Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

My personal view of the field, in ten questions. I'll work in traditional order, from Being through Knowledge, to Value. 1. Does the world consist of substances with attributes (that is, enduring things with various properties), or is that a misleading way of thinking? 2. If one accepts the substance/attributes dichotomy, what COUNTS as a substance? How many of them are there in the world? Are there an infinite number of substances, or could it all be boiled down to a smaller number? Three, as Descartes thought (mind, matter, God), or maybe just one? 3. In terms of the nature of a human being, are we each one substance with various attributes? Or are we two different substances that somehow interact? Or is a person an attribute of a trans-personal Substance? 4. If we end up with a view of the world in which humans consist of both mind and body: how DO they interact? 5. What do we mean by "truth" as a matter of common language. also, what SHOULD we take the ...

Last week, in a post about Santayana, I said by way of admitting my own prejudices, "I find reasonable an act of 'will to believe' in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth." A friend wrote me immediately that he was surprised by this rather modest confession of faith. He said he thought the phrase "whose existence I can not prove" was rather misleading, since it suggests that I may have some evidence of God's existence, though it is evidence inadequate to clear the bar of proof. He thought "for whose existence I have no evidence at all" would be a more frank statement of the epistemological situation. My reply: I do believe that I have evidence that God exists that falls short of proof, so I don't agree that I was cheating with the phrase "whose existence I cannot prove." The evidence is human subjectivity itself, the stream of consciousness. It rem...

  Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, pictured here, whose writings for the mainstream press have made him easily the most visible Keynesian of our day, issued a challenge to Austrian economists recently. For those of you who may be new to such discussions, I'll explain the jargon. The Austrian school is the tradition of Hayek and Von Mises, [and for the record, Hayek too received a Nobel Prize], a school built on a subjective understanding of economc value, that is, the view that something has value because one or more individuals want it -- regardless of, say, how much labor or how impressive a technology was necessary to create it. Also integral to the "Austrian" school are distinctive views about economic calculation, the demand for hard or honest money, the bases of interest rates, and certain meta-theoretical ideas as to how economics ought to be studied. What especially sticks in Krugman's craw, though, is the Austrian view of the business cycl...