Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I posted a thought about the Georg Simmel's book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY, published in Germany by Duncker and Humblot in 1900.  Today I'll add a bit about how that book came to be in English -- indeed, in American English -- where I can read it with ease. As distinct from the slog that getting through actual German would be for me, despite my two years of High School German classes!   The book began as a lecture delivered by Simmel in 1889 to a political science seminar at the University of Berlin, a seminar over which Gustav Schmoller presided.  Simmel then issued a series of articles on the underlying issue and the book emerged in due course. The first English translation?  It didn't happen until more than three quarters of a century later, a full 89 years since that first lecture  -- it was in 1978, brought out by Routledge, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby.  There have been more recent editions. But ... why the long delay?...

  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...