Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Oxford University Press has a book out entitled Plato's Moral Psychology , written by Rachana Kamtekar, who is affiliated with Cornell University. The book came out in 2017 but seems still to be kicking up excitement in the relevant quarters of academe. It dd succeed in making a new splash out of its very old subject matter. She identifies a common understanding, among students of Plato, that there was a shift in Plato's views on moral psychology between the earlier dialogues and th e Republic . The early dialogs take an intellectualist view of motivation, so that bad actions are the consequence of error or ignorance, and virtue is teachable. But by the time he wrote the Republic (says the standard view) Plato had abandoned that intellectualism. Kamtekar believes this account mistaken. She holds instead, that for Socrates, at least as Plato retrospectively understood his views, that the good is the natural object of desire. This is not as simple as claim is that virtue ...

I've recently read Galen Strawson's 2011 book, THE EVIDENT CONNEXION: HUME ON PERSONAL IDENTITY. It is a follow-up of sorts to his book on Hume's theory of causation, which I discussed in a series of posts last January. Hume believed himself to have been defeated in his efforts to explain personal identity. He says so pretty clearly in an APPENDIX he added in 1740 to his TREATISE ON HUMAN NATURE, though one of Strawson's point is that many other scholars don't seem to have realized how complete the confession of failure here is. Here is Hume. I had entertain’d some hopes, that however deficient our theory of the intellectual world might be, it wou’d be free from those contradictions, and absurdities, which seem to attend every explication, that human reason can give of the material world. But upon a more strict review of the section concerning  personal identity , I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correc...

I'm thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust. I'm not going to do that here, though. Instead, I'll just note for my own future convenience some names with which to conjure, and the year of at least one of their pertinent works. Hannah Arendt (1963) Stanley Milgram (1963) Nathan Eck (1967) Lucy Dawidowicz (1975, 1981) Christopher Browning (1992) Daniel Goldhagen (1996).

What is a cumulative recorder? Apparently, it is an important term in behavioral psychology in the tradition of B.F. Skinner. The idea is that a cumulative recorder is a device that creates a graph over time on the paper turning on a rotating drum, as abve. The graph would in turn display the responses of the rat or pigeon or whatever to the experimental stimulus. The functions of a cumulative recorder in the old mechanical sense have been supplanted in our age of digital computers, but one still finds references to these machines in the periodicals of this branch of psychology. This little vocabulary lesson has been brought to you by trhe letters "C" and "R."

"The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon one another." So writes William James early in the fourth chapter of Principles of Psychology. Is he, as may at first appear, playing a semantic game here? I think not. We say that the electrons of an atom have a "habit" of acting in various law-like ways in a sense somewhat stronger than metaphor. After all, on such a basis we can also say that our neurons have a habit of acting in certain ways. It is a fair guess that certain thought patterns correspond to pathways of electrocal charges through a possible line of our neurons, and that once these pathways have been oft followed, their continued use in the future becomes more likely. Such a conjecture would provide a physical basis for habits of thought. We might sa...