In the last two posts, with the help of the imaginative and erudite folks at Existential Comics, we've discussed how Hume and the Buddha agreed that there is no self in the traditional sense, no enduring person behind the experience day to day, no soul subject to judgement as good or evil. We also discussed the extent to which their inferences from that premise diverged (utterly). Today I'll ask a Jamesian question about what underlies those last two posts. What is it to say of any X that it exists? What is it to deny existence of any X? What is it to say that the millionth digit of the number pi exists? Does that imply that we know what it is? No. For all I know (I haven't looked into the matter) no one has yet bothered to calculate what the millionth digit of pi is. If they HAVE, then we could use some further digit for the example. Does our affirmation of its existence mean anything Platonic -- that it exists beyond the cave of our earthly affairs, in a super...
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1. In anthropology, James thought of a human as a stream of consciousness, and of the conscious being as unified by his internal cohesion, the way one pulse of awareness follows from and flows out of another, not by any facts as to its physical or metaphysical setting. 2. In metaphysics, James defined himself by negation, resisting both the "upper" and the "lower" dogmatisms, both idealism and materialism insofar as either threatens to impose on us a deterministic block universe. 3. In epistemology, Jamesian thought had both a negative and a positive pole. He told us to beware of verbal formulas we cannot translate into practical terms, and to believe what is in the line of our needs. 4. In ethics, James held that the only fact true about all goods is that they are objects of desire -- that objects of desire do and must conflict with one another -- and that moral life accordingly has a tragic aspect, which it is our duty to lessen over time. 5. In politics...