Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

More than a year ago, someone asked the following question on Quora:  "Is there any way to reconcile Plato and Aristotle? I like them both. How strong is the schism between them?"  There is much with which I could quarrel in the framing of the question, aside from vagueness. The personal-sounding note, as if the question had gone to school with them both and retained some fondness for their memory. No ... he didn't. They are the collective names given to sets of writings and the systems of ideas we think we find therein. We can understand and appreciate them. The word "like" sounds wrong.  "How strong is the schism?" Again, the wording is off. But this is the Trump era, and the predicate "strong" is ubiquitous.  My quibbles notwithstanding, two Quorans offered answers to this question at the time. I was one of them. But I won't quote my own answer today. I'll give you a good chunk of the other one, which frankly is...

A famous German-language book on philosophy first published in 1929 has finally been translated into English.  The work is Helmuth Plessner's LEVELS OF ORGANIC LIFE AND THE HUMAN. For Plessner what is critical to grasp about life, the sine qua non of the living, is that every organism has a self-positioning boundary. There is the organism on the one hand, there is the environment on the other. Further, the organism itself is largely responsible for where that boundary is. Animals move about more than plants of course, but the difference is of degree rather than kind, and all organisms grow. The outer boundary itself may be defined as that which is neither living nor non-living (the outer layer of our skin consists of dead cells), this making it a liminal zone. There is movement both outward and inward. The liminal zone moves outward as an organism grows, there is movement inward in the process of digestion. In Plessner's words, "It is these two moments togethe...

I believe I may have mentioned at some point in the history of this blog, or its precursor, that at least one great physicist, Roger Penrose, believes quantum mechanics offers the key to the understanding of how consciousness arises within the function of the human brain. Today, I simply want to make the observation that quantum computing is no longer a hypothesis. It is a fact. Google declared its breakthrough this year. Some of the premier quantitative-analytic hedge funds in the world, including Renaissance and DE Shaw, have high hopes for quantum computing and expect that it will help them discover and make profitable use of now-invisible patterns in the markets. Let us be clear on what Google is saying. It says it has physical operating computers that make use of the quantum aspects of matter to outperform conventional (digital) computers for some specific tasks, a situation it grandly calls quantum supremacy. The qualifying phrase there, "some specific tasks,"...

The Socrates of the early and presumably more historical Platonic documents is sometimes portrayed as naive. The thinking is this: Socrates identified knowledge with virtue, and thus inferred that people only do wrong things because they are insufficiently well informed. With that naive view of human nature Plato also began, so the early dialogs are faithful to it. But as Plato grew older and wiser, he modified this view and allowed for untamed passions in the human soul that cause trouble not attributable to ignorance. [See the angry fellow portrayed above.] And the "Socrates" who continued to serve as Plato's mouthpiece represented this chastened view. But the story is not faithful to the texts. Socrates, even the Socrates portrayed in the dialogues often used to tell this story, was never that naive. A discussion:  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/appetite-anger-harmonized-knowledge-talking-rachana-kamtekar/ That's the review, in the Los Ange...

The following observation  arose in the course of a critique of philosopher Derek Parfit.   "Even if the lower-level facts [that make up identity] do not in themselves matter, the higher-level fact may matter. If it does, the lower-level facts will have derived significance. They will matter, not in themselves, but because they constitute the higher level fact." The quote is from Mark Johnstone, as part of a critique he wrote of Parfit's work on personal identity for a collection called DEREK PARFIT AND HIS CRITICS.  Parfit didn't believe in personal identity. That is, he didn't believe there is any important sense aside from social convention why an "I" of 15 years old is the same person as an "I" of 45, thirty years later, however firmly the latter has memories that might be traced ultimately to the sensory organs of the former. Parfit can perhaps best be understood as bringing into the Anglo-American analytical philosophical tradi...