Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

As a matter of the psychology of emotions, or for that matter of moral philosophy: is agent regret the same thing as guilt? Jake Wojtowicz, a philosophy PhD student at King's College in London, thinks not. That is the subject of his ongoing dissertation work, and the subject of a lot of the tweets in his twitter account too. It has taken me some time to come to grips with the terminology. "Agent regret" doesn't mean, "regret that one has hired the wrong agent," which is presumably what Britney Spears feels toward -- just about any agent she's ever had. Agent regret means regrets about one' actions in one's capacity as a moral agent. "Oh, damn, I cheated that poor soul. Terrible thing I did," Is that the same as guilt? The case that it isn't the same as guilt is apparently that agent regret is acquired by looking at one's self as if from the outside, whereas true guilt is more of an internal matter. This seems to be mix...

The Higgs boson was the end of the line. Or, at least, the end of one important line. Here's an argument from somebody who knows particle physics a heck of a lot better than I do.  https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/particle-physics-may-have-reached-end.html And although I do love science for its own sake, there is a political point here. In a number of countries, including the US, the UK, the Eurozone, and Switzerland, there is a Big Science lobby. Big Science sees the Manhattan Project and the cold war era Space Race as examples to be imitated. After all, if we (nation X) doesn't build the next big doohickey, then they (rival country Y) will build the doohickey with disastrous results. That is the pitch for public consumption, Within the industries that stand to gain (from academic institutions to the relevant industrial contractors) there is a simpler pitch: this is our gravy train. So it is worthwhile noting the article that goes with the above URL. No riv...

In the philosophy of law, "positivism" generally stands for the view that the law is the will of the state, as expressed in legislation understood as a natural, historical fact. It is antithetical to any theory that posits "natural law," a Way Things Ought to Be to which those legislators must respond at the cost otherwise of losing their own legitimacy. Also in the philosophy of law, "realism" stands for the view that there are no formal and direct inferences from rules of law to applications -- from what the legislators do to what the judges do -- or from precedents sent down from the appellate court up high to the decisions of the ground-level trial courts. Realism is a critique of formalism. Positivism and realism as so defined are neither at odds nor allied. They don't address the same questions, they do not share the same foes (natural law theory is not identical to formalism). Historically, though, representatives of positivism and realism...

The death of President Kennedy is the first 'public' fact of which I have some memory. I had just turned five at the time (a little more than a month before). I have some earlier personal memories, including a happy one of playing around on a dumpster outside our family home -- then an apartment building in East Hartford. The big green dumpster was a blast. My big brother and I crawled around on it like it was a jungle gym. But by 1963 we have moved into a nice ranch style house in Enfield, with an actual backyard, and our own trash cans. No shared dumpster. Dad was working second shift at the time. He could now afford to commute to and from work from a suburb a fair distance to the north of East Hartford (he had moved us to the apartment at a time when it was necessary for him to walk to and from work there.) To be precise, he could afford to become a member of a five-man car pool that did so. He thus used his own car only once a week, leaving it with Mom the other day...

In Bali, more than a thousand years ago, in decentralized way, people seem to have arrived at a sophisticated system of irrigation management, run by committees known as subaks. As with many worldly matters, this was done under the guise of religion. The subaks placed water temples along the slope of mountains, at points critical to water's movement down the sides. The rice farmers planted in tiers along the mountainside, in places where the subaks were sending the water. Western scientists, arriving on the scene in the mid 20th century, advancing what they saw as a green revolution brought a new system. This was part of the "green revolution," which some called neo-imperialism. It was also a fiasco. Pest control was also critical in the transition. Under the traditional system, the fields weren’t harvested all at once or all seeded with the same crop. So although fields sometimes became pest infested, after the harvest those pests would starve. Th...

A random quotation from a recent book by Bruce I. Jacobs, pictured here, comparing the portfolio insurers of the late 1980s to the LTCM crisis of eleven years later. "But LTCM, like portfolio insurers, fell prey to the illusion of liquidity. Portfolio insurers believed investors would underwrite their insurance policies by buying stocks when portfolio insurers needed to sell stocks. The crash of 1987 disabused them of this notion. LTCM believed that lenders or investors would be available to lend it cash or act as counterparties to its increasingly risky positions. In the end, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had to coerce LTCM.s counterparties into supplying that liquidity." 

I wrote the following three years ago this week, and I repost it for the same seasonal reason I posted it when I did, one that will become clear to the reader in due course.   The great mid-20th century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our own day, who want to turn Creation into 'intelligent design' and repackage it as 'science' for secondary schools.    "Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about th...