius Saccas” comes down to us as part of a line of intellectual succession, the last link in a chain connecting Plato to Plotinus. Plotinus of course formulated a systematic Neoplatonic philosophy that, though I am not an adherent, seems to be both impressive and important. But we have Plotinus’ texts to study and argue about. We don’t have any such thing for Ammonius Saccas. What we have is just the predicate that usually follows his name as subject. Saccas “taught Plotinus”. And we have THE NAME, which is fascinating in itself but tantalizing. The name “Saccas” could be a reference to the "Sakyas", an Indian ruling clan. From this possibility some have spun speculation on the presence of a Vedic element in lessons he taught Plotinus. Such visual representations as we possess allow for this speculation.  He might be Indian -- he might be Egyptian -- he might be a Greek.  Such speculation is a game anyone can play. See the image above to play along. I love the b...

As is now all-too-well known, the executive branch of the US government has put its resources behind the proposition that the numbers "8647" lined out with seashells, must to any reasonable person be seen as a threat to kill the 47th President.  Hmmm. So far as I could tell from the infamous photo, we're supposed to take them to be 8 6 47.  Month, day, year.  Did anything of importance worth memorializing on a North Carolina beach happen on an 8/6/47?  Nothing much from August 6, 1947, I'm afraid.  Except that a great cornerback for the Cincinnati Bengals, Ken Riley, was born on that date. He was posthumously admitted to the Football Hall of Fame in 2023. We get to something more promising if we step back a century. During the Mexican War, on August 6, 1847 the US marines began a march on Mexico City under the command of Lt. Colonel Samuel Watson.  This historic tidbit does have some visibility or, rather, audibility, because it is the reason the Marine Cor...

 Bolton's big hit "How am I Supposed to Live without You" begins thus: "I could hardly believe it/When I heard the news today/I had to come and get it straight from you/They said you were leavin'/Someone swept your heart away/From the look upon your face I see it's true." That  strikes me as a marvelous bit of story telling. The rest of the song, unfortunately, soon slips into standard-issue '80s ballad. But what exactly do I like about the above? The first line sets up the rest, pressing the listener to ask  what  was so unbelievable. We might already guess that a romantic disappointment was the hardly-believed thing, but we are steered subtly in another direction by "news".  The narrator didn't hear gossip or "the word".  He heard "the news".  For many of us that suggests headlines or something broadcast.  Then it turns out, not until the third line though, the first suspicion was accurate.  I could hardly believe ...

Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?".  I answered: The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge. Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off.  Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent.  He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts." As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing.  It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real.  A Hegel/Wittgenstein link?  That is a different trick.  You COULD try to see the movement from th...

 This looks like a mess.  Peruvian police raids property of former electoral chief amid irregularities in elections So ... Peru has a two-tiered system of electing a President. In the first round, there is a free-for-all, with dozens of candidates.  If no one gets 50% + 1, the two top vote getters from that round run against each other in the second. Much like California's Governor's race.  The first round took place on April 12th.  Various snafus delayed some of the voting until the next day and snafus in the counting since then have been legion. It is clear as I wrote this that the largest vote total was the one that went to the daughter of a former President, that is to Alberto Fujimori's girl, Keiko Fujimori.  It is not at all clear who will be running against her. But the cliffhanger or "who came in second" isn't what is generating the headlines in Peru right now. Nor are they generated by the complicated nature of the Fujimori family's political lega...

 Many years ago, boys and girls, there were television commercials about the Keebler elves working to make their cookies inside a hollow oak tree. The commercials were probably as famous in their own way as the hucksterism of "Crazy Eddie" would become somewhat later.  Here's a link:  Keebler Elves in the Hollow Tree | 70s & 80s Tv Commercials | EL Fudge   The elves and their tree were first cooked up, so to speak, in 1968.  They got their boss and spokesperson, Ernie Fudge, two years later.  That's E.L Fudge.  E as in everybody -- L as in "loves" fudge.  The odd pointlessness of much of memory.  So: why did I illustrate this pointless memory with an image from the Sistine Chapel?  I just guess that as God is said to have created His world, we within that world create our own fictional worlds. Give the copy writers some credit. That it may have been just a day's work for some of those inolved does not make it uncreative. 

  The Canadian Journal of Philosophy has gone open access.  That is why I was able to discuss the article about free will and closure arguments in my Tuesday and Wednesday posts this week. Long live Canada.  Canadian Journal of Philosophy | Cambridge Core

  Tucker Carlson's son quits JD Vance's team after pundit suggested Trump might be 'Antichrist' News from inside the belly of the beast.  JD Vance is best bud with Tucker Carlson.  Back in the day, Tucker got his ambitious son, Buckley Carlson, a job on Vance's staff. I personally like to imagine that the rest of the staff called him Skippy.  That was back when Carlson, Vance, and Trump were all posing alike in their professed opposition to the neoconservatives of the Bush family circle and their forever wars.  Now, Trump is the wartime president, Carlson (bless his otherwise infernal soul) will not abide that.  Vance has no choice but to abide whatever Trump does and put a smile on his face while Trump does it, devastating as it may be to JD's chances of prevailing as a peace candidate in 2028.  Also devastating to Skip Carlson's chances of being a bigshot. Imagine my despair. 

You are looking for a second consecutive day at a fossil-disclosed jungle cat inspired by thought experiments over whether p was true already in ancient times.  I go back today to the issue raised in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy in an article earlier this year by Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop.   The point is not to settle the issue of what is free will and is it real.  The point, rather, is in logical analytical fashion to render clear "previously underappreciated constraints on defenses of closure-based arguments against the existence of free will."  Who are they?  Lampert is affiliated with the University of Vienna, apparently a postdoctoral researcher there.  Waldrop's affiliation is with Notre Dame. They seem often to have worked together.   As I understand it, they are saying that various promising arguments against free will require a principle of closure, and that whether they have such a principle available in the sens...

In the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop recently offered a rather confusing argument about free will.  They didn't argue for it or against it precisely, but sought to outline what a solid argument for it or against it might look like.  They seem sure that no sound argument to either conclusion has appeared yet, despite the voluminous attempts. "Free will and intensional operators" is the title of their article, in the February 2026 issue. As one might expect, the phrase "intensional operators" plays a big part in their discussion. So does the word "closure".  They don't really define what they mean by [epistemic] closure in this context, but I expect that it means here that for any domain of discussion X, the domain is closed if and only if we can safely add to our knowledge by taking the enatilment of what we know as also ... known. [This is different from causal closure.]  Free will, for Lampert and Waldrop,...

The safe return of Artemis, with its four astronauts, reminded me of my boyhood  and the thrill of following the Gemini and Apollo flights. Some time in the school year that began around Labor Day 1969, a friend and classmate of mine named Pat showed me a poem he had written on how inspired he was by space exploration, and especially by the safe return of the Apollo 11 astronauts after their landing on the moon. It was a well-written poem for a 6th grader.  But he had chosen a picky critic.  I noted that he had described the return of this flight as a thing happening in spring.  Chiefly because thing and spring rhyme.  I pointed out, "the moon flight took place in July."  He thought about it and said he was not going to try to change the masterpiece. After all, thing and spring rhyme so nicely.  Well, they do. The following couplet also rhymes: It is hard to surpass the cosmic-sized bummer Of not having a rhyme for a flight in mid summer. Anyway: I am...

Just a book note today. I've heard good things about this one.  Brenda Wineapple, KEEPING THE FAITH (2026), concerning the Scopes Monkey trial still reverberating in our national consciousness after a century. Wineapple is a former faculty member at Sarah Lawrence and at present teaches in the MFA program at Columbia. She also has a world-class enviable surname.  Here's the link.  https://www.americamagazine.org/books/2026/01/15/review-the-scopes-monkey-trial-and-church-state-tensions/ [The above photo is of Clarence Darrow.]

 In finance journalism, the acronym HOTS stands for "Heard on the Street," the somewhat opinionated and somewhat gossipy column made famous, and made into a mover of markets, by Dan Dorfman in the 1960s.  Someone would advance the history of this branch of journalism if he could only write a comprehensive history of this column, from its earliest days in the 1930s to and through Dorfman's day to the notorious reign there of Foster Winans in the 1980s.  Anyway, Jonathan Weil writes it now. Weil, whose expertise as a forensic accountant has long given an edge to his journalism, defends the management of Blue Owl, a large alternative asset manager that specializes in private credit.  Private credit funds typically act as non-bank lenders to mid-market businesses. Blue Owl in particular has become controversial of late for its relative illiquidity. Specifically, it has lent a lot of money to firms on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, also known as the app econom...

Archeologists report the discovery, on an old papyrus manuscript, of verses they attribute to Empedocles, previously unavailable to us moderns.  The finding, days ago, didn't happen out in the field in Indiana Jones fashion. It appears to have happened in an office. Specifically, at the French Institute of Oriental Archeology in Cairo. It sounds as if somebody may have done the field work years ago, but the pertinent papyrus has been stored away, significance unrecognized, and only just now has been recognized as what it is.  What IS it?  Let us start with who is the author. Empedocles is one of the pre-Socratics, generally associated (though not geographically) with the Ionians: Thales, Anaximander, etc. Like the others of that school he is -- or has until now been -- known entirely through the fragments of his work quoted by later authors. He expounded a theory of "Love" and "Strife" as two cosmic forces, the former always mixing the (four) elements, the latte...

Let us take this from the top.  Just think of two creatures: one notoriously swift of foot, the other not so.  Then think that the slower creature has a short head-start in a race.  Of course the former will catch up with and pass the later.  That is inherent in what we mean by such notions as slow and fast.  But ... what if we assume with ancient geometers that space, and so every possible distance, is infinitely divisible?  Does that throw a wrench into things?  Fast creature (Achilles) starts ten meters behind slow creature (Turtle). Achilles moves ten times as fast.  Within some period of time (we will call it a nonce), Achilles has advanced those ten meters. Ah, but Turtle has now advanced one meter, and so is still ahead.  Achilles advances THAT distance in one-tenth of a nonce.  Yet he still has not caught up, for the Turtle has by now advanced one-hundredth of a meter.  And so forth, depressingly, on and on. It is impossible...

  And it means what it says.  That's the post. 

"Since our world conditions have changed, we can do no other than to think our own thoughts about the redemptive significance of the death of Jesus and all that is connected with it, basing our thoughts, so far as possible, on the original and Primitive-Christian doctrine.  But if we undertake this task, as we needs must, we ought to make clear to ourselves what we are doing.  We ought not to bemuse ourselves with the belief that we are simply taking over the whole of the dogmatic conceptions of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity, seeing that this is, in fact, impossible.  And we ought not to regard the obscurities and contradictions, in which we find ourselves involved, as originally attaching to Christian doctrine; we ought to be clearly conscious that they arise from the transformation of the historical and Primitive-Christian concepts into concepts necessary to adapt them to a later situation.  Instead of simply being able to take over traditional material as we...

  I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE!  Anyone still here?  Okay, then.  Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush.  We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads.  They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...

  It was a big splash when news of the bankruptcy filing broke. Serta, of course, is a well-known mattress company, around since 1931.  [Not a year full of economic optimism -- it must have taken some contrarian gumption to start it then.] Whatever mattress you use at home, dear reader, you have almost certainy slept on a Serta if you have spent a night at a Hilton or Wyndham.  Anyway, back in 2020 the company was in trouble, and it executed what became a very controversial transaction to lessen its total debt burden It is called an uptier deal, because it allowed certain favored creditors to move up on the capital stack, to end up that I which positions more senior than they had before. The creditors who had been excluded from this deal cried bloody heck.   They had reason to be worried. The creativity that deal showed did not in fact rescue the company from its woes and in early 2023 it filed for bankruptcy court protection.  A lot else has happened in the thr...

Steven Louis Reynolds passed away last month, (March 21) in Salt Lake City, of complications related to Parkinson’s disease.  His fine 2017 book, Knowledge as Acceptable Testimony  took a social view of what we mean by knowledge.  Sorry, Descartes, but someone sitting at a desk alone determined to figure out whether he knows anything has already lost the battle. Knowledge only has meaning and 'knowledge' only has meaning within a world populated by other people in which such affiliated ideas as 'acceptable testimony' make sense. Reynolds received his PhD from UCLA and he spent more than three decades teaching philosophy at Arizona State University. I did a search of his name looking for photos.  I persistently got one of him standing in a cave, which accordingly I have used. Was he a spelunker on his spare time or was he making a sly point about Platonism?  Either way: rest in peace, professor.

Spoiler alert! If you have never read this book and hope someday to do so, and hope to be surprised by plot turns, I have to warn you that this post will give one big one away.  Still here, anybody?  All right. In our earlier posts I made clear that in the opening scene, Andrew's beloved second wife Briony is dead.  Andrew thrusts his infant by Briony upon his first wife, Martha.  There is no explanation of the reason for her death, and while reading the middle of the book about their courtship and life together the easiest assumption is that she was going to die in childbirth. She didn't.  Briony gave birth and there was a cozy household of three for a time. But she died soon thereafter in the collapse of the Twin Towers in the financial district of New York City on September 11, 2001. That struck me as quite a twist in a story that until then had been vague about chronology. Hence the spoiler warning above. It was over the following two months that Andrew make...

  We return to Andrew and Briony.  There is a bit in chapter three in which Andrew is describing to his therapist a road trip: our two young lovers drive from southern California to New York City, taking turns at the wheel.   For the final stretch, beginning in Atlanta, the one not at the wheel was reading out loud. From Mark Twain, whom Andrew refers to, familiarly as MT.  The book of MT's that enlivened those hours and days of driving?  The therapist guesses Huckleberry Finn.  Andrew corrects him. The book was The Prince and the Pauper.  And he puts what I take it is a Doctorow-esque gloss on this book: The two boys exchange identities, the prince is the pauper and the pauper is the prince. Briony liked the romance of that, Clemens saying there's nothing to royalty but the assumption. But it's more than a democratic parable: it's a tale for brain scientists. Given the inspiration, anyone can step into an identity because the brain is deft, it c...

Once, many years ago, when I was working in a junk-mail mill, I got some joy out of a simple sign just about a mile away from the site of this employment. The sign, on a smallish road, warned drivers that racoons and other small critters were crossing thereabouts, so it would be wise to proceed with caution. Or, at least, that is what I imagine was the point of posting the sign. It said simply, "Slow animals crossing". I found it joyful because I would always say to myself while passing, "Gee, I guess the smarter animals cross a little further down the road."  I guess we're supposed to imagine a punctuation point after the word "slow" to foreclose such an interpretation. 

  Beyond the usual concern that the total or partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up the price of the stuff we put in our cars, there is a concern only slowly bubbling to public consciousness -- that it will also drive up the cost of fertilizer and accordingly of food. The traditional route for the manufacture of fertilizer is through what chemists call the Haber-Bosch process, which makes ammonia, which can be used as a fertilizer in itself or can be combined with other stuff for more elaborate fertilizers.  There has been a lot of talk about moving beyond Haber-Bosch, finding alternative ways of making  ammonia and growing the world's food, in part precisely because natural gas is an input, and relatedly because CO₂ is a major byproduct of that process. A move toward alternative processes is a move toward a low or net zero carbon emissions world. It is certainly possible that even a partial blockage of Hormuz will kick-start the implementation of alternatives...

More on the novel, Andrew's Brain , by Doctorow.  We discover soon after the passage I quoted yesterday that the narrative voice saying "I can tell you about my friend, Andrew" is himself Andrew.  He has a proclivity for speaking of himself, and I submit a proclivity for seeing himself, in the third person. This discovery has weight in the unfolding of the not-especially-narrative tale. For one of the key themes here is the relation of mind to brain, of a self to its physical stratum.  And one might say that to the extent we reduce self to brain, we are trying to escape from the responsibilities of a first person point of view, into a world in which there is no subject, there is only the third person.  The first chapter is the longest in the book, going 50 pages. That is one-quarter the length of the book though there are eleven chapters. That is not remarkable -- the long first chapter feels like leisurely scene setting.  Anyway: as the second chapter opens we ...

  I've been reading a short novel by E.L. Doctorow, ANDREW'S BRAIN (2014). Let me quote for you the opening paragraph: "I can tell you about my friend Andrew, the cognitive scientist, but it isn't pretty. One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died." That paragraph throws us in the middle of things. It works from and, I think, presumes our familiarity with, a number of conventions. Andrew's job sounds like an academic one, and the paragraph primes us for a campus novel, where love triangles, ambitions successful or foiled, human tragedies, all play out amidst faculty, students, administrators with well-defined social roles.     The speaker may be addressing us, the readers, here.  Or he might be addressing a therapist -- not an unusual expository device in contemporary fiction.  We also cued up here have a rather ordinary-seeming love triangle.  A mi...

 Presidential authority as the commander in chief of the armed forces, under Article II of the US Constitution, is real and important, but it surely isn't all that President Donald Trump needs it to be for this war to be even remotely lawful.  To review six familiar points: (1) The US Constitutional reserves to Congress exclusively the right to "declare" war; (2) Probably because the framers considered the point too obvious to require stating, there is no specific statement that undeclared wars are illegal wars; (3) The courts have refused to make that inference leaving a gap in the whole notion of the checking of war powers, but (4) Congress, overriding President Nixon's veto, filled that gap with the War Powers Act of 1973, and (5) if Congress does not approve President Trump's action, then under the War Powers Act, the President will have to end hostilities within 60 days of starting them -- which would be by the end of April, but (6) nobody expects President T...

For a long time, much of the political appeal of  President Donald Trump has come from his professed opposition to “forever wars.”   One of his many explicit statements to this effect dates from his State of the Union address in 2019.  He said, “Great nations do not fight endless wars.”  If you need a link for that: behold. Given his goal to make America “great again,” this language clearly amounts to a commitment to use his position as commander-in-chief to keep the United States out of endless wars. Yet here we are, with Trump once again the commander-in-chief and with his commitment to war with Iran open-ended. He began the attack on Iran at the end of February and throughout March he has put his renunciation of his earlier view front-and-center. He has used his own proprietary social-media platform, “Truth Social,” to explain to us that “Wars can be fought ‘forever,’ and very successfully, using just these supplies (which are better than other countries fin...