Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

John Searle is no longer affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. He has been stripped of his emeritus title. This is quite a comedown since Searle's name regularly shows up on lists of the most prominent and influential philosophers writing today. Let's review a little intellectual history. As of the late 1970s, the dominant view of consciousness, intelligence, and the mind-body relationship among professional philosophers in the Anglosphere was functionalism.  There was a lot of disagreement about the details, but mostly consensus on the big picture. The idea was that the brain was a machine that functioned more or less like a digital computer. Or, at any rate, its functions could be indefinitely approximated by a digital computer. Thus, there was nothing fundamental (just irrelevant biological history) setting the brain aside from what algorithms embodied with wires and on/off gates can or will eventually be able to do. Alan Turing had speculated ab...

Apparently members of the Modern Language Association have  initiated a petition to remove Judith Butler as that organization's Vice President and President elect. In order to understand this petition, one has to have some answer to each of the following questions: 1) Who is Judith Butler and how important is she? 2) What is the MLA and how important is it? 3) What are the grounds/merits of this complaint? I will address the first two of those questions today and the final one tomorrow. Judith Butler is a philosophy professor at UCal Berkeley. She is the author of Gender Troubles (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993). Her writing style is notoriously difficult.  Here is one sentence often quoted as an example of the impenetrability of it: " The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and reart...