Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In 2020, JD Vance appeared on a podcast hosted by Eric Weinstein. Here Vance uttered the "yes" heard round the political world. The two were discussing grandparents. (And yes, we can all agree that the relationship between grandparents and their offspring's offspring can be a wonderful one.) But Weinstein wasn't going to let the matter rest there. He said that raising grandchildren is "the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female." Vance's response to THAT? A single word. "Yes." Indeed (for context), the whole Weinstein sentence, is "That [child rearing assistance] is the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female in theory." One thing I find fascinating about that wording is that Vance actually interrupted the sentence, to say "yes," BEFORE the host got out the phrase "in theory". Thus he suggests that for him anyway what he is agreeing with is not just a theory but a settled fact. Hmmmm. So for those p...

Mary Midgley passed away this month. I'm told she was a renowned ethicist, active in discussions of animal rights, I don't know any of her work in that field. I am familiar with her chiefly as a nemesis of Richard Dawkins. She forcefully criticized his use of the word "selfish" as an adjective that could coherently modify "gene." This is, as it happens, the headline of the Telegraph's obituary of her: "Mary Midgley, moral philosopher who took on Richard Dawkins."   Genes, she wrote, "cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological." [I agree on the atoms, though I'm not sure about the elephants. Was she saying elephants cannot think abstractly? or just that any given elephant we might meet is an individual creature, not the abstraction ELEPHANT?] That first review was part of a long feud, and Midgley eventually apologized (to readers, not to Dawkins) for wha...