Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  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...

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 ...