Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I write today to correct an injustice of my own making. In a recent post here poking some fun at former VP Mike Pence and his recent book deal, I said that Pence had  " fled Capitol Hill with secret service protection while a crowd chanted for his death." Actually, it now appears that he did not "flee Capitol Hill." In fact, although he allowed his security detail to move him to a secure room within the Capitol complex, he did insist on staying there, while the detail apparently tried to talk him into getting into his limo and letting them take him to the VP residence. If the story is accurate , then we have to say that Pence made just the right call. By staying in the building, Pence allowed for the resumption of the normal constitutional process once the mob wave had receded.  So, whatever we think of him -- I hope regular readers here will appreciate that I'm not a fan -- reasonable people must concede that at one juncture in his life, one that may prove i...

Who is Stephen Homner? There is a bit of a controversy, has been for decades, over the true authorship of "Brandy," the syrupy woman-waits-for-her-sailor ballad from Looking Glass in the early '1970s. There is a commonly expressed view that Looking Glass'  Elliott Lurie didn't write the song -- he bought it from Stephen Homner. The specific figure sometimes used is $10,000.  Lurie denies this.  Is there even a real Homner? So far as I know he has no existence outside of this claim.  The more heated accusation is made, too, that Lurie "stole" the song. Obviously both claims can't be true. If Homner (whoever he is exactly) willingly sold it and cashed the check then it wasn't stolen from him.  A seller of those rights for $10,000 would plausibly have had buyer's remorse when the song seemed to be coming out of every radio in the world but ... that's the way it goes.  And yes, he should have been given song credit IF this Homner person is re...

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.   -- Amartya Sen. Starvation is a problem, then, not of  inevitable scarcities, or earthly infertility, but of defective social and political arrangements.  Sen was born in Bengal (northeastern India and the country now known as Bengla-desh was all once "Bengal") in November 1933.  Of course this means that he was born a subject of King Edward VIII, about a month before that King would abdicate in order to be free to marry Wallis Simpson. It also means that Sen was old enough to have a general sense of what was going on when the Japanese troops were at his country's door, knocking, in 1942-44.  So if we understand anything about the horrific Bengali famine of 1943, we know that he knows of what he speaks when he writes of starvation.   The Bengali famine came about because Bengal had been importing most...

I have not read "Cat Person," and indeed haven't kept up with contemporary fiction at all since Updike died (2009). I have an old-fashioned sensibility about fiction that makes me very likely unhelpful on this.  But ... there are aesthetic issues of some moment addressed here.    “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian draws specific details from my life. (slate.com)

 Xpeng, an electric car manufacturer born in China but with an increasingly large footprint in the United States, has recently held two IPOs, one on NYSE last August, one on the Hong Kong Exchange just days ago.  When a company holds a second IPO, it is typically for a "secondary listing." Their first pop still establishes their primary listing. But Xpeng arranged these as twin primary listings.   "Aren't there are costs involved in doing things this way? Why did XPeng incur those costs?" Most of the talk is that the company is concerned about getting hurt  by the chilly relationship between the two superpowers. It wants to hedge against the possibility of Chinese-based firms being kicked off of American exchanges. But there is another side to the mutual hostility. China may well move toward “decoupling” its own technology industry from that of the United States, and the Hong Kong listing for Xpeng may have hedged some regulatory risks only by incurring others....

  I wrote about "radical enactivism" back in January.  To review: this is a philosophical theory about consciousness associated with Daniel Hutto of Antwerp.  It is a non-reductive identity theory of mind and body. In this, it sounds a bit like Spinoza, and the "dual aspect" school.  But Hutto maintains that we can understand the brain-mind relationship if and only if we look at it as part of the organism-environment interaction. That's as far as I got.  What else is Hutto, and the rest of the school, saying?  Three of the other members of the school are: F rancisco J Varela; Evan Thompson; Eleanor Rosch. They co-authored  THE EMBODIED MIND published in 1992. Varela et al invented the word "enactivism" to, in their words, "emphasize the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind but s rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being...

The Supreme Court had a lot to say about the various clauses of the first amendment. Sometimes the most important statements a court can make are in its decisions on what cases it will not take up. And that was the case this term, with the high court's refusal to take up the case of Berisha v. Lawson.   That is important to the continuing role of the Supreme Court as a protector of freedom of the press, and the uniquely hard time that public figures have in mounting a plausible defamation lawsuit in the United States. The new configuration of Justices has been re-working the religion clauses from scratch in recent years, and that process has continued this term. And there is the much-publicized matter of the cursin' cheerleader to consider.  We will contemplate those points in that order today. (The above image is of Mary Beth Tinker, the plaintiff in free-speech-for-minors litigation of more than 50 years ago -- photos taken than and now.  her case came to the fore again...