Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

On this holiday we should spare a moment to remember Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the novelist and dramatist who gave to vampire lore its classically Victorian formulation.  I say "dramatist" because Stoker -- an Irishman -- was an actor at, and the manager of, a London theatre beginning in 1878. To an ambitious Irishman in the arts in the 19th century, politics notwithstanding, going to London was "making the big time." Indeed, it is still thus, as you can see from the attitude of the Dublin musicians in the recent bittersweet romantic movie "Once."  It is, I submit, worth spending the time and pixels to make that observation because Stoker gave to vampire lore the element one might expect from a man who crashed the London dramatic scene in his early thirties. Dracula is the same way. A man trying to make it in the big time.  One theme of the famous novel, I submit, is that although the Count could be a frightening bigshot to the peasants of Transylvania, alt...

  I have written here before about Henry James' novel, THE SACRED FOUNT.  Today I'll discuss one detail in it.   James offers up a protracted discussion between two characters, each speaking in oddly cryptic fashion, in which they seem to end up stumbling accidentally into a Platonic metaphor -- indeed THE Platonic metaphor, of wisdom as an escape from the darkness of a cave.  The unnamed first-person narrator is talking here to Ford Obert.  They had first run into each other at the train station at the start of this weekend gathering. Obert is sometimes called "Obert RA," signifying in British usage that he is a member of the Royal Academy.  Near the end of the book, Obert has caught up again with narrator to say that he has been thinking about the question they had discussed earlier (to wit, the way the life force can seemingly flow from one member of a couple to another, enervating one and energizing the other). He has found it illuminating.  I...

  Julia Roberts in a psychological thriller: what could be better? I approve of Julia Roberts in just about anything else.  But in AFTER THE HUNT she is wasted, as is the viewer's time.  BBC called it "more of an admirable project than an engaging drama. "  And that is being kind.  Roberts plays a professor of philosophy, at Yale, on the edge of receiving tenure. The stakes are rather low for something marketed as a "thriller": will a #MeToo scandal keep her outside of the magic threshold of academic tenure?  I'll spoil it for you (no harm done, I assure you!), the answer is "yes," at least for a period of five years.  The implication of the final scene -- a flash-forward -- seems to be that her character, Alma, has recovered her upward path five years after the events displayed in the main narrative line.  Back to the mainline. The harassment scandal involves Alma's Platonic but flirtatious man friend, Hank, who is also a candidate for tenure...

 I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism.  My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism.  But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument.  In brief that means: 1) Continuity.  All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...

  When I was a kid, grownups would sometimes advise me that to make my counting approximate the passage of seconds, it would help to say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi...."  Other times, though, they would say that the right phrasing was "one one-thousand, two one-thousand ...." Can both be valid?  Mississippi has four distinct beats.  "One-thousands" only has three.  Wouldn't the latter system yield shorter seconds than the former?  A little experimentation since has found that I do tend to pronounce the four syllables of "Mississippi" roughly as rapidly that the three of "one thousand". Those esses, eh?  One tends to slide right through them.  One the other hand, after the word "one" I reach a full stop then press forward with the "the" sounds.  I think we may say roughly that the space in between the two words acts as a beat, so both expressions are four beats.  One childhood quandary at last resolved at 67...

As I write these words, Robert Roberson still sits on death row.  But he is still alive, and another scheduled date for his execution is in the rear view mirror.   This is what has so far prevented the execution of Roberson. In 2013, Texas enacted a specific legal avenue allowing prisoners to challenge allegedly wrongful convictions by arguing that changes in the field of forensic science have undermined the conviction or, in the alternative have exonerated the prisoner completely.  This is popularly known as the "Junk Science Law" -- formally Article 11.073 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. The "shaken baby syndrome" [or "abusive head trauma"] is the key here. A medical/physical fact like a bruise, a fever, a broken bone  is often consistent with several hypotheses about cause.  No trauma by itself tells us it was the consequence of abuse. That is an inference that, in a criminal trial, the finder of fact, paradigmatically the jury is supposed to d...

  When I was young and foolish, I believed in the story I heard in a sappy song on the radio about the climactic "night Chicago died," the time when Al Capone decided to go down fighting rather than going to prison so he "called his men to war 'gainst the forces of the law". There was no such night.  But it does make a  good story. For those of you young-uns who may never have heard it: you've missed out.  Here's a link.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR0gjl66PVs&list=RDtR0gjl66PVs&start_radio=1 Whatever happened to Paper Lace?