Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is the first in a projected three-part series about the law of the excluded middle, a (disputed) logical principle according to which, for any well-defined  proposition, either the proposition is true or it is false.  Today I will explain the law in question and offer a classical argument for its validity. On another day (not tomorrow, I assure you): I will explain why I do not believe that argument is a strong one and why we might want to allow for violations of this LEM. When I get around to Part III, I will discuss how the dispute feeds into political philosophy and certain questions about the legitimate regulation of markets. So ... let us proceed.  When it seems that a proposition IS both true and false, or is neither, and in either case is in violation of this law, various remedies are available: the proposition in question might just be nonsense (as for example the claim that the Jabberwocky has a frumious Bandersnatch), it might embed a false premise (as for ...

One of the facts that lies in the background of constitutional history, and usually stays there, without being highlighted, is this: most of the founders of the United States shared a disdain for the institution of a "standing army" --that is, of a permanent professional military force maintained through peacetime and composed of full-time soldiers.  Their idealization of the "militia," and the reference thereto in the second amendment, arguably the second amendment itself, constitute the flipside of their anti-standing-army persuasion.  If you ask about the background and history of this conviction, you are generally referred to the build-up to the revolution, as the mother country built up its military presence (the "regulars") in the troublesome colonies. But a newly published paper makes the point that the vocabulary in which our founders expressed their conviction on point has a specific history within that Mother Country.  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol...

  Suppose I say to you, dear reader: "I have a hot tip.  Onion futures! If you invest a modest sum of money with me, I will invest it in futures. "You'll really like dem onions.  I have a solid inside source at the exchange."  If I ever say this to you, then 'I' have gone over to the dark side.  RUN.  There is no such thing as an onion future on ANY exchange in the US or in Europe or, so far as I know, anywhere on the globe.  The US has the distinction of having an act of Congress on the books saying that onions are not to be subject to futures trades. The Onion Futures Act was created at the insistence, back on the 1950s,  of one Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan.  His district was the epicenter of US onion growing, and he decided early on in his career that futures speculation in the crop was inherently crooked.    Ford had standard mid-20th-century laissez-faire opinions on a lot of subjects, but futures trading in onions: N...

 As everyone likely now knows, the US President has a plan to make the Gaza strip into a sort of French Riviera, a high-value vacation destination.  There will surely be lots of Trump properties there in this imagined future. There won't be a lot of Palestinians, though. The displaced people of Gaza will get some other nice place to live, but won't get to go back to Gaza.   They've been displaced before.  They must be used to it by now.  Amirite?  Donald Trump says the United States will "own" Gaza. I put quote marks around that word because he is not thereby saying Gaza will come under US sovereignty.  He is saying the US will own it -- ownership and sovereignty are two distinct facts. It is possible he has in mind Israeli sovereignty, and US ownership within Israeli law. If the hotels make money, Israel will have to be cut in with "a piece of the action," as grifters like to say.  Anyway: this imagined future is as likely to be the actual ...

 Haven't read it yet but ... it does appear Kane was determined to get in a final word about the free-will controversy: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-complex-tapestry-of-free-will-a-free-will-odyssey/  For years I've cited his 1990s work as a fine expression of the view with which I associate myself. Kane works from generally secular premises, and reaches a free-willist position that is indeterminist and incompatibilist, the old in-in combo, thereby establishing that certain Jamesian contentions remain in the running.  Daniel Dennett (a determinist and compatibilist) replied to Kane and Kane was said to be working on a reply to THAT. Now Dennett and Kane have both shuffled off this mortal coil and this posthumous publication may be the last word in THAT exchange -- if it does contain  the response to Dennett I had heard about -- although surely the broader philosophical argument will continue.  I'm going to have to get this book. 

  Near the southern border of the western Massachusetts town of Longmeadow, near where it borders Connecticut, one finds a very fine and not-at-all expensive Greek restaurant named Grapevine.  Now, suppose you are in downtown Chicopee, somewhere in the neighborhood of John's Pizzeria [nowhere near as classy a place, to be honest] and you want to get to the Grapevine. What is the easiest way to do that?  You'll be starting off near 391. Get onto that highway and continue (westbound) for about 2 miles until you can get onto I-91 (southbound).   You'll then take 91 for about 7 minutes, if the traffic allows, and then get off exit 1, the last exit before you find yourself in (gasp) Connecticut. This exit will dump you onto route 5, and you stay on there, still southbound, until you find Maple Street.  This entails going past a lot of places familiar to anyone who loves Hollywood movies that involve small towns -- a small library with that Carnegie-ish look, a t...

"As a fact, the mystical tendency in religion is not the last, the mature, result, not yet the last refuge of piety. Mysticism is the always young, it is the childlike, it is the essentially immature aspect of the deeper religious life. Its ardor, its pathos, its illusions, and its genuine illuminations have all the characters of youth about them, characters beautiful but capricious." -- Josiah Royce, THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIANITY (1913), from chapter viii, "The modern mind and the Christian ideas".  The brief passage, something of an aside in context, reminds me of another work from my postulated golden age, PETER AND WENDY (1911) by J.M. Barrie.  In both instances, our author was reacting against the earlier romantic idealization of childhood. At one point, Barrie wanted to call his novel The boy who couldn't grow up. Not "wouldn't".  Couldn't.  Pan's magical condition is not a choice of his and is at least as much a curse as a blessing.  ...