Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  And on its very first day hearing arguments, the notorious "first Monday in October," the justices heard a potentially momentous case out of a Boulder, Colorado state court. Plaintiffs in the state court dispute want to hold two big hydrocarbon-marketing concerns (Suncor and ExxonMobil) liable for their role in climate change and for obscuring that fact that climate change is underway from the general public.  Samuel Alito has recused himself from the case, apparently because he is heavily invested in the petroleum industry. It is worth observing here that the plaintiffs do have a right to move forward with this dispute, according to Colorado's own Supreme Court.  That court ruled that Boulder's state-law claims were not preempted by any federal statute. If the US Supreme Court does not reverse that, the Colorado court's decision stands.  In this case, that means "tie goes to the runner," a 4-4 split in Alito's absence, which seems quite possible, ...

In his 1907 book PRAGMATISM, William James makes one use of the expression "cosmic weather," an expression he likely picked up from his friend Chauncey Wright, a Metaphysical Club member.  James writes (in Lecture 3) that according to a certain materialistic view of things, all that happens in time is arbitrary and pointless, just the doing and undoing of cosmic weather. James uses it as a throw-off phrase, but tracing the idea back through Wright we can see that it had significance for Wright in the context of astronomy. Gravity draws bodies together, thermodynamics disperses heat from centers to margins. Coming together is balanced by coming apart. Great structures like galaxies come together, disperse, and come together again. There is no progress to it all, Wright thought.  Astronomy, and cosmology, have changed a good deal since Wright's day, or James'. The general view now is that there is a progression (in an amoral sense), not just a lot of aimless cycles.  Th...

A random memory.  My mother went through a phase of believing that what I needed were lessons in transcendental meditation. She had seen some newspaper article about TM, when it was all the rage, and she thought it would be good for what ailed me.   She had a lot of such phases. I generally resisted. There was reason for this, other than sultry passive-aggressive rebellion.  There was that, too.  But the chief reason I balked at TM was the sense that it would badly backfire on me.  I would start, become attached to it, and then in another swing of her own phases my mother would decide to stop it, and I'd be getting lectures about how much time I was wasting with this silly pose and mantra.  In time, she did forget about the wonderfulness of TM and she did pass on to something else, as I had expected. Mom died about ten years ago, and I offer this recollection of course with regret for the fact that we never really managed to communicate honestly with o...

W illiam James once offered the following summary of his critique of Hegelian philosophy: 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When that happens, one must go forever, nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive. 2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. Their partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and space. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. But between different qualities...

  President Trump loves announcing deals.  Especially deals that mean someone has invested in US based products.  This turns attention, after all, to the single most traditional (and academically respectable) argument for tariffs.  You can go to Broadway and pay good money to see an actor playing Alexander Hamilton expound the argument metrically. The argument is "we, the good people of country X, ought to be able to produce Y for ourselves.  We cannot, at present, because the cheap influx of Ys from other countries makes it unprofitable.  Tariffs mean either that the people of country X will start doing the job for themselves or that the companies creating Y overseas will buy/build factories here, the products of which shall be free of the baleful tariff."   So it is no wonder that Trump loves announcing deals with people or institutions of other countries in which they seem to be saying that they will do that in the US. It confirms the Hamiltoni...

A prominent philosopher has just received a MacArthur Award, a/k/a a "genius grat".  The MacArthur Awards -- half a million US dollars with no strings attached to an individual thought to show such originality and promise that he or she ought to have the freedom that sort of cash can provide -- has gone to Felipe de Brigard, a philosopher working on mind/body issues.   Specifically, Felipe de Brigard works at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, affiliated with Duke University in North Carolina. (Go, Blue Devils!)    Felipe De Brigard | Duke Institute for Brain Sciences   He is the author of an article on "Vitalism in the age of AI," which sounds intruging from its title but sounds rather deadening from its abstract.   Vitalism in the age of AI - PubMed Apparently, he is in dialog with such scholars as Anil Seth and Andy Clark on the issue of whether consciousness is "substrate independent." I have never before heard of any of the three of them,...

Godzilla, in yesterday's entry, brought our attention to east Asia and we will stay there today. Hackett Publishing has come out with a book with the title I've just given this blog post. Again (as with the Godzilla movie), I haven't partaken myself, and I'm working simply from a review.  It turns out that the Korean peninsula has produced a distinctive school of neo-Confucianism, and eight individuals within that line are featured in this anthology.  Jeong Dojeon and Gwon Geun kicked off this party in the late 14th and 15th centuries. Seo Gyeongdeok and Yi Eonjeok seem to have been more original figures than their precursors. They have the air not of people bringing something Chinese into a new place, but of people making something new out of it.   A third group in the 16th century broadened the issues that such philosophizing covered, focusing among other things on the role of emotions in causing behavior. There was a fourth and final group (final at least in the c...