Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is from Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Freud throws off in a footnote a rather wild speculation about the origins of the human use of fire. I'll just paraphrase most of it, but I'll directly quote a bit at the end. In primordial days, lightning would strike the branches of trees and  set them ablaze in this primordial forest, and primitive people would see the branches, still burning, fall to the ground. Then usually, one or more men would step toward the branch and put out the fire with their urine stream. Freud presumes that this was very pleasant for the men who did this: a form of sexual excitation, even. Why? Well … it was apparently an Oedipal thing. The father gods in the sky had sent the fire, the men of the tribe were conquering the father gods by pissing on the fire. Aaaaaah, feels good, eh? The real Prometheus? The real hero who tamed fire for the human species? That was a man who deprived himself of this pleasure by … N...

Another term of the U.S. Supreme Court has come and gone. This year, though as in most years the court issued a lot of decisions that are, in their own several ways, fascinating, is not a year in which THE ONE -- the big case, is immediately obvious. If any one of them is THE stand-out case, the matter will be determined by the jurisprudential historians of posterity. I will leave out of my discussion here and in the next two days the decision regarding Argentina's bond default and the hold-out's recourse, because I have had something to say of that one already. This leaves the following five decisions of great importance. Simply listing by alphabetical order they are: *Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank -- patentability *Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund -- class action *Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby -- Obamacare implementation * Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus -- free speech *Town of Greece v. Galloway -- establishment clause. I'll say something about Alice Corp. in...

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued another important decision on the limits of intellectual property law this week. Specifically, it now holds that pieces of the human genome are not patentable when they are identical to the naturally occurring segment. "[A] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated." The method of isolation would presumably be patentable -- but that wasn't the question before the court. SCOTUS has been returning to its efforts to set limits on the reach of patent law on a fairly regular basis of late. For example, there was the Bilski decision against the patenting of abstract ideas. That was three years ago.  Or a patent decision concerning Stanford University and Roche. Here is my blogged discussion of that  from two years ago. Or the Prometheus decision, from last year . This week adds to that list the case of Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Ge...