March 2012
1 post
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A Clausewitzean Conception of Philosophy
I have been listening to Daniel N. Robinson’s Teaching Company lectures Consciousness and its Implications, and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve been planning on brushing up on philosophy of mind for a manuscript I’ve been working on, but this has had unintended consequences of giving me a lot of new ideas, and my manuscript has been neglected while I work on these new ideas.
Here...
February 2012
32 posts
Anonymous asked: Perhaps, there is a better way pof organizing society, but for all its flaws, the religious (though not necessarily institutionalized religion) impulse has done a great deal of good in organizing society. Without the external measuring stick of a deity, how can humans really assert we are equal? Science and changes to human biology (trans-humanism) could make this an ever more salient issue. If...
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President of Ecuador to Pardon Four in Libel Case →
In the ongoing saga of the fallout from the courtroom victory of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and newspaper El Universo, President Correa has now officially announced that he will pardon all those sentenced to jail terms and forgive the 42 million dollar judgment against the paper.
The above-linked article from the New York Times has none of the drama of the McClatchy piece that I linked to...
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What diplomats could learn from Nebraska
A friend of mine just sent me this:
At a high school in Nebraska, a group of boy students played a prank. They let three goats loose inside the school. But before turning them loose, they painted numbers on the sides of the goats: 1, 2 and 4. School Administrators spent most of the day looking for No. 3. Now that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.
Not only is this funny, it...
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ISI and Pak Army knew of Osama hideout: Stratfor →
It has been widely reported that Wikileaks has begun to release e-mails stolen from Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor) — e.g., Wikileaks publishes confidential emails from Stratfor.
I’ve written about The Stratfor Hack, and I have a personal interest in this because, as a former Stratfor subscriber, my information was stolen as well, and I have been receiving bogus e-mails as a result,...
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Secularization
Another in a series about confirmation and disconfirmation in history
Not too long ago in Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History I discussed whether we can say certain socioeconomic ideas like communism or capitalism have been “proved right” or “proved wrong” by history. There are partisans on both sides of these contentious issues who main mutually irreconcilable...
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Intuitively Clear Slippery Concepts
Or, into the conceptual wild…
The above phrase, “intuitively clear slippery concepts” just appeared today on the FOM (foundations of mathematics) listserv, as used by Hendrik Boom.
Here’s some context:
“…well-founded is one of these intuitively clear slippery concepts that goes awry when things become too general.”
This appeared in the tread,...
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The Scope of Modernity
The Scope of Modernity
What is modern? That depends on whom you ask.
Modern Man
If an anthropologist refers to “modern man,” he or she will likely mean the emergence of anatomically modern human beings about 120,000 years ago, or perhaps as recently as the advent of cognitive modernity, but still tens of thousands of years ago.
Modern Logic
Almost every new development in logic...
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Sex, Lies, and International Banking
The villain of the hour is the wealthy banker, and a wealthy banker in the present age of globalization is synonymous with an international banker. For “international bankers” to be the target of choice for public outrage ought to be a little unsettling for anyone with a minimal knowledge of history, and who is aware of the last time that this particular class was scapegoated.
No...
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Judge in Ecuador libel case flees country →
Since I recently wrote about Ecuador’s courts upholding the libel verdict against El Universo newspaper I was interested to see this detailed article by Jim Wyss of McClatchy Newspapers.
Since last writing about this, journalist Emilio Palacio has sought political asylum in South Florida, the director of the paper has been granted asylum in Panama, and Monica Encalada, an Ecuadoran judge...
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If I Lectured on the Philosophy of History...
On my other blog I have several times mentioned Darren Staloff’s Teaching Company lectures on the philosophy of history, The Search for a Meaningful Past: Philosophy, Theories and Interpretations. I enjoyed these lectures a lot. In fact, I enjoyed them so much that when I discovered that the Teaching Company had discontinued them, I bought a used backup copy so that I would be able to...
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Distant 'waterworld' is confirmed →
The creative use of science and technology is continuing both to extend our understanding of the universe in unexpected directions, as well as serving the purpose of continuing the relentless accumulation of evidence for the Copernican Principle.
The ongoing discovery and classification of exoplanets is also creating a expanded discipline of planetary science that could not have existed in the...
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Navy to embark on submarine program →
This reasonably detailed article (make sure you read both pages) discusses Taiwan’s attempts to acquire or build submarines. Earlier today I spotted another Taiwanese submarine article in the daily e-mail that I get from Global Security, which was a short and not very detailed piece by Elaine Hou, Taiwan Navy does not confirm report on sources of submarines. The above-linked article to the...
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Sartre and Fukuyama
With particular reference to human nature
And the social consequences of this conception
There is a school of philosophical thought that explicitly denies that there is any such thing as “human nature” (and so we must put the very idea in scare quotes). I do not know if anyone has given a name to the diverse representatives of this school of thought, but there ought to be a name...
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Yemen voters elect new leader to end Saleh rule →
During the Cold War we Westerners would hear about elections in Soviet Bloc countries with only one name on the ballot. I always accounted this as one of the great insults of authoritarianism to human dignity: appropriating the forms of democratic governance while flaunting the absence of true popular sovereignty. It seems like an exercise in faux-democracy as flagrantly oppressive in its own way...
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Banishing Despair
From Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to Cornell West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy, there is ample documentation of the utilitarian character of American life and the extent to which the spirit of philosophy is alien to American life. In so far as scientific culture has been overwhelmingly American in its character, because of the dominance of...
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The Origins of Physicalism
It is ironic that among the most strident critics of Cartesian dualism are the physicalists and the identity theorists, since Cartesianism was the original mechanistic philosophy, and it could be said that the whole physicalist program has its roots in Descartes.
Indeed, the whole of physicalism could be said to be implicit in Cartesianism and to have developed into its present form as a...
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Confidence, Calling, and Cockiness
I will admit without hesitation that I enjoy the company of people who are extremely self-confident, and even those who are proud to the point of arrogance. Perhaps I am like that too, but that is unimportant.
I find that many people who have nothing of their own to offer put on an act of cockiness that is merely faux-confidence, and “faux” because it corresponds to nothing of...
Anonymous asked: May I recommend lunch with a scientist working in nano technology. The 'mind body problem' you speak of was “solved” in a lab I worked in years ago. Sadly it's classifd due to ES P Rsrch Such musings with regard to mind, now seem like Claudius Ptolemy lecturing about his epicycles
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Of Distinctions, Principled and Otherwise
Again, with special reference to the mind-body problem
One of the obvious weaknesses in the distinction that I made between that which is strongly distinct and that which is weakly distinct in Of Distinctions, Weak and Strong, was the fact that I provided no way to distinguish between weak distinctions and strong distinctions. Without some principle to identify the distinction between weak and...
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Ecuador court upholds $40m Rafael Correa libel... →
I was disappointed to read that Ecuador’s highest court has upheld a libel judgment against the newspaper El Universo. The enormous size of the judgment — 40 million dollars — and sending the journalist and three of the newspapers owners to prison for three years, is extreme and unduly harsh. It is impossible to imagine that this will not have a chilling effect on the press in...
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Of Distinctions, Weak and Strong
With special reference to the mind-body problem
A day or so ago in Naturalism and the Mind I posited a mind-body continuum in place of the traditional mind-body distinction familiar since Cartesian dualism. It has occurred to me that, wherever a traditional idealized distinction between two extremes is reformulated as a continuum, the traditional distinction can be reformulated in terms of...
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Clausewitzean Micropolitics
A few days ago in Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History I quoted a passage from Clausewitz’s On War regarding the final decision of combat, which Clausewitz regarded as never truly finished:
Lastly, even the final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after...
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Naturalism and the Mind
On my other blog I have posted a series of attempts to define naturalism, including:
● A Formulation of Naturalism ● Two Thoughts on Naturalism ● Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation, and ● Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology
I began with the idea that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism,” and went...
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Don't Cry for the Papers...
Probably, if you are reading this, you have little or no sentimental attachment to newspapers, and you are not about to cry over the imminent demise of print media. I must admit that I am personally attached to the Financial Times, to which I subscribe. I look forward to reading my newspaper every day, and I would miss it if I didn’t have it. But I’m old-fashioned, and I know it.
...
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Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History
I’ve written several posts in which I discuss the idea that particular ideas can be confirmed or disconfirmed by history, and most especially I mean those socioeconomic ideas that are implemented in political ideologies. I haven’t yet produced any definitive formulation of this question, but I find it very interesting and continue to think about it and occasionally to write...
fuckingold asked: If you're interested in cities william whyte (for social etiquette) and robert putnam (for 'social capital') have similar views to Jacobs. Like Glaeser, Richard Florida also talks about the 'creative class;' glaeser ripped him off basically. Florida represents a location to people shift in urban design. Michel de Certeau's walking in the city is a kind of response to...
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Cities: the Constructive Kluge
I’ve just started to listen to the book on CD version of Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City, which I wrote about shortly after starting this second blog, since I had just read a review of this book. I am happy to say that the book is much better than the review, which just goes to show that one ought never to give too much credence to reviews.
I particularly enjoyed this...
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Analysis and Advocacy
I subscribe to the short analysis series “Critical Questions” from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), described as follows: “Prepared by CSIS experts, ‘Critical Questions’ are a quick and easy read designed to go to the heart of the matter on today’s ‘of the moment’ issues.”
I just received one of these on the...
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"Explaining" Mojo
Somewhere I read that Bertrand Russell never went to a film until he read Bergson, who invoked a “cinematographic” conception of movement, and Russell wanted to see what exactly Bergson had in mind. I don’t know whether or not this story is true, but it presents Russell as a coldly rational philosopher who only stooped to engage with popular culture when it figured in the...
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Geopolitical Irony
Over the past several days I have posted three times on my other blog concerning biopolitics and bio-power, explicitly contrasting this Foucaultian idea with the more familiar idea of geopolitics (cf. Geopolitics and Biopolitics, Addendum on Geopolitics and Biopolitics, and A Further Note on Geopolitics and Biopolitics).
In these posts I suggested that the emergence and rise of geopolitical...
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Never say die: a lesson in political immortality
One of the most important lessons that we can learn from politics and from history is that old conflicts never die, they simply continue in a changed form. This can be considered a practical application of the Clausewitzean principle that war is the continuation of politics by other means. For Clausewitz, human purposes and intentions are continuous, sometimes pursued by conventional political...
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An Interview in Starbucks
While I was doing some errands this evening I stopped at a Starbucks in northeast Portland for hot chocolate. I wanted to take some notes before I forgot my ideas, so I sat down with pen and notebook, and as soon as I did I regretted my choice of seat. At the next table were two young women who are talking loudly and animatedly. What is one to do? Listen to their conversation, of course.
The...
January 2012
21 posts
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Taliban, US Begin Talks in Qatar →
It was headline news (at least on the BBC) when Hamid Karzai said he would negotiate with the Taliban, but this report on the Voice of America was the only report I saw of US representatives meeting with the Taliban. It is interesting that they chose Qatar as a venue, since I just wrote about Qatar’s growing diplomatic profile.
The VOA story cites Maulavi Qalamuddin as a source. A...
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Truncating Twitter
When the Spanish were creating their empire in the New World, while the initial actions of the conquistadors was that of outright military conquest, the consolidation of political control was so legalistic as to be disturbing — at least to the modern mind. A formal debate was held at Valladolid among the most advanced theologians of the age as to whether the natives of the Americas had...
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Abstract Thinking about China
There is a famous passage from Keynes that I have quoted on many occasions, but it is always worth quoting again:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, ...
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A thought on cognitive modernity
A few days ago on Twitter I posted this:
While cumulative effects of civilization have changed the allocation of cognitive resources, cognitive modernity precedes this allocation.
Here is the longer version that would not fit within the 140 character limit of that forum:
While the cumulative effects of civilization have changed the allocation of human cognitive resources, cognitive...
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Qatar's towering ambition on show in Doha →
This excellent BBC piece by Kevin Connolly of BBC News, Qatar, chronicles the ambitions (so far, largely successful) of Qatar to raise its diplomatic status to a role commensurate with its status of possessing the highest per capita GDP in the world.
The article includes this fascinating quote from Mostefa Souag, managing director of al-Jazeera’s Arabic news service:
“The media is...
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Fire-Breathing Tigers
During my night at Ica, Peru, where I stayed at the wonderful El Carmelo hotel, I had an unusually long and satisfying sleep notwithstanding the fact that I experienced a series of memorable and colorful dreams. While I woke up with a sense of the many things I had experienced in my dream state, I retain at present only one specific memory, and that is of dreaming of fire-breathing tigers. Yes,...
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Schoolgirl sailor triumphs after battle with... →
Teenaged sailor Laura Dekker has completed her solo circumnavigation of the world, becoming the youngest person yet to do so. This BBC article about the voyage focuses on her battles with the Dutch authorities to be allowed to take the trip. I remember an argument I had with the child psychiatrist when Laura Dekker was setting out: I thought it was a great thing for her to do, and the psychiatrist...
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UK 'subsidising nuclear power unlawfully' →
I was very pleased to see this story on the hidden subsidies for nuclear power in the UK, as I have written about this insurance limitation subsidy for the nuclear industry on several occasions (for example in Circumventing Consent: Nuclear Risk and Self-Deception). Though my posts focused on the US nuclear industry, a little research shows that nuclear power is subsidized by nation-states...
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A Third Temperament
Some weeks ago in Alienation, Class Interests, and Individual Interests I suggested that a division can be made in human temperaments:
I have observed a fundamental difference of opinion between those who believe that individual temperament is definitive in how one relates to the world and those who believe that social, cultural, and ethnic identities are more important and more powerful in...
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Marx and Fukuyama
Over at my other blog I’ve just written another long post about Marx, Marxist Eschatology, arguing that the argument over whether Marx has been “proved right” or “proved wrong” by history is misconceived and short-sighted, because the conditions that could prove Marx right or wrong do not yet obtain.
I was very pleased to see a piece at the Foreign Policy website...
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Passive-Aggressive Ecology
I found what initially seemed to be a quite detailed and quite complete glossary of ecological terms, A Glossary of Ecological Terms. I was about to send the link to a correspondent, when I ran across this “definition”:
Mind-Body Problem: a sterile philosophical dilemma given its first modern expression by mathematician and swordsman Rene Descartes. Its basic question: how...
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Fear and Wisdom, Anger and Patience
One of my favorite passages from Pascal’s Pensées is this that comes from a section titled “Imagination” and numbered as 82 in the traditional edition:
“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be: if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail. Many could not even...
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Alien hunters: Searching for life →
The BBC is having a two part presentation on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), “Seti: the past, present and future,” which is here introduced in a article by Jason Palmer.
All the big names of the field are quoted here: Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Paul Davies. At the present moment they don’t have a happy tale to tell, not because they haven’t found any...
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Television as Tubepunk Technology
Sometimes — not very often, but nevertheless sometimes — it is given us to see the future. Now, by this I do not mean that we are rarely and briefly granted special mental powers that allow us to remotely view the future, but only that sometimes there appears in history glimpses of the future in the form of things ahead of their time.
When I was a child and I heard the phrases,...
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What is the relationship between constructive and...
A few days ago in P or not-P I mentioned a discussion concerning constructivism on the FOM listserv. In that post I quoted Frank Waaldijk, and gave my response to this. Since then I have been honored with a response, which follows herein:
I think that to compare classical mathematics to science fiction is not the same as to dismiss it. Actually I’m quite appreciative of good science...