Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A passage from PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS (1981). "In what other way, if not simulation by a Turing machine, can we understand the process of making free choices? By making them, perhaps. We might interpret those theorists who pointed to our choices not as trying to prove that we made free choices but as ostensively explaining the notion, showing its intelligibility. Were they saying that we understand free choice and agency by virtue of making free choices as agents? To accept a (restricted) form of knowledge by acquaintance, encompassing knowledge of a mode of action and of ourselves, runs afoul of views that we know something only when (and to the extent that) we know the laws it obeys. However, even if such views are rejected the nature of this other mode of knowledge, by self-acquaintance, is unclear." I don't always agree with Nozick. Indeed, I have been saying so since the late 1980s at latest. But he often seems to me to write in the way that a philosophe...

"The University of Kinshasa sits on a hilltop near the edge of the city, reachable by an hour's taxi ride through the broken streets, the smoggy sprawl, the snarled traffic of vans and busses and pushcarts, past the street-side vendors of funerary wreaths, the cell-phone-recharge kiosks, the fruit markets, the meat markets, the open-air hardware stores, the tire-repair stores and cement brokers, the piles of sand and gravel and garbage, the awesome decrepitude of a postcolonial metropolis shaped by eight decades of Belgian opportunism, three decades of dictatorial misrule and egregious theft, and then a decade of war, but filled with 10 million striving people, some of whom are dangerous thugs (as in all cities) and most of whom are amiable, hopeful, and friendly." Say that in one breath! Spillover is a recently published volume by David Quammen , a piece of popularized science quite analogous to Microbe Hunters , the classic history-of-medicine book . Quammen ...

Greg Woolf's new book, Rome: An Empire's Story, says this about Numidia, which presented a threat to the growth of Rome in the 2d century BC, and about its King: Jugurtha. "The lack of political consensus in Rome meant that it was always possible for him [Jugurtha] to find some supporters among the Senate, and as he murdered  and intrigued his way into a more and more powerful position at home, he protected himself from the complaints to the Senate by bribing prominent figures. Sallust puts into Jugurtha's mouth the famous description of Rome as 'A city for sale and ready for destruction just as soon as it finds a buyer.' "By 118 Jugurtha had murdered one heir to the throne and was at war with another, in 112 he ignored a senatorially mediated partition of the kingdom and two Roman embassies, killed his brother (massacring a group of Italian merchants in the final siege of Cirta), and survived both a Roman invasion and a summons to Rome. Eventually ...