Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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...

  I hereby inform my readers that I will not be doing the usual post-Supreme-Court term round-up this year.  Most Julys for many years now, I have devoted four long blog entries to the term of the US Supreme Court that has just ended.  This year, I'm not feeling it.  There have been a lot of intriguing decisions this term. I have written posts on some of they as we have proceeded.  But the elaborate round-up? No thanks.  And ...sorry to disappoint.  By the way, the fact that I have just been using the word "round-up" reminds me of the fact that one of the cases decided by the Court this term literally did involve a product named Round Up.  https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1068_n7ip.pdf 

    From Quora, question and answer How should I get started with philosophy? I'm 15 years old. That is a very good time for it. You might want to try to define for yourself what kind of philosophy problem most interests you and cluster your readings (and your early manuscripts) there. Many young people are driven by social/political concerns. Can philosophy say something foundational about these concerns? Can it help us get a Big Picture into which the day-to-day headlines and debates will fit? If that is what you mean by philosophy, you might want to look to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and older figures like Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke. Others are feeling a more existential angst. What is the point of even getting out of bed in the morning? Do my actions matter? Are they determined anyway, so that I am just a ping-pong ball bouncing around? If those questions are what philosophy means to you, I suggest the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a follow-up with the work of William...

As soon as Abraham Lincoln received a favorable battle report from Gettysburg in early July 1863, he at once paired the time of year with the time in which the United States had declared its independence from its mother country, and before long Lincoln did the arithmetic.  The two events were separated by 87 years. Months passed before Lincoln spoke on the subject of that battle and its consequences (in November), but his famous address on that occasion begins with the invocation of the length of time that passed between the two events: four score and seven years.  This is likely the only reason the word "score" in that sense remains in the English language.  All of which, as we close in on the 250th anniversary of the same declaration of independence, induces me to ask: what happened just 87 years ago as I write?  That would be 1939. What happened on independence day that year? Four score and seven years ago, legendary first baseman Lou Gehrig delivered a farewell a...

  In Isabellas County, Michigan, the Pung family lost its ranch style home due to a mere $2,242 in disputed taxes.  The country government sold the place for $76K at a public auction. The buyer then flipped it for $195,000.  I'm a recovering anarcho-capitalist, so I will try not to go on too much of a bender about how much this sucks.  But boy is the world of property taxation and enforcement offering up a delicious cuba libre to someone who is trying to get with the twelve steps, here!!! In May 2023, U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Tyler v. Hennepin County that home equity theft is unconstitutional. The Court determined that seizing excess value over a tax debt violates the fifth amendment's taking clause.   So was Pung simply a straightforward application of Tyler ? No such luck.  Lower courts essentially gave the Pungs the difference between the tax debt and the public auction value. But the Pungs asked the Supreme Court to affirm that (...

A poor third place finish for a Kennedy. And in the State of New York, no less -- the state where former Attorney General Bobby Kennedy served as US Senator. from his election in November 1964 until his assassination almost four years later.  The primary campaign for the Democratic nomination to be the Congress critter from the 12th district NY -- midtown Manhattan, along with both the upper East and West sides -- was the first ever political campaign for Jack Schlossberg.  Schlossberg is the son of Caroline Kennedy, and so he is the grandson of a President and the grand-nephew of the aforesaid AG and Senator.  Whatever.  Micah Lasher won with 39 percent of the vote. The second-place finisher was Alex Bores, with 35 percent. Schlossberg was far behind with just 10 percent. George Conway was in the mix, too.  [At least Schlossberg beat Conway].  Voting turnout was likely key here.  Lasher drew his strength from the Upper West side (pictured) where votin...

  One of the important financial economists writing today is Mohamed El-Erian, who grew up as the son of an Egyptian diplomat and was the deputy director of the IMF for three years in the 1990s. He is quite well known to folks like me, who look to his analyses to guide our work reporting day to day events.  But he is not well known at all to the "general public," where that term is taken to mean the sort of people who know that Paul Krugman or Robert Shiller are important economists.  I'm old enough to remember when Friedman and Galbraith were the economists whose name came to the tongue of many non-economists. They both passed away in the first decade of the new millennium, and the public attention has done what it does ... it has passed on. I may say more about El-Erian's non-celebrity work soon.  For now, I will only lay down that he has recently said that on June 24, "The most notable price action in US markets" was the fall by 9 basis points of US gover...

I just had a revelation about Gilligan's Island . Regular fans will remember that Gilligan would from time to time mention his favorite rock group The Mosquitoes. Eventually, the group itself visited the island, looking for a relaxing getaway after a difficult tour. Like all guest stars, the band left in a manner that didn't help the core seven castaways at all.  Anyway, it is obvious that the group was conceived as a Beatles parody. The insectile name, to start with,  The fact that the group appears to have had a single with the lyrics "don't go in there, yeah yeah yeah." It was not subtle parody.  But what only recently occurred to me was the clever way that the names of the members of the fictional group mirror the real-world names of the Fab Four.  The Mosquitoes had four members (of course): Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. Note that three of those names would be quite unusual for any of the men one meets on the street in any city in the Anglophonic world. ...

   An odd philosophical troika of philosophers in early modern Britain comes to mind today for no good reason.  Locke, Berkeley, Hume. I saw a random post in Quora asking for a brief summary of the significant contributions of each "the" three major philosophers.  No more specific context. I have no idea how one would pick THE troika the querent had in mind, But this is one troika if great significance. To summarize their “significant contributions” is a considerable task — or three different tasks, EACH considerable. But it does seem that together the three of them tell a tragic story.  In essence we can say this (ignoring the politics of Locke or of Hume, and the vision theory of Berkeley): Locke: Accepted a dualist picture of the world in which minds, conceived of as properties of souls, are intangible beings that must come to grips with a material world around them. His contribution was to think through this material world in Newtonian terms — what he called...