Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'm thinking today about the HGTV program, "Love it or list it." In each episode, a designer (Hilary) and a real estate expert (David) offer competing solutions to the move-or-stay issue of a couple with gripes about their abode. The couple (and sometimes children) is presumably out, and staying at a hotel while Hilary and her team gut their house and re-work it to spec so the owners will 'love it' again and want to stay. If they don't want to stay after all ... well, at the worst Hilary's work will have improved its value, so they can list the property, get more money from it than they otherwise would have, and buy the nice new home that David has found for them. I find the economics of Hilary's work intriguing. David's search for a new dream home is a distraction at best. Near the end of each show, the hosts present four numbers. The fascinating one, the one NOT on the list, is what I think of as "value added," and one gets it ...

I recently came across the following abstract of a paper on the notorious Liar paradox: The Liar sentence is a singularly important piece of philosophical evidence. It is an instrument for investigating t he metaphysics of expressing truths and falsehoods. And an instrument too for investigating  the varieties of conflict that can give rise to paradox.   It shall serve as perhaps the  most important clue to the  shape of human judgment, as well as to the   nature of the  dependence of judgment upon language use. I don't know what the author of the paper is saying about the sentence "This is a lie," but I am struck by the phrase "piece of philosophical evidence." At law, an utterance is often evidence.  Or a text. But the say that a "sentence" is "evidence" is, fittingly, more abstract.  What does "evidence" mean in that sentence? And is it the same as the usage of "evidence" in the following sentence: "The ...

Parnassos Press has brought out this book, LOOKING AT BEAUTY, about the ideas of beauty that were prevalent especially in the western part of the ancient Greek world, southern Italy and Sicily. The book arose from the 2018 symposium on the heritage of Western Greece.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions arrived in the AG's office in February 2017 amidst a good deal of talk that he presented a danger to the state-legal marijuana industry. Sessions had built up quite a reputation in the US Senate as a "hawk" on the War on Drugs in general and pot in particular. His tenure in that office, of one year and three quarters, was consumed with other controversies, and with the odd spectacle of the man who appointed him continually ridiculing him. But he did make one significant MJ-related gesture. He rescinded the Cole Memorandum.  That is, he rescinded an Obama-era instruction that the D of J had issued to the district attorneys around the country to the effect that they should NOT bring charges against state legal marijuana use. One can infer that he was saying it was okay for prosecutors to bring such charges. But he was not pressing them to do so, and in general they did not. The habit associated with the Cole Memorandum survived...

The Socrates of the early and presumably more historical Platonic documents is sometimes portrayed as naive. The thinking is this: Socrates identified knowledge with virtue, and thus inferred that people only do wrong things because they are insufficiently well informed. With that naive view of human nature Plato also began, so the early dialogs are faithful to it. But as Plato grew older and wiser, he modified this view and allowed for untamed passions in the human soul that cause trouble not attributable to ignorance. [See the angry fellow portrayed above.] And the "Socrates" who continued to serve as Plato's mouthpiece represented this chastened view. But the story is not faithful to the texts. Socrates, even the Socrates portrayed in the dialogues often used to tell this story, was never that naive. A discussion:  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/appetite-anger-harmonized-knowledge-talking-rachana-kamtekar/ That's the review, in the Los Ange...

In sheer terms of volume, it would be possible to fit all of the planets of the solar system between the Earth and its moon.  One could even include Pluto if one wanted to be Old School enough to call it a planet. The total diameter of all the non-Earth planets (and Pluto) taken together is 382,308 kilometers. The average distance from Earth to moon is 384,400 kilometers. To me this is a vivid way of expressing the fact that the planets are teensy things moving in a vast emptiness.

List criticizes the "causal exclusion" argument, which is a recent formulation of the case for epiphenomenalism in mind-body relations. By usual definition,"epiphenomenalism" is the view that though there is an intangible mind distinct from the body (there are such things as "intentions" for example, which may not be reducible to any physical sort of fact), this mind, these intentions DO NO WORK. They do not function as causes, just as the steam coming out of a train does nothing to move the train. The causal exclusion argument works from two premises: 1) the premise of the causal closure of the world. Any physically realized event has a sufficient physical cause. 2) the premise of causal exclusion. If an event has a sufficient cause, then it has no other distinct cause at the same time. I'm standing outside on the street and a cab comes by. I raise my arm in a familiar gesture. Why did I raise my arm? The first premise tells me that there ...