Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In our four further discussions of the Edmonds book this week, we will break little if any truly new ground.  We will try to go more deeply into some questions that we raised last week.                                     First, I mentioned last week that Wittgenstein's discussion of the foundations of mathematics after an exposure to Brouwer's views was what brought him fully back into philosophy. I omitted a related point.  Wittgenstein did eventually write up his thoughts on that subject. REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS was published after his death, in 1956.  There he makes the remarkable observation that what is called "losing" in chess may constitute winning in another game.  That is his analogy. His example involves "Russell's system," the logicism/logical apparatus of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. A proposition could be proven the case in Russell's system yet sti...

Both Sean Spicer and Marine Le Pen have in recent days uttered claims that might well fit under the capacious tent of "Holocaust revisionism." Spicer has walked it back, and one can generously attribute his comments to gross maladroitness in the performance of ... well ... his job. Still: such events do give us the opportunity to observe that much of the crap that passes itself off these days as "Holocaust revisionism" traces itself back to Harry Elmer Barnes, a paid apologist and propagandist for Nazi Germany in real time. Barnes may have been atoning for his own war guilt. During the "Great War," 1914-18, Barnes was an enthusiast for the crusade against the Huns. When peace came, Barnes (like many at the time) wondered what it all had been about. He concluded not just that he had been overly enthusiastic, not just that he had been wrong in seeing the war as a matter of white hats versus black hats, but that in fact he had had the 'hats' t...

Two days ago (as you reckon time, oh real-time reader of these prepared-for-vacation notes) I said that I am thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. Somewhat related to that ambition: I see that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a very high-profile social scientist, formerly an associate professor of political science at Harvard, has a new book out called   The Devil That Never Dies. From what I've heard it is not so much as history as a work of personal meditation on the past, present, and future of anti-Semitism.  It is also the object of a very sharply worded critique in the September 13th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Anthony Julius. Julius says that he is himself of Goldhagen's "party," that is, anti-anti-Semitism, but ... to do the good work of that party one has to be a "smart, truth-telling" participant in the "terrible struggle" against the enemies of the Jews. And this, Goldhagen is not. I shouldn't comment ...