Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

There is a kerfuffle underway about a statue called "fearless girl" recently installed in the financial district of Manhattan. It isn't the biggest of controversies, but it does have some symbolic significance, and there is a pragmatic lesson here about how markets work. http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2017/04/wheres-the-bear-.html#comments   Since 1989, the financial district has featured the "Charging Bull," a statue by Arturo Di Modica. He originally located it directly in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but it was subsequently moved to a small park in the neighborhood. In March of this year, a four foot tall bronze statue of a grade school aged girl (pigtails and billowing dress) standing in the path of the bull in the usual stance of defiance (legs spread, hands on hips, face forward toward the danger) made its appearance. Fearless Girl is sufficiently close to Charging Bull that they appear to be a single work , which has Di Modica ...

Consciousness depends, it turns out, on how different parts of the brain speak to one another. Marcello Massimini at the University of Milan has done some important studies, stimulating the brain with brief pulses of energy for the purpose of studying its response in different conditions. This is known as transcranial magnetic stimulation. The TMS work indicates that in dreamless sleep and under general anaesthesia, the brain "echoes" the magnetic pulse in a simple way. But ... apply the pulse to the brain of someone fully conscious, and the echoes are much more complicated, disappearing from one part of the organ and re-appearing in a complex way that seems to suggest the parts are communicating with one another about this new thing. How can one measure the "complexity" of an echo? I don't know, because I'm not an IT guy. But I gather the means of measurement involves compressibility, something like the way digital photos are compressed into JPEG ...

One of the Big 30 of philosophy in the list I presented yesterday, perhaps the least well known of them to non-philosophers, is D.K. Lewis. More fully, that is David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001). He is hanging on at the end of the list, #30, but he is there, in the elite company, nonetheless. He got there, interestingly, because of a late surge in what one may call pro-metaphysics votes in the polling. The earlier votes had had more of a positivist slant to them. This late pro-metaphysics surge not only got Lewis onto the list it put Aristotle at the top and moved Hegel up (past Nietzsche) to #17. So let's talk a little about Lewis's defining idea. He is considered the outstanding exponent of extreme modal realism. Let's break that down: (1) modal logic is the branch of logic that addresses issues of possibility and necessity; (2) modal realism is the view that what are called "possible worlds" are real facts; Lewis' extreme modal realism is the view that...

So who were the greatest of the greats? A new poll is available, and its top thirty reads thus: 1. Aristotle 2. Plato 3. Kant 4. Hume 5. Descartes 6. Socrates 7. Locke 8. Wittgenstein 9. Aquinas 10. Leibniz 11. Hobbes 12. Marx 13. J.S. Mill 14. Spinoza 15. Augustine 16. Frege 17. Hegel 18. Nietzsche 19. B. Russell 20. Kierkegaard 21. Berkeley 22. Quine 23. Epicurus 24. Rousseau 25. Kripke 26 Rawls 27. Carnap 28. F. Bacon 29. Bentham 30. D.K. Lewis There were 87 names available to voters, and all 87 were ranked, although the supervisor of the poll, Brian Leiter, highlighted the top 30 I've provided here. A couple of quick points to start, though I'll say more about these results tomorrow. First, I am of course dismayed that William James didn't make the top 30. He came respectably close to making the cut (in the mid 30s out of the 87). But I certainly think he was deserving of higher placement than, say, Russell, Frege, Augustine, or Ba...

I mentioned Samuel Alexander last week in the course of discussing the semantics of emergence. At one time, I considered Alexander to be an important and impressive philosopher. I'm afraid I've outgrown his appeal, but he is certainly worth a blog entry of his own.  He is the author of Space, Time, and Deity (1920). If you are interested in the social history of academe, you might also want to know that he was the first Jewish fellow of an Oxbridge college.  The book named above is one of the early expressions of metaphysicians' efforts to incorporate Einsteinian physics into their own speculations. Space and Time are named separately in the title, but the book is suffused with the idea that they are one, and that this one thing, spacetime, is not merely (as many philosophers have thought and still think) a matter of relationships among objects or events, it is a directly intuited substance. What is more, spacetime is THE substance for Alexander. Over t...

In contemporary metaphysical discussions the word "emergence" and its variants play a big part. It often appears in the context of the mind-body problem. The mind (or intentionality, or consciousness, or whatever you may call the intangible subjective aspect of our reality) is said to have "emerged" at a certain moment in evolution, and to recapitulate this by "emerging" again at a certain moment in embryology. I think there is an element of word magic involved. We lessen the mystery of something by having a good word for it. IIRC, Samuel Alexander built an impressive metaphysical structure around this word magic. Matter, he said, emerged from space, then life from matter, then mind from life, like a growing ziggurat. I bring this up because I came across an intriguing discussion of the ambiguity of the word in my recent web surfing. Here is a link. It turns out that was written a year ago but, hey, that's an eyeblink for the chronology of ...

Whenever I order coffee from a restaurant, I order Splenda, or "the yellow one" if the proper name for it doesn't come to mind. There's no particular reason for this. I know there's also a blue one and a pink one, and the newest entrant is a green one. I don't remember why I started using the one that I do, doubt it was rational or evidence-based, and have no confidence that I could pick the Splenda-sweetened coffee from alternatives by taste alone. But it is useful I think to have a default option, and so long as there is no reason to adopt either of the others, I'll stick with my default. What percentage of our choices are default choices, made on no better basis than my invocation of Splenda at such moments? Hmmmm.