Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

As POTUS has recently tweeted, he's a book-of-the-month club onto himself. That, unlike so much that comes from his thumbs, is a truth. But the guy who is the subject of this club keeps trying to use the power of his office to stop the presses, or stop up the mouths of anyone who challenges the narratives he wants to feed us. One great piece of good news is that he has been regularly failing at that. One of the good things about Mary Trump's new book, released to the world after a court fight, is precisely that it is outselling the last one. John Bolton is an unreconstructed imperialist. I used to call him a neocon, but I repent of that. The neocons want the US engaged in nation building, which involves some blank checks for violence, but at least in principle they generally think that the nations CAN be built to a point where they could stand on their own and handle their own affairs, so the US can and presumably would under their sayso withdraw. Bolton pretty c...

Four recent or forthcoming books that may deserve the attention of some of the readers of this blog, below. 1. AFRICA, EMPIRE, AND FLEET STREET, by Jonathan Derrick. Published by Oxford University Press, this is the story of Albert Cartwright, an anti-colonialist, and the newspaper he ran for decades, the London based WEST AFRICA MAGAZINE. 2. WHITE SHOE, by John Oller, published by Dutton. This one is forthcoming -- March 2019. It tells the story of the Wall Street lawyers of the end of the 19th century and the early 20th who created what are still considered the establishment (or "white shoe") law firms in that vicinity to this day. 3. CONSCIOUSNESS AND PHYSICALISM, by Andreas Elpidorou and Guy Dove. Published by Routledge. "Physicalism" in the philosophy of mind is roughly what used to be known as "materialism." These authors think it should be regarded not as a dogma but as a research program, and that it is a sensible program. A reviewer in the...

Wojciech Jaruzelski, a man whose passing I cannot regret, RIP. Jaruzelski passed away on May 25th of this year, after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. His place in the history books is ignoble but secure. He was a General by trade, and he became the only military official ever to head a ruling European Communist Party when he became First Secretary in Poland, in October 1981. Two months later he became the General who declared martial law in Poland, acting at the cat's paw of the old Soviet Union. such actions are a sign of a regime's weakness not strength -- the Solidarnosc movement was becoming too much for him. Nowadays, the world still witnesses Russia's efforts to extend its control over its neighbors, largely through complacent local paws. But since the demise of the USSR and the discrediting of the once-marketable ideology of "actually existing communism" has left Moscow's imperial stretch weakened. The flash points now are to the...