Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.  I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once." It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time. One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania. He could h...

The story of a man who made a fortune on dynamite, then cleansed his name by creating a Peace Prize, is well known. Recently I've learned of an analogous story, of a man who made a fortune  running one of Europe's largest asbestos firms, then cleansed his name by turning himself into a philanthropic environmentalist. This later story is that of Stephan Schmidheiny, founder of the Business Council for Sustainable Government, one of the organizers of the Rio de Janeiro earth summit, and founder of Avina. a Latin-American oriented endowment for the study of ecological sustainability. But cleansed though he might have thought he was, Schmeidheiny found that his asbestos-,marketing past was hard to shake, and late in the spring of this year he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his part in the deaths of thousands . This came to my attention as a page one story in the Hartford Courant last week. It was a front page story only because the Courant cares about our sta...

I've written before here (as on September 27th) about Jesse Prinz' recent book on the emotions, a book in which he advocates and in the process somewhat revises the James-Lange theory. Today I'd like to quote a bit of what he has to say about romantic love, drawing on a classic work by C.S. Lewis (who is pictured above). "To contrast the constructivist approach with evolutionary psychology, it is instructive to ... reconsider romantic love. Some constructionists have endorsed C.S. Lewis' (1936) provocative thesis that romantic love was invented in medieval France....Apparently, during the twelfth century it became very fashionable for Frenchmen to become infatuated with married women of higher social station....It is hard to know which is more cynical [selfish-gene] reductionism or constructionism. On the former, love is an evolutionary insurance policy, and on the latter, it is a French fad that happened to stick." Prinz doesn't advocate either of...

In the wake of the whole let's-not-default escapade, I don't see Cruz as   the   nominee of the Republican Party in 2016. He might be   a   nominee, though, in a fractured-party context. In much the same way that the Democrats had three nominees in 1948. Cruz would be a Henry Wallace type figure.   The Bush family remains powerful in the Republican Party and I think they'll back somebody. This could mean Jeb, portrayed above, but if he doesn't want the job (and he   might   be rational enough not to want it) it'll mean some family associate. The Bushie to be named later (TBNL) will be the Henry Truman type figure in my '48 analogy.   There may also be an outlier, a regionally-limited figure who nonetheless wants a spot at the table, like Strom T. in the 1948 Democratic context. In the 21st century Republican context, though, the regional outlier will be a northeastern Republican who will be open to the charge tha...

It may be (unless a leader of unexpected stature and skill shows up soon) that the GOP will go the way of the Federalist Party in the near future. They'll do decently in the midterm elections of 2014, when only the hardcores show up to vote anyway. BUT they could splinter so badly in the run-up to 2016 as to give Hillary Clinton a cakewalk. And if that happens, the splintering will worsen until there is no opposition party to speak of, just as there was not when the Federalists fell apart. The feelings in the so-called "Era of Good Feelings" weren't especially good, though. One has to hope that Democratic Party dominance won't last and will have the consequence (as it eventually did in that context) of a splintering within their own ranks. The Whig Party came about because through the course of Monroe's 8 years large chunks of the Democratic Party decided they couldn't abide the consequences of their triumph, and they walked. So ... Hillary wins as...

A dialogue. MYSTIC: I know there is a God. I have attained cosmic consciousness and have touched His face. ATHEIST: There are lots of problems with that, but I'll start with this -- the rest of us have no way of knowing that you aren't lying. MYSTIC: I don't care, dude. EPISTEMOLOGIST: But I care. If only a small portion of the human race has mystical experiences, and if they are locked up, so to speak, inside the consciousness of each one, then do they inform the rest of us at all? ATHEIST: That's what I said. EPISTEMOLOGIST: I heard you. BUT ... since our friend has gone off into his reveries and only you and I can talk.... MYSTIC:  Om mani padme hummmmmmm EPISTEMOLOGIST: I'd like to point out that there is another side to this.  The point in favor of an argument from mysticism to the existence of a God is that it IS an argument from experience. It is possible that some of them are lying, but it seems unlikely that all of them are lying. And if a...

Are there loose threads in the fabric of the thought of Thomas Hobbes? If you pull hard at one of these threads, does the whole thing (and especially the goal of delegitimizing the Cromwellian revolution and revolutions in general) unravel? Hobbes was a much more fascinating guy than the cartoon versions of him suggest. and these loose threads make him more so. Hobbes was sufficiently logical that he had to admit there was such a thing as a right to rebel. Or something quite analogous, anyway. Logic compels Hobbes to write things like this: "If the sovereign command a man, though justly condemned, to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other thing without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the liberty to disobey." I take this to mean: if you are on death row, no contract or duty rationally deters you from resisting your executioner or seeking escape. Further, the resistanc...