Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Somebody not long ago asked on Quora, "What is the meaning of Kant's statement, 'I have no need for that hypothesis' in his work Critique of Pure Reason?" Yes, the premise of the question is false.  But I had fun putting together a reply, and I'll re-use it here, with slight cosmetic changes.  Happy Thanksgiving.  -----------------------------------  That is not a Kantian statement. It is one generally attributed to Laplace. And it doesn't come from a book of Laplace’s, either. It comes from a later book by a biographer of Napoleon, discussing a confrontation Laplace, an early 19th century big-shot politician, supposedly had with the Emperor Napoleon. (Kant does come into this story in an indirect way — but put a pin in that for a bit). Pierre-Simon Laplace was an astronomer and mathematician as well as a politician. While Napoleon was busy in Russia, Laplace wrote a great work on CELESTIAL MECHANICS which was seen in some quarters as the most important th...

I have a yahoo! email box. I have other email addresses, too, but the yahoo box is the one I've had longest, its use is second nature to my personal friends, so it has long functioned as my default. I don't believe that is about to change. Verizon is buying the core of yahoo, and it will presumably continue to be happy to allow me to get my mail in the old way. But that isn't why Verizon is spending the $4.83 billion buying the venerable internet company's core operations. Verizon doesn't likely care about preserving the convenience of lil ole me. So what do they care about here? Well, Verizon already owns AOL, another venerable internet brand, going back to the '90s of blessed memory. Presumably it can wrap the two companies together now, eliminate 'redundancies,' and look for 'synergy. All that business school stuff. Beyond that, I suspect that there is some empire building at work. Somebody in executive ranks wants to be a somebody in ro...

Just a quick book note today. The Simms book, EUROPE, is a very ambitious effort to put between two covers a discussion of the modern history (mostly the old-fashioned sort of history -- politics, war, and diplomacy) of the named continent. The book gives to this convoluted subject matter, ranging from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to headlines in the early 21st century, fewer than 700 pages. Excluding the lengthy source notes gives you just 530 pages. Personally, I'm a sucker for Big Picture books like this. Anyway: one of the themes of Simms' book is contingency . There was nothing inevitable, Simms tells us, "about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler." Charles V was the King of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor, at the time when Spain was conquering much of the New World. Charles' big defeat was in his efforts in his Imperial capacity to suppress the Protestant Reformation. (He did keep it out of Spain, though!) Louis XIV...

In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books I discovered the following. George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald exchanged letters in December 1946 about the meaning of Orwell's fable, Animal Farm. Macdonald wrote that some people have been citing the book as an argument that revolutions always end badly, "hence to hell with it and hail the status quo." Macdonald himself didn't take the book as having any such broad a meaning, he took it as specifically applying to the history of Russia and the failure of its revolution. But he had been surprised by the prevalence of the other view and was asking Orwell for guidance. Orwell replied:   "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a      wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant...