Review: Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway

Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Morals for Mortals: 7 Universal Rules to Living a Meaningful and Happier Life

Morals for Mortals: 7 Universal Rules to Living a Meaningful and Happier Life by Moshe Pereg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of this book as told from inside a concentration camp is the most affecting evidence of the indomitable human spirit I have ever read. The second half, about "logotherapy" has never resonated with me.

I read this book, roughly, every year for the eleven years '87-'98. I found it a powerful testament to the the awesome human potential. In Nietzschean proportions, it is a book on the will-to-live.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, observed that in concentration camps, those who broke first were the ones hoping for a quick end, followed by those who despaired it would never end. Survival, favored those who focused on immediate actions without fixating on outcomes.

The personal experience of meaning: "an inward peace".

I had to keep my intention to escape to myself, but my comrade seemed to guess that something was wrong (perhaps I showed a little nervousness). In a tired voice he asked me, ""You, too, are getting out?” I denied it, but I found it difficult to avoid his sad look. After my round I returned to him. Again a hopeless look greeted me and somehow I felt it to be an accusation. The unpleasant feeling that had gripped me as soon as I had told my friend I would escape with him became more intense. Suddenly I decided to take fate into my own hands for once. I ran out of the hut and told my friend that I could not go with him. As soon as I had told him with finality that I had made up my mind to stay with my patients, the unhappy feeling left me. I did not know what the following days would bring, but I had gained an inward peace that I had never experienced before. I returned to the hut, sat down on the boards at my countryman's feet and tried to comfort him; then I chatted with the others, trying to quiet them in their delirium.

I think my first reading of this was my first encounter with this illustrative story, if much better told by Boris Karloff in Targets.
Tom Schulte let you know that 'Boris Karloff in Targets' is available on BFI Blu-ray from 25 September and you can watch it on YouTube.

A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, "Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?" "I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran," said Death.

View all my reviews

Review: Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The Origin of Intolerance: Fear of Different Individuals, Groups or Nations

It is usually normal for an organization, religion or government to be united in its purposes and ideals. However, uniformity (rather than unity) can be psychologically unhealthy, even dangerous, because it breeds intolerance, even fear, of those who are different. For example, in Germany during World War II, the Nazis demanded uniformity in their concept of German nationalism, racial superiority and political policies of extermination of inferior races. In other words, the Nazis did not tolerate dissent and opposition from Jewish and Polish people, even from Germans themselves.

In the Foreword of one of Viktor Frankl’s books, Swanee Hunt, formerly the United States Ambassador to Austria, said that the Nazi concentration camps were “created to annihilate those who were different.”1 Frankl suffered in the concentration camps, because he was different. His father, mother, brother and wife died, because they, too, were different.

False Tolerance: To Tolerate the Intolerable

[Paraphrased from Viktor Frankl’s View of Tolerance]

Tolerance, jealousy, benevolence, hate, decency. What will be ultimate in our lives? As Viktor Frankl would remind us, the choice is ours.

Swanee Hunt

United States Ambassador to Austria

Logotherapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logothe...
Noology
Ontology
Facticity

Pill god romanticism

Speaking of population explosion, I would like to touch on the Pill. It is not only counteracting the population explosion but, as I see it, rendering an even greater service. If it is true that it is love that makes sex human, the Pill allows for a truly human sexual life, one in which, freed from its automatic connection with procreation, sex can realize its highest potential as one of the most direct and meaningful expressions of love. Sex is human if it is experienced as a vehicle of love, and to make it into a mere means to an end contradicts the humanness of sex, regardless of whether the pleasure principle dictates the end or the procreation instinct does so. As to the latter, sex has been emancipated, thanks to the Pill, and has thereby become capable of achieving its potential status as a human phenomenon.

Today the will to meaning is often frustrated. In logo-therapy one speaks of existential frustration. We psychiatrists are confronted more than ever before with patients who are complaining of a feeling of futility that at present plays at least as important a role as did the feeling of inferiority in Alfred Adler's time. Let me just quote from a letter I recently received from a young American student: "I am a 22-year-old with degree, car, security and the availability of more sex and power than I need. Now I have only to ex-plain to myself what it all means." However, such people are complaining not only of a sense of meaninglessness but also of emptiness, and that is why I have described this condition in terms of the "existential vacuum."

There is no doubt that the existential vacuum is in-creasing and spreading...

Existential panic that seems classic, timeless w/conformism

If asked for a brief explanation, I would say that the existential vacuum derives from the following conditions. Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do-which is conformism-or he does what other people wish him to do which is totalitarianism.

In addition to these two effects of the existential vacuum, there is a third, namely, neuroticism. The existential vacuum per se is not a neurosis, at least not in the strictly clinical sense. If it is a neurosis at all it would have to be diagnosed as a sociogenic neurosis. However, there are also

Sacred

If we respect the spiritual and existential character of unconscious religiousness-rather than allotting it to the realm of psychological facticity—it also becomes impossible to regard it as something innate. Since it is not tied up with heredity in the biological sense, it cannot be inherited either. This is not to deny that all religiousness al-ways proceeds within certain preestablished paths and patterns of development. These, however, are not innate, inherited archetypes but given cultural molds into which personal religiousness is poured. These molds are not transmitted in a biological way, but are passed down through the world of traditional symbols indigenous to a given culture. This world of symbols is not inborn in us, but we are born into it.

Post Freud

psychoanalysis had already lost much of its territory to a sound and sober trend in the field of psychotherapy, namely, behavior therapy. As early as 1960, H. J. Eysenck deplored "the lack of experimental or clinical evidence in favor of psychoanalysis." The theories of psychoanalysis are "beliefs" with which "psychiatrists in training are now frequently indoctrinated." However, Eysenck argues not only in general that "Freudian theories are outside the realm of science" but also in particular that "so-called symptomatic cures can be achieved which are long-lasting and do not produce alternative symptoms." This fact "argues strongly against the Freudian hypothesis." In contrast to the Freudian "belief," Eysenck thinks that abolition of the symptoms does not at all "leave behind some mysterious complex seeking outlet in alternative symptoms. "

Long before this, logotherapy also had offered evi-dence that neuroses need not in each and every case be traced to the Oedipal situation or other types of conflicts and complexes but may derive from feedback mecha-nisms such as the circle formation built up by anticipato-ry anxiety. 43 And as early as 1947 I myself attempted to interpret neurosis in reflexological terms ...

It is my contention that behavior therapy has made a valuable contribution to the evolution of psychotherapy in that it has shown how to demythologize neurosis. This formulation is not too far-fetched when one considers the fact that Sigmund Freud himself described his instinct theory as a "mythology" and the instincts as "mythical" entities.

To sum up, Freud has unmasked the neurotic; Rogers has de-ideologized psychotherapy; and Eysenck, Wolpe, and others have demythologized neurosis; and yet a discontent remains. Even to such a declared materialist as Christa Kohler, who runs the department of psychotherapy at Karl Marx University in Leipzig, "the behavioristically oriented psychotherapists Wolpe and Eysenck" are, to her mind, excessively "sliding into a biologistic and mechanistic position."45 She may be right. Particularly in an era such as ours, one of meaningless-ness, depersonalization, and dehumanization, it is not possible to cope with the ills of the age unless the human dimension, the dimension of human phenomena, is included in the concept of man, which indispensably underlies every sort of psychotherapy, be it on the conscious or unconscious level

View all my reviews

Review: We Hold These "Truths": How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back

We Hold These "Truths": How to Spot the Myths that are Holding America Back by Casey Burgat
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Subtitled "How to Spot the Myths That Are Holding America Back", this book has been called "This book is the crash course in civics that America needs." Largely educational and even enlightening from insider account of how government really does work, there is also some revelations on behind the scenes realities of some events in our recent dramatic and turbulent times. Alyssa Farah Griffin was the White House Director of Strategic Communications during Trump's first term and recalls bleach etc. remarks by Trump in a press briefing:

POTUS walked right past me without breaking stride, ignoring or missing my attempts to catch his attention. I followed him to the briefing room, and its big blue sliding door closed. I opted to watch from a stone's throw away in Upper Press, where my office and the White House press secretary's office were located. Then I watched as President Trump did far more damage than I ever could have fathomed.

"There's been a rumor that-you know, a very nice rumor-that you go outside in the sun or you have heat and it does have an effect on other viruses," Trump said from the world's most famous podium. He then turned to Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx and directed her to "speak to the medical doctors to see if there's any way that [she] can apply light and heat to cure" the virus.2 Dr. Birx sheepishly nodded, afraid to contradict the president in front of the world. I worked closely with Dr. Birx and hold her in the highest regard. She served her country in uniform as an army doctor, then dedicated her life to fighting infectious diseases, including HIV and AIDS. I'll never fault her for not jumping to the podium to correct the president of the United States, for honoring the chain of command, though I don't envy the position it put her in.

And here's where the wheels fell off.

(Trump, who doesn't kid,
said he was being sarcastic.)

Back to the lessons in government, we are seeing as I type what feels like a crest of peak EO churn as executive orders seem Trump's tool for quickly reshaping government. So, it is helpful to learn of the history and development of this tool in the president's toolbox.

The impermanence of executive orders not only has created a land-scape of instability but has also become a powerful tool for presidential candidates looking to make immediate impacts. The promise to reverse a predecessor's executive orders has become a rallying cry on the campaign trail, with candidates often pledging swift action in their first 100 days in office. This tactic allows them to quickly chalk up wins by undoing the policies of the previous administration, appealing directly to their political base eager for change.

So while the early months of an administration are often marked by a flurry of executive action, much of that action involves undoing the work of the previous administration. For modern presidents, their first 100 days have transitioned into playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with the other guy's executive orders-just as fast as one policy pops up, it's smacked back down, and the clock is turned back. And the cycle continues.

Interestingly, The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, that took a leading role in the conservative movement in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan when his policies were taken from Heritage Foundation studies. They offer their own EO analysis in "The Use and Abuse of Executive Orders and Other Presidential Directives".

More from Griffin:

Lincoln did not call his Emancipation Proclamation an "executive order," but it was. In fact, it was the most famous and impactful example of the president of the United States bypassing Congress and changing federal law with the stroke of a pen. But from where did Lincoln's power to issue such a proclamation originate? Despite their frequent use and significant impact, the term "executive order" (or any of its variations) is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Instead, the authority for what's often called the "power of the pen" originates from the Constitution's "vesting clause." This clause simply vests in the president "executive power," a deliberately vague term that has evolved over time to encompass the wide array of administrative actions involved in managing the government's day-to-day affairs.

This vagueness has produced an eternal debate about the scope of executive power, how the Founders intended it to be used, and what it means for modern presidencies. Constitutional experts generally agree that executive actions are legal as long as they fall within the president's policy jurisdiction (read: matters for which there is a relevant federal department) and within a reasonable interpretation of existing court rulings. (Note that things the president cannot do within those bounds include lower gas prices, cut mortgage rates, reverse inflation, fix Social Security, protect abortion access nationwide, or many other moves that some constituents expect him to do.)

These actions-whether they're called orders, directives, or memoranda are official, legally binding mandates...

Speaking of things that seem to add more grandstanding than good government IMHO, there is here an analysis of the evolution of the now ubiquitous filibuster by Adam Jentleson, contributor to this anthology of essays. Jentleson is former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman and deputy chief of staff to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. Jentleson is the author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy and a regular contributor to various publications. He recalls "the golden age of the Senate, running through the first half of the 19th century, was a majority-rule institution where the filibuster did not exist." That was until Sen. John C. Calhoun

... envisioned a numerical minority empowered to counter the dominance of an unsympathetic majority. Whereas Madison wanted the minority to have a platform to air their views and delay the legislative process to make themselves heard, Calhoun believed the minority was entitled to a veto. Importantly, Calhoun had a specific minority in mind: slaveholders, for whom he was the nation’s leading advocate.

...[Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette's 1917 filibuster against arming American ships against German attacks] triggered a massive public uproar against the Senate-as Wilson described them, a "little group of willful men" and widespread calls for the chamber to reform its rules.

For a moment, it looked like the end of the filibuster. The Senate quickly reconvened and formed a committee to rein it in... But the committee made one change that would prove enormously and unintentionally-consequential. Instead of setting the threshold for cutting off debate at a majority, as in the original rule, they recommended setting it at a supermajority. ...Senate Rule 22, otherwise known as the "cloture" rule... is what sets the de facto threshold for passage at 60 votes...

For half a century after Rule 22, filibusters remained rare. From its inception in 1917 until 1970, the Senate averaged less than one cloture vote per year.16 During this time, those looking to stall a bill would talk for as long as they wished, and the majority would let them. But then and this is the key part once the minority ran out of words, they stopped talking. They voiced their opposition, and then

Rep. Steve Israel (D) who served in Congress from 2001 to 2017 offers insights into the realities of fundraising.

I learned early that there is only one area of instant bipartisan agreement: raise money.

Far from the resplendent white marble of the Capitol, I soon found myself shuttled into a "call room." Since it's illegal to fundraise within Capitol walls, members do their financial dirty work a few blocks away in a less auspicious building. Gray fabric cubicles. Flickering fluorescent lights. Members of the US Congress reduced to glorified telemarketers. For 10 to 15 hours every week, I would cold-call donors, delivering my well-honed 60-second pitch to raise the money required to stay afloat in politics and address the pressing issues I sought to tackle as a legislator.

I'd envisioned long hours spent on the House floor in great debates with partisan foes, hashing out hard-fought compromises and passing legislation that would improve the lives of my constituents. The reality was a financial arms race that would lead me to spend over 4,200 hours dialing up donors during my 16 years in Congress. That's almost half a year of my life.

Stephen I. Vladeck, an expert in constitutional law who has argued over a dozen cases before the US Supreme Court, has a prescription for SCOTUS:

...the indictment that SCOTUS has become too political rests on an assumption that rarely gets questioned. It assumes that, in some bygone kumbaya era, things were different. The court was better and could be trusted because justices of yesteryear were above (or, at least, aloof from) politics. They kept their personal views quiet and considered cases with cold judicial neutrality. In other words, they stayed in their lane, which is to just "call balls and strikes," as Chief Justice John Roberts famously described his would-be job at his 2005 confirmation hearing.

That idea certainly does sound nice. Only one minor snag: It's completely false. The belief in an apolitical judiciary is a myth-and a dangerous one. The Supreme Court has never been above politics. Even more to the point, the Supreme Court shouldn't be above politics. And if anything, the view that the court is supposed to be above politics has helped precipitate the true crisis facing the Supreme Court today.

That true crisis is not the one we think of whenever the press reports another divisive SCOTUS decision. It is that, to an extent that we have never seen in American history, the justices are not accountable to the other branches of government, especially Congress (or really, to anyone). Nor do they believe they should be. Justice Samuel Alito said this quiet part out loud in a July 2023 interview with The Wall Street Journal, asserting that "no provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court-period."

Alito is wrong as a matter of text (Article III of the Constitution expressly authorizes Congress and only Congress among other things, to make "regulations" of the Supreme Court's caseload). He's wrong as a matter of history (he himself holds a seat created by Congress in 1837). And he's wrong as a matter of common sense (without congressional approval, the court would have no money, no building, no staff, and no ability to do much of anything).

Congress ceding power to executive branch, specifically the president. Lack of comity

...bill to the floor that would give Congress more time. It passed overwhelmingly, though 90 Republicans opposed it. And just a few days later, McCarthy was booted from the Speakership by his own party. His crime? Compromising with Democrats.

Did compromise die along with McCarthy's leading role? No. Mike Johnson (R-LA) eventually emerged as the new leader, promising to fight for his party's goals. But a change in leadership could not change the underlying dynamics at play. Republicans were still divided and held a narrow majority. The parties were still miles apart on spending policy. There was no way forward except to cut a bipartisan deal.

The final spending package, agreed to in March 2024, largely resembled the deal cut between Kevin McCarthy and the White House in May 2023. The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both chambers. Conservative Republicans, who would have liked to go it alone, didn't like it. But the American system of government didn't really give them a choice.

A similar pattern has repeated over and over again in recent his-tory. Lawmakers on one side or the other want to do big, bold things to deliver on their campaign promises. They don't want to com-promise. But they discover, eventually, that to achieve anything at all-to move the ball forward on any of the issues that are important to Americans-they must.

cooperation required

...the majority rarely succeeds without the minority's support. Most times it's either teamwork or stalemate.

Are there exceptions? A few. Across the 295 party agenda items, we found just 13 (4 percent) that ended with one party achieving a clear policy victory over the sustained opposition of the other. These rare, partisan laws loom large in our political consciousness: Obamacare, the Republicans' 2017 tax law, some of the Bush tax cuts. But they are unusual.

This last point is key. It's not that Democrats and Republicans work together all the time. It's that if a majority party wants to actually come through on its promises, it needs the minority to help do it.

Border bill gerrymandering gridlock

Congressman Pascrell represented New Jersey in Congress from 1997 to 2024. He served as chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight in the 117th Congress. Pascrell was a member of the New Jersey State Assembly from 1988 to 1997 and mayor of Paterson, New Jersey, from 1990 to 1997. Prior to serving in office, Pascrell received his BA and MA from Fordham University. He was a longtime public school teacher and is a veteran of the US Army and US Army Reserves. Congressman Pascrell was a lifelong resident of Paterson. This essay was completed shortly before his passing in late 2024.

On February 4, 2024, a trio of US senators made a momentous announcement. James Lankford (R-OK), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) unveiled a legislative deal to address America's southern border crisis and frayed asylum system.²

The package was the product of months of painstaking behind-the-scenes negotiation among the senators on one of America's most pressing issues. The effort had been declared dead by reporters and congressional insiders more times than you've accidentally been on

Matt fuller

What I can tell you from working in both types of settings is this: People want drama. They crave it. When Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Lauren Boebert a "little bitch" on the House floor, that's the story that gets clicks. It's juicy; it's immediate; it's got all the elements of a good old-fashioned political brawl. Readers are far less interested-and I've got the numbers to prove it-in my 6,000-word story on why Republicans turned on funding a war in Ukraine. (It's a great piece and you should read it!)

...

The truth is, the power to change the media starts with us-and it always has. If we want a more balanced, less sensationalized media environment, it's up to us to stop rewarding the content that perpetuates division and start demanding something better.

Part of the difficulty is, many of the people in power don't want us to.

The author's website offer more content along these lines including his substack for a "crash course in civics".

View all my reviews

Review: Once There Was a War

Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS

Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS by Lisa Rogak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

During WWII these four "girls" (why not "women"?) generated black propaganda, which is disinformation, lies, and rumors calculated to sap morale and encourage surrendering:

...defined as any leaflet, poster, radio broadcast, or other public or private media that appeared to come from within the enemy country, either from a resistance movement or from disgruntled soldiers and civilians. In essence, black propaganda was a series of believable lies...

* Betty MacDonald was a 28-year-old reporter from Hawaii. Zuzka Lauwers grew up in a tiny Czechoslovakian village and knew five languages by the time she was 21. Jane Smith-Hutton was the wife of a naval attaché living in Tokyo. Marlene Dietrich, the German-American actress and singer, was of course one of the biggest stars of the 20th century. These four women, each fascinating in her own right, together contributed to one of the most covert and successful military campaigns in WWII.

[I was gratefully provided with a copy of this engaging book in exchange for an honest review.]]

View all my reviews

Review: Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intro:

Along the way, I found myself in the basement working the wine-press for my father, or on the front porch Independence night helping my Uncle Bion load and fire his homemade brass cannon.

Thus I fell into surprise. No one told me to sur-prise myself, I might add. I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experi-ment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.

So, I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.

movies Stand By Me, River's Edge

"Dad," said Douglas, "it's hard to explain."

Somehow the people who made tennis shoes knew what boys needed and wanted. They put marshmallows and coiled springs in the soles and they wove the rest out of grasses bleached and fired in the wilderness. Somewhere deep in the soft loam of the shoes the thin hard sinews of the buck deer were hidden. The people that made the shoes must have watched a lot of winds blow the trees and a lot of rivers going down to the lakes. Whatever it was, it was in the shoes, and it was summer.

Douglas tried to get all this in words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_L...
In May 1980, Carl Skenes performed a bullet catch for the That's Incredible! television show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkiV...
but... https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how...

View all my reviews

Review: War

War by Bob Woodward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Philosophical Writings of Peirce

Philosophical Writings of Peirce by Charles Sanders Peirce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Verifiable

What... is the end of an explanatory hypothesis? Its end is,

through subjection to the test of experiment, to lead to the avoidance of all surprise and to the establishment of a habit of positive expectation that shall not be disappointed. Any hypothesis, therefore, may be admissible, in the absence of any special reasons to the contrary, provided it be capable of experimental verification, and only in so far as it is capable of such verification. This is approximately the doctrine of pragmatism. But just here a broad question opens out before us. What are we to understand by experimental verification?

Falibilism

All this is true of direct experience at its first presentation. But when it comes up to be criticized it is past, itself, and is represented by memory. Now the deceptions and inexactitude of memory are proverbial.

On the whole, then, we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We never can be absolutely sure of any-thing, nor can we with any probability ascertain the exact value of any measure or general ratio.

This is my conclusion, after many years study of the logic of science; and it is the conclusion which others, of very different cast of mind, have come to, likewise. I believe I may say there is no tenable opinion regarding human knowledge which does not legitimately lead to this corollary. Certainly there is nothing new in it; and many of the greatest minds of all time have held it for true.

Indeed, most everybody will admit it until he begins to see what is involved in the admission-and then most people will draw back. It will not be admitted by persons utterly incapable of philosophical reflection. It will not be fully admitted by masterful minds developed exclusively in the direction of action and accustomed to claim practical infallibility in matters of business. These men will admit the incurable fallibility of all opinions readily enough; only, they will always make exception of their own. The doctrine of fallibilism will also be denied by those who fear its consequences for science, for religion, and for morality

Descartes

DESCARTES is the father of modern philosophy, and the spirit of Cartesianism-that which principally distinguishes it from the scholasticism which it displaced-may be compendiously stated as follows:

1. It teaches that philosophy must begin with universal doubt; whereas scholasticism had never questioned fundamentals.

2. It teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness; whereas scholasticism had rested on the testimony of sages and of the Catholic Church.

3. The multiform argumentation of the middle ages is replaced by a single thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous premisses.

4. Scholasticism had its mysteries of faith, but undertook to explain all created things. But there are many facts which Cartesianism not only does not explain, but renders absolutely in-explicable, unless to say that "God makes them so" is to be regarded as an explanation.

In some, or all of these respects, most modern philosophers have been, in effect, Cartesians. Now without wishing to return to scholasticism, it seems to me that modern science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from this.

1. We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial scepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. It is, therefore, as useless a preliminary as going to the North Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by coming down regularly upon a meridian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusapia...
Illusions And Delusions Of The Supernatural And The Occult

fatigued by an enigma, his common-sense will sometimes desert him; but it seems to me that the Palladino has simply been too clever for him, as no doubt she would be for me. The theory that there is anything "supernormal," or super anything but superchérie in the case, seems to me as needless as any theory I ever came across.

That is to say, granted that it is not yet proved that women who deceive for gain receive aid from the spiritual world, I think it more plausible that there are tricks that can deceive Mr. Carrington than that the Palladino woman has received such aid. By Plausible, I mean that a theory that has not yet been subjected to any test, although more or less surprising phenomena have occurred which it would explain if it were true, is in itself of such a character as to recommend it for further examination or, if it be highly plausible, justify us in seriously inclining toward belief in it, as long as the phenomena be inexplicable otherwise.

Abduction Bayesian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abducti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron

Though infallibility in scientific matters seems to me irresistibly comical, I should be in a sad way if I could not retain a high respect for those who lay claim to it, for they comprise the greater part of the people who have any conversation at all. When I say they lay claim to it, I mean they assume the functions of it quite naturally and unconsciously. The full meaning of the adage Humanum est errare, they have never waked up to. In those sciences of measurement which are the least subject to error-metrology, geodesy, and metrical astronomy-no man of self-respect ever now states his result, without affixing to it its probable error; and if this practice is not followed in other sciences it is because in those the probable errors are too vast to be estimated.

View all my reviews

Review: Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree of the Century

Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree of the Century by Dennis McDougal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



View all my reviews

Review: Learning to Be Rotuman: Enculturation in the South Pacific

Learning to Be Rotuman: Enculturation in the South Pacific by Alan Howard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



View all my reviews