Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I mentioned Whitehead's apparent sympathy with Heraclitus in my last post about him. My reading had not yet at that point discovered Process and Reality. Part II, Chapter Ten , which takes the form of an extended meditation on the sentiment "all things flow." In Heraclitus' Greek, panta rhei.   The sympathy is here made explicit. Indeed, a full understanding of that sentiment is said to be one of the main goals of philosophizing at all.  Some of the thinkers of the early modern world tried to ban flow, or fluency, from their picture of the world.  But Whitehead adds, "Newton, that Napoleon of of the world of thought, brusquely ordered fluency back into the world, regimented into his 'absolute, mathematical time, flowing equably without regard to anything external.' He also gave it a mathematical uniform in the shape of his Theory of Fluxions." What a marvelous packing of two concise sentences!   Almost as magnificent as Heraclitus' two words. ...

 At Quora, someone recently asked me who was the greater influence upon Plato: Socrates or Parmenides? It is a fascinating question, to which I could only answer with some further related questions, a dash of context, and a joke.  I enjoyed it all so much, though, that I will reproduce it here.  To begin with, there is no good metric of “influence.” You can’t measure influence like inches or Celsius degrees and say X is exercising more of this unidimensional stuff than Y is. Who influenced John Dewey more: Charles Darwin [pictured] or William James? Except that in the Dewey case we have much more information. We know what Darwin’s views on a wide range of subjects were, and what James’ were, and we can work to understand how Dewey’s thought was formed by each. We don’t depend on Dewey to tell us what James said or thought! In the Plato analog, though, we do largely depend on Plato to tell us what Socrates said or thought. There are other sources who help at the edges — Ar...

  Karl Popper, renowned as the inventor of falsificationism in the philosophy of science, also popularized the term "the open society," of which George Soros nowadays makes a lot of use.  Early in his book THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, Popper has admiring things to say about the pre-Socratic philosophers. He identifies their views with the open society of which Periclean Athens is a paradigm. He has a particular fondness for Heraclitus.  Popper was especially fond of the idea that life is a river into which we cannot step twice. Popper takes this, along with certain other Heraclitean bon mots, as meaning that (in Popper's words now) "all matter, like fire, is a process."  This, Popper think, put philosophy off to a promising start. It is this start that was unfortunately shut down by Spartan victory and Plato's codification of that victory in his dialogues.  I don't believe this. I believe much that Popper has to say, but he is using Heraclitus as a ...

Yesterday in this space I quoted a fragment conventionally attributed to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and, in essence, free associated from that. That doesn't advance the cause of scholarship one tiny bit but, heck, it's a hobby blog. Somewhat more interesting than my personal train of association chugging along its tracks might be the question: how did fragments like that get from Heraclitus to us? Fortunately, the tradition whereby philosophers write the history of the issues with which they deal goes back a long way. Setting Plato aside (because of the dramatic/literary demands of the dialog form), Aristotle started the practice of setting one's own table historically. A less well known later fellow named Sextus Empiricus seems to have played a big role. SE lived in the second or third century of the Christian era. He was a skeptic, that is, he believed that no firm beliefs are rational, and that by accepting our ignorance we can achieve tranquility. ...

"This cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings, but always was, is and will be an eternal fire, arising and subsiding in measure." The presumption that the cosmos was not made by immortal or mortal beings draws out attention to the verb. The cosmos was not "made" at all, so there is no answer to the question who made it. The cosmos was not made precisely in the sense that it has always been. So far so good, we might attribute to Heraclitus something akin to the steady-state theory of the cosmos and knock off our exegetical work for the day. But then what are we to do with the final clause? The cosmos continues to exist by "arising and subsiding in measure." To continue with the categories of contemporary cosmologists, this seems like a "Big Crunch" theory. The universe is a closed one, in that it will not expand forever (that would be an expansion without "measure"!). It will at some point start to fall in upon itself,...