Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

.  It is appropriate that we ended our last post with Jarkesy .  For without much effort, that can be seen as part of a push by the majority of this court to put the whole regulatory apparatus on a defensive jurisprudential footing. There is some combination here of social darwinism and a fear of the hidden rulers behind the superficial state consisting of well-known politicians.  MAGA as a political movement is an effort to weaponize the superficial against the deep.   Beyond Jarkesy there is the CFPB case, and there is Loper Bright , the case that has finally overturned Chevron.   I would like to focus especially now on :  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association of America,  aka the CFPB case, published in mid May. CFPB was a loss for the cause of dismantling administrative agencies. A win for the deep state, if you will.  It is not always clear what the word "consumer" means in the financial worl...

  In anthropology, Hobbes was a thorough-going materialist. He didn’t believe in a ‘ghost within the machine,’ only in the machine. In metaphysics, again, he was a thorough-going materialist. This meant that he disbelieved in any notion of God that would involve a Being transcending in any way the material world. It is possible that he believed in a God in SOME sense, but he statements on the subject are confusing and subject to a lot of interpretive controversy. They may be confusing because he wanted them to be so: his Stuart patrons would hardly have smiled on open atheism. In epistemology, Hobbes was a nominalist and empiricist. “There is nothing universal but names,” he said, and that notion was in his mind a sword with which to slay nonsense. In ethics, Hobbes was of two views. In a state of nature, there is only generalization from psychological egoism. I want power. I have to expect that you, too, want power. What is right for me then is to dominate and perhaps to kill you....