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...
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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,...
Dropping these here as a convenient place to keep them. The issue of ranked choice voting versus first-past-the-post voting is a hot one in Canada right now -- its profile has been raised by former prime minister Justin Trudeau, who appears remorseful about not having done anything to move the country in the ranked direction. Here is some literature on the controversy. Martin Horak (2021) Adopting Ranked-Choice Voting in London, Ontario . Michael Cowan (2025), “Ranking Bad: The Chemistry of Ranked‑Choice Voting.” ResPublica: Undergraduate Journal of Political Science. Rivard & Lockhart (2022), “Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Political Science. Examines how voters use expectations about government formation to guide their choices. Highly relevant because strategic voting is one of the main behaviors RCV aims to reduce . Donovan, Todd, Caroline Tolbert & Kellen Gracey (2019). “Self‑Reported Underst...
One of the most frequently used textbooks in political philosophy these days is by WIll Kymlicka, a professor at Queen's University in Toronto. Photo of Kymlicka here. Here, just for nothing, is its table of contents: 1. Introduction 2. Utilitarianism 3. Liberal Equality 4. Libertarianism 5. Marxism 6. Communitarianism 7. Citizenship Theory 8. Multiculturalism 9. Feminism If you're looking for me to say something profound about that ... I got nothing. But if you've got a kid or grandkid in college going for a political science degree, he or she will probably have either that table of contents or something similar in front of nose.
My favorite canonical author, William Faulkner, had a phony war story to tell. While he was alive, biographers would say that Faulkner, born in 1897, left the US for Canada in 1916 because he was put off by Wilson's neutrality policy and wanted to get into the Great War. He trained in Canada to become a pilot in the RAF and spent some time flying in France before the war ended. That was what would now be known as "stolen valor." It begins with his misdescription of when he left the US and why. The precipitating cause wasn't eagerness to fight, it was romantic heartbreak. His family (and the family of his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, prevented the two young'uns from marrying in 1918. Broken hearted, and aware of course that there was a war on, Faulkner tried to enlist. He was rejected by the US Army because he was too short. He entered Canada then, hearing that the height requirement there was one he met. He was never anywhere near the fighting. He did enlist in ...
Chevron may have thrown, or may be about to throw, some cold water on the dreams that some have cherished for the near future of western Canada. Chevron may be pulling out of its stake in the big Kittimat liquified natural gas project. Even the very possibility of such a pull-out has had an enervating effect. https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/chevrons-possible-exit-from-kitimat-lng-project-dents-canadas-hopes-of-building-lng-hub
An op-ed in a US newspaper recently said that Jordan Peterson has become (arguably) Canada's "most famous academic ever." I'm pretty sure I've discussed Jordan Peterson in some capacity or other in other blog posts. I won't even look it up now. But the phrase seems to me a clear case of presentist bias. Surely Marshall McLuhan made a bigger splash on both sides of the border (and in the world in general) than Peterson has. Heck, McLuhan played himself in Annie Hall ! How much more high profile can an academic get! Northrop Frye, the famous literary critic and theorist, also comes to mind, though Frye is a more high-brow choice than either Peterson or McLuhan. And surely not the stuff of Hollywood movies.
I've written about the Voynich manuscript here only once, years ago. Here's a quick review: Wilfred Voynich was an early 20th century ms dealer, and the manuscript that bears his name was a mysterious book he bought from the Jesuits, a book that originated in the 15th century (something carbon dating has confirmed). In the century since Voynich made its existence known to the world, nobody has been able to make hide nor hair of it, except for the guess -- based on the illustrations -- that its a medical or pharmacological text. The usual guess has been that the author performed some sort of cryptographical trickery upon Hebrew, although even that still isn't a matter of consensus. And, even if it were, that wouldn't get the job done. What trickery? Now some new information. A team of Canadian scientists think their algorithm has worked it out. Or at least parts of it. They derive this as the first sentence of the text, translated and decoded, " She made...
At the movies recently I saw a preview for a soon-to-be released movie called GOLD, which will be a fictionalized version of the true story of Bre-X, a Canadian company that lost investors billions in the 1990s as a result of a spectacular rise in stock price and then a sudden fall, based first on a fraudulent claim to the discovery of vast gold reserves in Indonesia and then to the unravelling of those claims. In 1999 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrapped up a criminal investigation. The RCMP brought no charges. Somebody was presumably responsible, but proving who ... that seemed, and still seems, murky. The story is a fascinating one and although at the time it was rather overshadowed (for those of us in the US anyhow) by the dotcom madness on the one hand and the related rise-and-fall of Enron on the other, the Bre-X saga has its own archaic quality that makes it stand out in recollection. It was a tale that was in the 1990s but of an earlier time. It was a ta...
The Nobel Prize went to two physicists honored for the discovery that neutrinos have mass . Their discovery was a major contribution to what is now known as the "standard model" of the elementary particles. Until their turn-of-the-millennium work, the widely shared opinion was that neutrinos (like photons) don't have mass. This consensus had led -- don't ask me why-- to a further consensus on how many of them ought to be detectable on earth. And that, in turn led to some confusion because the quantities actually detected were much smaller than what they 'should' be. So these are experimenters who managed to clear up a split between other experimenters and theorists. The theory had to be revised so that the experimental results, the actual quantity detected, could be accommodated, and their work showed how that could be done. A victory for pragmatism in science, the hospitable homeland of pragmatism. I enjoy this time of year for a number of reasons, n...
If you wanted to write the recent history of global oil markets, and you wanted to take a Carlylean (or Jamesian) view thereof, who are the outstanding individuals on whose work you might focus? Working from a recent WSJ feature, here are six: Nikolay Buynov: Russian entrepreneur Mohammad al-Sabban: Saudi economist/consultant Gary C. Evans: US/Texas based CEO Yin Shenping: China, entrepreneur on the oil/IT interface Scott Saxberg: Canadian CEO involved in oil sands Adnan al-Janabi: Business & political figure in post-war Iraq. Because I'm feeling lazy, I'll leave you with the list, and a photo of Janabi, above. He's the one on the right.
Simple fact: the maximal extent of the Arctic ice pack is mid-March, and the minimum is in mid-September. Until recent years, the maximum has been about 15 million square miles, the minimum about half of that, that is, between 7 and 8 million SQ M. In September 2007 the usual time for the annual minimum, the ice pack shrank to only 4.3 million SQ. M., or about half of the usual minimum. This was a record for recorded history. In recent Septembers it has been somewhat larger, that is, 2007 retains that record. But these last few years have included the second third and fourth lowest extents. in other words, the lowest four coverages ever recorded have all been notched within the last six years. Don't want to believe that? It's from The New Yorker , and for all I know you might consider that a dubious source. Still, nations and commercial interests are both acting as if a critical change is underway, and it would be churlish to act as if they're all crazy. Also, s...