Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I believe at some point I have mentioned in this blog that David O'Brien authored a book about an unpublished opinion written by Justice Robert H. Jackson that would have served as a concurrence to the court's opinion in the famous 1954 case, BROWN v. BOARD. The court's opinion was expressed in a unanimous vote and a single opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, declaring that the old rule that allowed "separate but equal" treatment in education facilities, i.e. segregation by race in schools, was a rule no longer. A follow-up decision the next year addressed the issue of remedy: it ordered states to desegregate their schools with all "deliberate speed." (Jackson was dead by that time.) Jackson never published his concurrence because the Chief Justice lobbied hard to dissuade him from doing so. It was Warren's considered view that on a matter so pressing the Court must speak with one voice. I bring it up again because I would like to offer a quota...

 There is a new book out about the Greek philosopher Parmenides, the central figure of the Eleatic school. Well, it is listed as a 2025 publication.  I, for one, will call that "new" given the antiquity of the subject matter.  It is an anthology titled simply, Parmenides: New Perspectives , edited by A.G. Long and Barbara M. Sattler. The Eleatics may have made their greatest impact on subsequent philosophy through Parmenides' disciple Zeno. The simplistic view (my view) is that Parmenides took a position that seemed, simply, nuts. There is no change, no motion, and no division in the word, there is only Being.     Zeno provided arguments for that position that made it seem less nutso, by making the common sensical world of change, gaps, and differences itself seem oddly paradoxical. That conventional understanding makes Zeno seem the more interesting figure in that dyad.  But the Long/Sattler book offers "new perspectives". One of them is that Parmenid...

People are looking for "tells".  What is a quick way to tell when I am reading AI slop, rather than something some real human has composed?  One of the better tells is the frequent use of the adverb "quietly" in metaphorical contexts. LLMs have received a level of publicity out of proportion to their role within the AI world (see the above Venn diagram) in part because they impact and indeed may threaten the livelihood of people like me. So we, because loquacious folk, talk about it. LLMs, large language models, have quietly developed the tick of using the word "quietly" a lot. You may recently have read about how a certain individual has "quietly" become important in deliberations of Congress, or how Stephen King has "quietly" amassed some large number of acreage of Maine real estate, or some whatever. "Quietly" does a lot of work for these models. It sounds as if it is saying something about something conspiratorial or trick...

Prelude: for those who were paying close attention to my haiku last week: yes, I did have the procedure done and, yes, things turned out well.  There is nothing nasty growing inside my butt. Prelude complete.  Anyway: I don't want to say much here about the ROYAL CARRIBEAN case issued by the US Supreme Court last week, in part because I may have something to say about it two months from now, as part of my annual round-up of  all things SCOTUS.  I'll only for today note that the case has Justice Thomas writing for the court, as one of an eight-member majority thereof, with Justice Kagan the sole standout.    And my only point is to ask a question. Does anyone know of another decision within the last couple of years that came down just that way?  In many politically sensitive cases, one gets a 6-3 lineup.  Sometimes the split consists of appointees of Presidents of the Republican Party versus those of Presidents of the Democratic Party, as in LOUISI...

Next time I do this  Really short poem thing for you, I'll use limericks. 

 Fifty five years now Since Gaye asked "what's goin' on". We still can't answer. 

One of the reasons  I must keep these posts short is: I've got shit to do.  

  Just a fleeting thought: I've got a busy week going. These posts will prove it. 

Sheila and Marty always seemed, to their mutual friends, an odd pairing.  Sheila, who in her youth had attended Columbia and Christ Church, Oxford, had nearly completed a doctoral thesis at the latter about Ezra Pound, ("the performance of madness in the Cantos" was how she described its subject to Marty) and she had gathered around her a circle of almost equally erudite friends.  Then there was Marty. Amongst them he was always getting the references wrong and the pronunciation disastrously so. He knew nothing about Pound except for Pound's fascistic broadcasts. But he was an actual working author (of technical manuals, mostly) and he occasionally did mention that Sheila, for all her talk of writing as Pound understood it, as Art, had never published ... anything anywhere.  And most places they went, Rowan (Marty's beautiful border collie, whose name had been  selected by his sister for its pure Scottishness) went along .   [Other stuff in here. Sheila and...

  Perhaps it is a great movie I don't know. I may never know.  I suspect I'm not going to see it until it ends up on small screens.  But THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA II has this to its credit.  It has inspired some fine writing amongst critics.  I'll just quote here one example, from SALON, where senior culture writer Coleman Spilde raves about it.  But “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t here just to make easy money by force-feeding audiences IP slop in the form of Miranda Priestly one-liners; it’s using its existence to issue a mass-scale warning about the future, stressing the worth in fighting tooth and nail to preserve what we hold dear — in cinema, in publishing, in every element of life being disemboweled by rapacious tech bros in fleece vests. Dug.

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 ...