Four books have especially shaped my thinking on the relations between the Eastern and the Western traditions in philosophy, broadly speaking.  I’ll just give you author, title, date for three of them, and a short explanation of the fourth. William Johnson, THE STILL POINT (1970) Thomas Tweed, THE AMERICAN ENCOUNTER WITH BUDDHISM (1982) Rick Fields, HOW THE SWANS CAME TO THE LAKE (1992). Now the fourth. Get a hold of Kitaro Nishida, AN INQUIRY INTO THE GOOD (1990). As the title suggests, this is NOT a work of history but a substantive philosophical work. Further, the 1990 edition ..read more

  Just for nothin' I'm putting a famous image from Raphael's painting School of Athens, right here.  But I am thinking as the headline here indicates of the song that has become the new anthem of the Kamala Harris campaign.  As readers will probably recognize, I'm fully behind somebody-who-is-not-Trump for President. Harris is now that candidate and she is guaranteed my vote. In that spirit, here are the lyrics to the anthem, Beyonce's "Freedom".  Freedom! Freedom! I can't move Freedom, cut me loose! Singin', freedom! Freedom! Where are you? Cause I need freedom too ..read more

  I have mentioned Mayo and her book, STATISTICAL INFERENCE AND SEVERE TESTING before.  Here I come back to it to provide you with some fruits of my readings therein. Duhem's problem.  Pierre Duhem said that experimental falsification doesn't get us very far in physics because the error that explains the surprising experimental result could invariably have come from any of a number of related postulates. The surprising result only tells us that ONE of them is wrong.  "The only thing the experiment teaches us is ... there is at least one error; but, where this error l ..read more

  Since the Olympics is upon us again, I might as well admit my long fascination with the song "One Moment of Time," memorably sung by Whitney Houston in 1988, and often used as a sort of background music for highlight reels.  I want one moment in time When I'm more than I thought I could be When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away And the answers are all up to me Give me one moment in time When I'm racing with destiny Then in that one moment in time I will feel I will feel eternity. ------------------------------------------------------------------- My mind follows a well-worn c ..read more

I found the above browsing about Mastodon (my favorite social media site given Musk's destruction of the old Twitter).  I've been too lazy to look for confirmation. Maybe this calls for some philosophical exegesis BEFORE confirmation!  The above is a screenshot of a post on a social media site that says that in 2022 medical researchers tried to make a machine-learning tool for identifying skin cancer. The idea, as always, was that the Algo would learn from large quantities of online photos of skin lesions that turned out to be cancerous and other skin lesions that did not, until th ..read more

January: Cryptocurrencies. United States. The Securities and Exchange Commission this month approved exchange-traded products designed to track the rises and falls in the value of bitcoin, in an unexpected move toward the regulatory normalization of the cryptocurrency asset class in the United States. It had refused such approvals in previous years, but this time it was acting in response to an appeals court ruling.  February: Commercial real estate. United States. The bankruptcy proceedings in the matter of WeWork (a case filed last November) continue and this month it bec ..read more

 From Soliloquies in England (1922): Santayana was part of a world that was rubbing its eyes after the end of what they called the Great War, wondering what it all meant and where civilization can go from here. The moment produced some fine (one might even say 'stellar') intellectual work. Hold that metaphor. Santayana, in Soliloquies, gave us this aphorism. "It would seem that when a heavenly body ceases to shine by its own light, it becomes capable of breeding eyes with which to profit by the light other bodies are shedding: whereas, so long as it was itself on fire, no part of it c ..read more

                                              Throughout school, I took what I have come to think of as a guess-and-test approach to math word problems. This was never the 'official' approach, so I eventually had to learn to dress my answers up to seem more official.  But they were derived from guess-and-test. Simple example.  There are two school buses, A and B.  A has 18 more seats in it than B does.  Together, they have 96 seats.  Find the numb ..read more

  Last week's posts were hard work.  I struggled to get through a reasonable discussion of that nuclear explosion of a SCOTUS term using no more than four blog posts and without making any of them unduly long. Today. and maybe this whole week, I will take things easier.   The orange and the gray.  Look! up there! a cute kitten!  And another one below! See you tomorrow.  ..read more

To pick up on the thought with which I ended yesterday's entry: as I write these words, Richard Glossip is still alive. And that has to be considered good.  Glossip is alive because the US Supreme Court, in January of this year, agreed to hear his case. I mentioned that fact in this blog in February, but I'll say a bit more now.  In January 1997 (yes, more than a quarter of a century ago, and days before the second inaugural of President Clinton) and man called Barry Van Treese beat Justin Sneed to death with a baseball bat. In order to avoid the death penalty, Sneed testified t ..read more