Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The cover story of the November 2015 issue of HARPER'S bears the title "Bombast Bursting in Air." It is editor emeritus Lewis Lapham's take on the Presidential election cycle thus far. I'll quote only one brief bit, in which he is discussing Trump, in the period immediately after the first candidates' debate (in early August) on the Republican side. The protectors of the Republican Party's virtue hoped that one of the other nine candidates would topple Trump from his catbird seat, if not the slow and steady Jeb Bush (self-style "joyful tortoise," mature and loving friend of the common man) then maybe Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, or Chris Christie, all of them rated by their touts as quick-witted, sharp-tongues, good at pretending that they care about something other than themselves, able to find Aleppo on a map. During the summer of 2015, the collective attempt at Trump removal failed because the mogul didn't take the proffered bait, decline...

In a long footnote in The Principles of Psychology , William James discussed the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. He consigned it to a footnote because he was sick of the subject, thinking it a "waste of ink and paper." W.V.O. Quine would come to much the same conclusion, 60 years later, after much more paper and ink had been employed. James provides us in the course of this footnote with a geometrical example of why the effort to maintain a consistently dichotomous relationship between these two sorts of statements is such a waste. "No one will say that such analytic judgments as 'equidistant lines can nowhere meet' are pure tautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is something 'ampliative' in our greatest truism, our state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them." Now, if he had written "parallel lines can never meet" he would he stated neither a synth...