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Tuesday, May 19, 2020

EVEN A BLIND SQUIRREL FUKUYAMA CAN OCCASSIONALLY FIND A NUT

On reading Wade, I bought Fukuyama's Origins. Obviously, someone stole it from a library then sold it. My copy apparently comes from the Berkeley Public Library. Maybe they just got too many copies.... Way too many Californians like Fukuyama! 

In any event I am thrilled to get a copy out of the hands of all those terms search: (SNL) The Californians !

Fukuyama wrote End of History, which I have used as a target here for many years. A really foolish book unless you see it as propaganda.

What came, most memorably, after the last man, in the history of philosophy? I will let you think about that.

Maybe he found a nut in Origins, but I am looking for some other issues there, too.


Tuesday, August 24, 2010


RE KNOWING REALITY

As I have discussed in several prior posts, some bigger policy problems we have had have had to do with intellectual compartmentalization of specialized, often scientific, knowledge.

Compartmentalization has facilitated the subordination and manipulation of isolated branches of knowledge. Subordination of and manipulation of specialized knowledge has not been an especially 'new' phenomenon in the 20th Century. Simpler mere repression had been a main tool of the Renaissance papacy, Galileo being an especially prominent example.

As David Kaiser mentioned in passing in Politics and War, european monarchs were quick to turn ostensibly anti-crown enlightenment notions to crowns' advantage, re aristocracy, populace, and dynastic rivals.

Other important issues have to do with notions of scientific progress and method.

A connection between science and progress has not been as obvious a connection as one might suppose, particularly in the 16 and 17th Centuries with respect to church doctrine.

Collingwood has an illuminating discussion of Aristotelianism, Platonism and science in Essay On Metaphysics, XXV "Axioms Of Intuition". Also good on the topic, Butterfield, Origins of Modern Science.

This is perhaps enough references to stuff, for one post.

One more note; see also, if he posts it, my note re Professor Kaiser's post Historical Novels etc, and his passage re the end of scientific knowledge, my comment referring to Fukuyama's book The End Of History And The Last Man, and the Whig interpretation of history.

Thursday, August 12, 2010


STULTIFERA NAVIS PATENTS EDITORIAL AND THE WHIG INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY FOR UGLY PHILOSOPHERS AND THEIR FRIENDS

These editors really have no clue.

Why do print media show good reasons why their freedom of press should, in the public interest (whatever that used to be), be curtailed?

R&D has been a sore spot for lazy fare regimes' 'firms' for a long time now.

Intellectual property has been pirated by 'strategic partners' now for decades, TEAM PLAYERS, even when it was not traded away in co-production arrangements, licensed then distributed, etc.

Markets flooded with cheap knock offs, by the billions.

'Nothing government can do'. 'Private enterprise at work'.

'Anomalies' of a free market.

Re patents, take a look at some of the passages in say, Trading Places re the history of certain US tech companies innovations in the mid 20th Century, and how they were handled by the stultifera navis. There are many other books on the subject. (I especially like the title Manufacturing Matters.)

I like especially his passage re the Crash of '87, and how people tried to explain what might have caused it. Spoonfeeding: p. 3. I had an acquaintance at that time, who had predicted and had bet a small amount against the market, made 12 million or so dollars, that day, Bloody Monday, October 19, 1987. Whether they were tightly related or not, it's illuminating re loss of competitive dominance.

For the economists, historians, or God forbid philosophers, out there, the quote at the beginning of Ch.5, Naohiro Amaya, is especially fun, re The Whig Interpretation of History. There aren't that many Whiggish thinkers, for example Francis Fukuyama, (in Butterfield's sense) in Japan. We have most of them, over here.

These Whigs are also often Maverick Executive types (see previous posts on this topic), and Prestowitz has an entertaining passage on just this aspect of American business mythology, at p. 13, 14.

Naohiro is talking about something (doing metaphysics?)that might actually qualify as a 'basic presupposition' in Collingwood's sense, (for the really squirrely, and perhaps also ugly), philosophers out there.

I can of course explain how things, in one or two better previous possible worlds, should have been done, but those did not become the actual worlds we have since been left with.

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