Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In English we  often use the idiom, "it is raining." We don't think much about the use of a pronoun without antecedent here. Nobody ever asks, " what is raining?" I raised this question recently on a message board and got three answers, dashed off together in an irritated fashion, as if to shoo me away: the sky, or the world, or nature is raining. Those are three very different answers, and the first of them refers to a mere visual phenomenon, the illusion of a blue dome above an observer's head that we call the "sky". Try out the phrase "the sky is raining." Does that trip off the tongue? There are profundities in the neighborhood of this simple seeming idiom. "It is raining, but what is 'it'?" could serve as a zen koan. After writing the above, I discovered that I explored the idiom in question in a post on this blog in June 2012. Ah well, repeating oneself at three-year intervals doesn't sound too ba...

"Morph"? Really? Back in 2005 I wrote a review of a then three-volume set of books on "Speculative Capital" by one Nasser Saber. Read more about that here, if you like. A very short account is that the review was not a favorable one, but did have as a consequence a memorable exchange in which Saber indicated he would provide a full demolition of my inanity in his fourth volume. Thus far there has been no fourth volume. I'm a patient guy. In the meantime, I see that Nasser is no longer actively maintaining his blog, apparently because he is engaged in the final stretch of writing for this fourth volume. So perhaps 2012 will be the year it finally appears. His wife, Sarina Saber, has told his fans on the blog "Dialectics of Finance" that she will keep the flames burning on her own companion blog, " Dialectics of Social Change." On that companion blog, she has recently posted a bit of dialog that appears to represent a conversatio...

William James wrote somewhere (I'm feeling too lazy to look it up) that there is a class of cases where the word "it" has no clear antecedent, yet where this apparent ambiguity is perfectly acceptable as a matter of idiomatic English. "It is raining," after all, is a simple statement of fact. Nobody, hearing it, scratches his head and askes, " what is raining?" The phrase in question conveys the same meaning as "Rain is falling at this moment," yet conveys it in half as many syllables. The lesson: we can't deduce a metaphysical fact from a grammatical subject. So what of the pronoun "I" in the sentence "I think"? This is one crucial problem with Descartes' famous reasoning. The thoughts with which he tormented himself in the course of his methodical doubt, the thought that there might be a powerful evil demon, etc., and the thought "I think" itself, might all be rain, as it were, coming ...