Reading:  The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling by Henry Fielding (the copy I bought shortly after moving to Long Island in 1964)To say the truth, Sophia, when very young, discerned that Tom, though an idle, thoughtless, rattling rascal, was nobody's enemy but his own; and that Master Blifil, though a prudent, discreet, sober young gentleman, was ( Read more... )

From an article in the New York Review of Books:In 1984, Thatcher watched TV footage of Kohn and Mitterrand visiting the site of the bloody World War I battle of Verdun.  The two men stood together, gazing at the field, holding hands, symbolically reconciling France and Germany.  "Wasn't it moving, she was privately asked afterwards?  'No, it was ( Read more... )

In 1983 I wrote to a friend:...Hip types...dare not try new ways of disciplining their feelings, firstly because they believe feelings are sacred, and secondly for fear of discovering that the old ways are better.  No useful experimentation is likely in such circumstances; every likely opportunity will be let slip.  "Gay liberation", for example, ( Read more... )

I am extremely skeptical of the notion that the individual whose ass occupies the president's chair makes much of a difference.  There are probably exceptions, and I am willing to consider evidence, but my null hypothesis is "no effect".  Political pressures overwhelmingly restrict what choices the president can make, and his sources of information ( Read more... )

I've been reading The Age of Longing (http://come-to-think.livejournal.com/12193.html) once again.  Of course, being by Koestler, it is full of arguments.  In one of them, in Paris, a defected Russian has told his French friend that he is about to redefect to the Communist Party & return ( Read more... )

Despite the lingering winter, the haircut trigger came earlier than last year ( Read more... )

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This morning I was rereading a manuscript novel by an old friend of mine, of blessed memory, who was a year ahead of me at Caltech in the '50s.  It was one of two that he had sent me for comment about 10 years after we graduated, when he had become a physicist & I an assistent editor at the Physical Review.  Toward the end of the novel, the main ( Read more... )

3  Some typical abuses

3.1  William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

In his introduction, he says:With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not ( Read more... )

2  Two sensible senses

Some of the legitimate uses of "identity" are worth considering in detail, because they are often, by a sort of pun, allowed to lend spurious plausibility to the bad ones.  It is therefore important to point out that they are not actually up to that job.

2.1  The logical senseIdentity in logic is the relation that, by ( Read more... )