Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I've been reading a book of the above title, published in 1963, written by Edward H. Madden . The title is a bit odd and is perhaps intended ironically. Madden's chief point seems to be that Chauncey Wright did not in fact set the "foundations of pragmatism," that he was more of a sounding board than an inspiration for those pragmatists with whom his name is generaly linked, Peirce and James, that his own views were positivistic and utilitarian. Further, Madden seems to be of the view that on most of the points where those who are properly called pragmatists diverged from Wright, he was right and they were wrong. Sample passage. After quoting from an essay by Wright that was itself a reply to a book by St. George Mivart, Mivart was an early critic, as Wright was an early defender, of Darwinism. In case you were wondering why I'm using an early-hominid skull to illustrate this blog entry, now you know. As part of the Mivart review, Wright discussed the...

In a long footnote in The Principles of Psychology , William James discussed the analytic/synthetic dichotomy. He consigned it to a footnote because he was sick of the subject, thinking it a "waste of ink and paper." W.V.O. Quine would come to much the same conclusion, 60 years later, after much more paper and ink had been employed. James provides us in the course of this footnote with a geometrical example of why the effort to maintain a consistently dichotomous relationship between these two sorts of statements is such a waste. "No one will say that such analytic judgments as 'equidistant lines can nowhere meet' are pure tautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is something 'ampliative' in our greatest truism, our state of mind is richer after than before we have uttered them." Now, if he had written "parallel lines can never meet" he would he stated neither a synth...

 The transition from a private into a public company, the IPO, has become extraordinarily tricky for all but the few and the lucky. Facebook and BATS have recently given us examples of what can go wrong even FOR the few and the lucky! But consider medium-sized business, of a size where going public used to be not such a big deal. It is a huge and tricky matter today. SEC enforced decimalization and NMS had a lot to do with this, changing the dynamics of the world of trading into which an IPO plunges such a firm. Look at the decade before those changes, the 1990s. The average annual number of IPOs was 520. Had the rate remained the same as the size of the economy grew, one would have expected that in 2011 the United States would have had 950 such offerings. In fact, it had roughly only about 1/6th of that. The average number of IPOs annually since 2000 has been only 129. The dysfunction may, as Arnuk, Saluzzi , and a lot of other market-savvy people think,...

I've just googled the expression "you didn't build that" and received more than 40 million hits. Most of them surely (and all of them that I see on the first page of the list) involve the President's recent speech, and his statement two weeks ago about how successful people should recognize that they didn't get there, they didn't build their business, on their own. It is pretty clear from the context, where the phrase "on your own" appears repeatedly, what is meant. There are efforts to create a furor over this, but the statement in itself is unexceptional. Of course you didn't get there alone. If you are a successful entrepreneur, you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are not a hermit living in a self-constructed hut in the rain forest. There aren't any customers or investors in the rain forest. Why would you try to create a business there? You built your business in the middle of a social world, and a lot of ...

This is from John Milton's first reply to Salmasius, something he wrote pursuant to his duties as official propagandist for the revolutionary government of Oliver Cromwell. Quin et ipsa ab ineunte adolescentia iis eram studiis incensus, quae me ad optima quaeque si minus facienda, at certe laudanda incitatum ferebant. In English: "And indeed from my youth onward I have been filled with a zeal which kept urging me, if not to do great deeds myself, at least to celebrate them." No big point here, I just like that quote. Milton was writing in Latin because that was part of his job -- as a propagandist, he sought to be read all over Europe, and large chunks of his audience could have read Latin far more readily than English. Let this post be a neat bookend to that of a week ago, which as it happened also involved Oliver Cromwell. George Fox and John Milton may be said to reflect two very different sides of Cromwell's own personality. And the collective personali...

The Olympic Games begin in London on July 27. For the particulars, you can go here. As regular readers of the precursor of this blog, Pragmatism Refreshed , will tell you, I have developed an interest in the career of Chinese track star Liu Xiang. Liu won the gold for his signature event, the 110 meter hurdles, in the 2004 Olympics in Athens. He set the world record for that event at a meet in Lausanne in 2006. Sadly, he was unable to compete in the Beijing Olympics, on his "home turf" if you will, because of a chronic inflammation in his right Achilles tendon. There have been conspiracy theories about this, but I suspect the humdrum medical account is the accurate one. At any rate, he has long since returned to competitions, and in fact he set a new world record, completing his event in just  12.87 seconds, in a competition in the US (Eugene Oregon) earlier this year. So: how will he do in London? We'll all find out together. When? Round 1 of the men'...

Greene still writes books, and he does so successfully, post-scandal. He wrote of the illness and death of a friend of his in And You Know You Should be Glad (2006). Publishers Weekly called this book a "dusty attic of lost Americana," because Greene uses it to re-visit the small town midWest USA milieu where he and Jack -- the fellow who is dying -- had first met (and they did so on their first day in kindergarten!) and become friends. Amazon.com's customer reviews are enthusiastic. A fellow named Peter Frost gives it five stars, saying "Yes, this book is sad in places, but it leaves you with a profound feeling of ... how important it is to have friends, and what they mean to us." It is easy to make fun of the sort of schmaltz that gets that sort of review, but pulling it off, at book length, an act that requires some variety and dramatic heft, is trickier than sophisticates imagine. Greene does have a gift. Here he is in the book's opening pass...