Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

With no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’ book De Cive , and his Leviathan , about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange that I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is. That was Robert Filmer, the divine-right-of-kings theorist, apologist for the whims of the Stuart family. I take the quote from Yves Charles Zarka's book about Hobbes, newly translated into English by James Griffith. Griffith also contributes an introduction, stressing that though Leo Strauss is "to some degree an ally of Zarka's in the argument against historicism, they are not involved in identical projects."   I have a full review of Zarka's book in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Lawyer.  I go into more particulars about the Filmer/Hobbes contrast there, as ...

A quote from the opening passage of her 1961 book, ON REVOLUTION. "Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite old although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political relations in the normal course do not fall under the sway of violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek antiquity, in so far as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon persuasion and not upon violence." Like many thinkers before and some since, Arendt tended to romanticize the Greek polis. I believe this passage exhibits that fact. Surely the slaves within the walls of Athens could have told stories about the use of violence against their persons to keep them in their status as beasts of burden. I doubt "persuasion" in a contrary sense had much to do with that. Still, I see her point. Before anybody would have thought ...

Koksvik is especially concerned with the argument that interactionist dualism can't work because for it to do so would violation the law of the conservation of energy (supplemented perhaps by the law of the conservation of angular momentum). The idea behind this argument is that IF my thoughts cause me to do something I wouldn't otherwise do, then they must do so by exerting energy. Energy after all  is that which does work, that which which moves matter around. Thus, if interactionism is true, energy is leaking into the phenomenal world from some trans-phenomenal source. Surely this would violate that law. If we're going to say, "so much the worse for the law then!" we can do so. Laws sometimes have to be modified and sometimes abandoned. Still, these leaks of energy into the phenomenal world should be in principle detectable, and anyone arguing for interaction should be able to make a case that they exist, that the law is violated, before arguing for ...

As I wrote here last week, TV finance pundits regularly tells us that price moves are the result of "momentum," or "bargain buying," or "profit taking." Together, these labels are so widely applicable as to drain themselves of any real significance. So let us put themn aside and try some other route forward. On Tuesday, after the market closed, the wire services carried the following, “Morgan Stanley downgrades XYZ.” On Wednesday, nobody could be found to buy XYZ at the previous day’s price. Is that an answer to the question “why”?   This is complicated. One line of argument would contend that the words “Morgan Stanley downgrades XYZ” didn’t tell the market anything the market didn’t already know. The headline allusion is actually to what some researcher paid by Morgan Stanley has said in a 30-page report. That report itself is most likely the compilation of publicly available data: John Smith (as we’ll call the analyst) with admirable industry ...