The trickiest questions in modern philosophy, i.e. those with which I have struggled most for decades, are those that involve the body/mind (or body/soul) connection.
Does the thinking-stuff that is "me" really interact with the material-stuff that the rest of the world sees and knows as me? If not, how can the two "Mes" be said to be one? Yet if they do interact, how is that possible? It seems to "me" that the two are so very different that it is hard to get a grasp on this.
I recently encountered the blog of a self-described "contemplative scholar," a Quaker who teaches philosophy at a small college. You can make this discovery for yourself here.
He said he has recently been teaching Leibniz to his students in the Modern Philosophy class. So I free-associated on Leibniz in his comments section. I'll just reproduce most of that comment below:
Leibniz, if I remember my college years at all, had a drastic solution to [mind body issues], -- preestablished harmony. Mind and body only seem to interact, as two trains running on parallel tracks at the same (predetermined) speed might seem to be moving deliberately in concert.
This calls for a rather distinctive conception of God, one at odds with much of the revelation offered to each of the "peoples of the book," and it all seems a very high price to pay for the resolution of the mind/body muddle.
Just my two cents.
To which the Contemplative Scholar replied with a fuller account of what Leibniz said in that line, and with his own thoughts on the matter. I'm sure that any of my readers who follow the above link will appreciate his reaction.
13 March 2010
12 March 2010
3D Rugby
Ben Fenton wrote for Wednesday's Financial Times a story about his experiment in 3D -- watching a rugby match. I don't know anything about rugby but I thought this was a nice piece of writing, and I will share it with you in that spirit.
"It must be decades since a London cinema audience stood for the national anthem. But then, watching one of the sport's most visceral encounters live on a big screen, with a beer in one hand, in 3D to boot, prompted several odd experiences.
"Few though were much to do with a third dimension. Dramatic moments of perspective -- explosions in space that send debris over your left shoulder -- don't happen in rugby, thankfully; they are fodder for Imax technology. Drama on the rugby field is more about depth, and England versus Wales had plenty of that -- if only depth of ordure as two poor teams battled to be the least incompetent."
I like the use of "ordure," a word for manure more often used, I'm sure, on his side of the Atlantic than on this one -- but of course so is the word "rugby"! Ordure also suggests "odor," both as a homonym and because of the rather intense relationship of the meaning of the two words.
Ialso like the play on the word "depth," as a feature of a visual field (the third of those Ds) and as a sport's team's attribute, i.e. the "depth" of talent. Yet other meanings of the multi-faceted term "depth" lie about and complicate our reaction to this passage.
Good work, Mr. Fenton.
"It must be decades since a London cinema audience stood for the national anthem. But then, watching one of the sport's most visceral encounters live on a big screen, with a beer in one hand, in 3D to boot, prompted several odd experiences.
"Few though were much to do with a third dimension. Dramatic moments of perspective -- explosions in space that send debris over your left shoulder -- don't happen in rugby, thankfully; they are fodder for Imax technology. Drama on the rugby field is more about depth, and England versus Wales had plenty of that -- if only depth of ordure as two poor teams battled to be the least incompetent."
I like the use of "ordure," a word for manure more often used, I'm sure, on his side of the Atlantic than on this one -- but of course so is the word "rugby"! Ordure also suggests "odor," both as a homonym and because of the rather intense relationship of the meaning of the two words.
Ialso like the play on the word "depth," as a feature of a visual field (the third of those Ds) and as a sport's team's attribute, i.e. the "depth" of talent. Yet other meanings of the multi-faceted term "depth" lie about and complicate our reaction to this passage.
Good work, Mr. Fenton.
11 March 2010
Our Anniversary
As of this week, Pragmatism Refreshed has been on blogspot for three years.
We're just basking in the anniversary glow here at PR headquarters.
Now let's begin our fourth year together with a big cheer for the movie "The Hurt Locker," and its Oscar wins. I wasn't all that impressed when I saw the movie, frankly, but it is very likely there is much I missed and that would impress me better on a second viewing, which I am willing to give it some time soon.
Who among my readers saw The Hurt Locker? What were your impressions? I'd love to read them here.
Reportedly Kathryn Bigelow, who won the Best Director Award for helming this movie, will next be working on something called "Triple Frontier," for Paramount. It's an action-adventure thing set in the area where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil all meet, by screenwriter Mark Boal.
We're just basking in the anniversary glow here at PR headquarters.
Now let's begin our fourth year together with a big cheer for the movie "The Hurt Locker," and its Oscar wins. I wasn't all that impressed when I saw the movie, frankly, but it is very likely there is much I missed and that would impress me better on a second viewing, which I am willing to give it some time soon.
Who among my readers saw The Hurt Locker? What were your impressions? I'd love to read them here.
Reportedly Kathryn Bigelow, who won the Best Director Award for helming this movie, will next be working on something called "Triple Frontier," for Paramount. It's an action-adventure thing set in the area where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil all meet, by screenwriter Mark Boal.
07 March 2010
Selling America Short
Richard Sauer has written a book, published by Wiley, entitled "Selling America Short: The SEC and Market Contrarians in the Age of Absurdity."
The official publication date is late next month, but if you're impatient, you can read large chunks of it via the amazon webpage.
So: who is Richard Sauer? He is a very prominent securities lawyer, a partner at Vinson & Elkins LLP, who is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. Most pertinent perhaps for the book, he was recently on the SEC staff. He was Assistant Director of the Division of Enforcement in the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So should the title of the book be: Why we didn't catch Madoff? Well, no ... his attention is elsewhere, and on another day I'll discuss his thesis. But for today, I'll content myself with quoting a brief passage relating to Bernie.
"Sad to say, it is not realistic to hope we can greatly improve the effectiveness of our regulatory agencies. Talent runs out of the government lke water through a colander, pulled out by the bigger dollars available, or pushed out by administrative folly. ...The SEC's failure to catch Bernie Madoff until he confessed was not a fluke. So poorly do government agencies understand the entities they regulate, they can sometimes be confounded by even thinly disguised frauds."
The official publication date is late next month, but if you're impatient, you can read large chunks of it via the amazon webpage.
So: who is Richard Sauer? He is a very prominent securities lawyer, a partner at Vinson & Elkins LLP, who is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. Most pertinent perhaps for the book, he was recently on the SEC staff. He was Assistant Director of the Division of Enforcement in the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So should the title of the book be: Why we didn't catch Madoff? Well, no ... his attention is elsewhere, and on another day I'll discuss his thesis. But for today, I'll content myself with quoting a brief passage relating to Bernie.
"Sad to say, it is not realistic to hope we can greatly improve the effectiveness of our regulatory agencies. Talent runs out of the government lke water through a colander, pulled out by the bigger dollars available, or pushed out by administrative folly. ...The SEC's failure to catch Bernie Madoff until he confessed was not a fluke. So poorly do government agencies understand the entities they regulate, they can sometimes be confounded by even thinly disguised frauds."
06 March 2010
Some wisdom from Singapore
US equities will rise again.
So says Josh, of "Josh Reviews Everything," while riffing and ripping on a Paul Farrell panic attack.
I won't seek to add anything more.
So says Josh, of "Josh Reviews Everything," while riffing and ripping on a Paul Farrell panic attack.
I won't seek to add anything more.
05 March 2010
The Marne, 1914
I've been reading a book by Holger H. Herwig, THE MARNE, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World (2009).
Herwig is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.
A random quote. Herwig notes that although the onset of war in 1914 was cheered by crowds in the capital cities involved -- St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris -- the countryside took matters in stride, or perhaps glumly.
"The July Crisis found the agricultural sector at a critical stage. Grain and legume fields were maturing, as were fruit orchards and vinyards. Soon, armies of farm laborers would hasten to bring in the produce before the sudden arrival of fall rains. War would mean the conscription of young male labor needed in the villages; the loss of secure urban markets; the requisitioning by the army of thousands of horses and wagons; and the likely imposition of price controls."
Herwig is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.
A random quote. Herwig notes that although the onset of war in 1914 was cheered by crowds in the capital cities involved -- St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris -- the countryside took matters in stride, or perhaps glumly.
"The July Crisis found the agricultural sector at a critical stage. Grain and legume fields were maturing, as were fruit orchards and vinyards. Soon, armies of farm laborers would hasten to bring in the produce before the sudden arrival of fall rains. War would mean the conscription of young male labor needed in the villages; the loss of secure urban markets; the requisitioning by the army of thousands of horses and wagons; and the likely imposition of price controls."
04 March 2010
A Thought from Macaulay, Not De Tocqueville
There is a pseudo-quotation that is often attributed to De Tocqueville:
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
The quote is all over the place these days. I'm told that if you google "de toqueville congress bribe" you'll get almost a quarter of a million hits. It has everything to recommend it as a meme -- it speaks to current anxieties, and is attached to a source whose name we all recognize from school.
But he didn't write it. Or, at least (since I can't prove a negative) nobody ever cites a specific source for it. Successful meme: lousy scholarship. It is sad how often those two things go together.
Anyway, where did this misattribution come from? Is there a real quotation (of de Tocqueville or anybody else of roughly the same era) of which that is the distorted form? I think there is.
Indeed, the first time I encountered this pseudo-quotation I said to myself, "Wasn't that Macaulay?" -- not because I sit around reading Macaulay, but because I have a vague memory of William F. Buckley once quoting Macaulay to this effect in an episode of Firing Line. So I went on Snopes, the wonderful "urban legends" resource. It told me that very similar sentiments are sometimes attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian of some prominence in the early 19th century. He is supposed to have written, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
Usually, when this attribution is made, Tytler's name is mis-spelled Tyler, which hardly gives one confidence. Anyway, Tytler appears not to have written this, either.
Then I did some more eclectic research. I found someone claiming that sentiments like this have been a regular part of the armory of conservatives in the US since the mid 1950s, when William F. Buckley gathered some bright intellectuals around himself and started putting out the National Review, in an effort to redefine conservatism as something more principled than the Eisenhower administration, but less wacky than the John Birchers. Well, yes, I thought, that fits nicely with my own first impression, though the Buckley observation I recall was televised, not printed, and was from the 1970s.
Anyway. it does appear that Macaulay said something like this in a letter he wrote to a friend in May 1857.
Here is part of Macaulay's argument -- you'll find that it isn't as snappy as the above variants. "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone: but civilisation has been saved."
So there IS a respectable 19th century source for this sort of connection between "purely democratic" arrangements and the threat of "a national bankruptcy." Further, Macaulay was also making the point that the US would be safe from this threat for awhile -- because the US doesn't have so dense a population as Europe -- there is/was the safety vent of western expansion. Once that vent was closed, though, the same dark choice that faced France, and that it resolved by recourse to the second Bonapartist dictator, would face Americans.
In 1953, Russell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind, which has gone through several editions and is still revered by many conservatives with an academic flavor to their minds. If you use the neat "look inside" feature at this book's amazon dot com page, you'll find that Macaulay is treated as an important link in the chain Kirk is forging between Edmund Burke's writings and mid-20th century figures like Santayana or Eliot. And on p. 163 you'll see a quotation from that letter to Randall. Kirk renders it thus: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic mustsooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous....Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish."
Which brings us again to Buckley. For it was just two years after the publication of the first edition of this book that Buckley founded National Review. Kirk was one of the first bright young men he brought into that fold, although Kirk held to a sort of traditionalist conservatism rather at odds with the market-oriented elements of the thought of some of the other founders of NR, including to some extent Buckley.
Anyway, whether the above expressed thought is right or wrong: it is not de Tocqueville.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
The quote is all over the place these days. I'm told that if you google "de toqueville congress bribe" you'll get almost a quarter of a million hits. It has everything to recommend it as a meme -- it speaks to current anxieties, and is attached to a source whose name we all recognize from school.
But he didn't write it. Or, at least (since I can't prove a negative) nobody ever cites a specific source for it. Successful meme: lousy scholarship. It is sad how often those two things go together.
Anyway, where did this misattribution come from? Is there a real quotation (of de Tocqueville or anybody else of roughly the same era) of which that is the distorted form? I think there is.
Indeed, the first time I encountered this pseudo-quotation I said to myself, "Wasn't that Macaulay?" -- not because I sit around reading Macaulay, but because I have a vague memory of William F. Buckley once quoting Macaulay to this effect in an episode of Firing Line. So I went on Snopes, the wonderful "urban legends" resource. It told me that very similar sentiments are sometimes attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Scottish historian of some prominence in the early 19th century. He is supposed to have written, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."
Usually, when this attribution is made, Tytler's name is mis-spelled Tyler, which hardly gives one confidence. Anyway, Tytler appears not to have written this, either.
Then I did some more eclectic research. I found someone claiming that sentiments like this have been a regular part of the armory of conservatives in the US since the mid 1950s, when William F. Buckley gathered some bright intellectuals around himself and started putting out the National Review, in an effort to redefine conservatism as something more principled than the Eisenhower administration, but less wacky than the John Birchers. Well, yes, I thought, that fits nicely with my own first impression, though the Buckley observation I recall was televised, not printed, and was from the 1970s.
Anyway. it does appear that Macaulay said something like this in a letter he wrote to a friend in May 1857.
Here is part of Macaulay's argument -- you'll find that it isn't as snappy as the above variants. "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as the France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted, and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved press. Liberty is gone: but civilisation has been saved."
So there IS a respectable 19th century source for this sort of connection between "purely democratic" arrangements and the threat of "a national bankruptcy." Further, Macaulay was also making the point that the US would be safe from this threat for awhile -- because the US doesn't have so dense a population as Europe -- there is/was the safety vent of western expansion. Once that vent was closed, though, the same dark choice that faced France, and that it resolved by recourse to the second Bonapartist dictator, would face Americans.
In 1953, Russell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind, which has gone through several editions and is still revered by many conservatives with an academic flavor to their minds. If you use the neat "look inside" feature at this book's amazon dot com page, you'll find that Macaulay is treated as an important link in the chain Kirk is forging between Edmund Burke's writings and mid-20th century figures like Santayana or Eliot. And on p. 163 you'll see a quotation from that letter to Randall. Kirk renders it thus: "I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic mustsooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous....Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish."
Which brings us again to Buckley. For it was just two years after the publication of the first edition of this book that Buckley founded National Review. Kirk was one of the first bright young men he brought into that fold, although Kirk held to a sort of traditionalist conservatism rather at odds with the market-oriented elements of the thought of some of the other founders of NR, including to some extent Buckley.
Anyway, whether the above expressed thought is right or wrong: it is not de Tocqueville.
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