prior probability

One of the artifacts at the National Museum of the American Indian in D.C. that I included in my previous post was a 14¢ postage stamp (also pictured below) featuring the Sioux warrior Hollow Horn Bear that was first issued by the U.S. Post Office 100 years ago! Among other things, I learned that this was an expensive stamp because, back in 1923, you only needed a 2¢ stamp to mail a letter! Here is more information about the iconic Hollow Horn Bear stamp.

I was finally able to visit the National Museum of the American Indian, which is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and is devoted to preserving the history and cultural legacies of the indigenous peoples of North America. Among other things, the museum featured a retrospective of the art of Robert Houle (see here) as well as a special exhibition explaining the larger significance of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn to our national culture and another informative exhibit on the infamous Indian Removal Act of 1830, perhaps the most egregious federal law ever enacted. Below are some snapshots of my visit:

I am super-excited to announce that my review of Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey (see here) will be published in a forthcoming issue of Bocconi Legal Papers (BLP), the flagship journal of the law school of Luigi Bocconi University, which is located in Milan, Italy.

Who sang it best? Taylor or the Bananarama trio?

This past week, I have been attending a symposium at the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C. The institute is named in honor of St Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th-century philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church, so I could not help but ask myself, What did Adam Smith the moral philosopher learn from Aquinas? My tentative answer is to say not much, since Smith does not even mention Aquinas once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Alas, the closest Smith comes to referring to the scholastic tradition of the great Christian thinkers of the medieval period is in Book 7 of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when Smith derisively describes the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Chrysippus as the thinker who reduced the doctrines of the Stoics “into a scholastic or technical system of artificial definitions, divisions, and subdivisions; one of the most effectual expedients, perhaps, for extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical doctrine.”

In other words, it looks like Smith has a low opinion of scholasticism as a methodology of reasoning. But at the same time, that can’t be the whole story, for both Aquinas and Smith wrote in the virtue ethics tradition of Aristotle. Smith, for example, extols the virtues of prudence, benevolence, and self-command in Book 6 of his treatise on moral sentiments, while Aquinas identifies four cardinal virtues in his magnum opus, the Summa theologiae: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. (See Question 61, Article 2 of the Summa, available here via the Thomistic Institute!) So, I suspect we should be able to trace an indirect intellectual path between Aquinas and Adam Smith, something which I shall try to do in the future.

Although I have been indoors for most of this past week attending a symposium, during my free time I have walked through a few of the nearby neighborhoods in our nation’s capital; below are some of the sights I have seen during my strolls:

Bonus link: For more background about La Marseillaise scene in Casablanca see here.

For the 5th Annual Thomistic Philosophy and Natural Science Symposium, which I am now attending in Washington, D.C., I have been reading large chunks of “The Modelling of Nature” by William A. Wallace and “Degrees of Belief” by Steven G. Vick. (The covers of both books are pictured below.)

Alternate title: 2023 summer travel update #4

I will be blogging haphazardly, if at all, because I will be taking part in several academic conferences during the remainder of this month, including the 5th Annual Thomistic Philosophy and Natural Science Symposium at the Thomistic Institute in Washington, D.C. The theme of this year’s symposium is “Uncertainty, Confidence, and Truth in the Sciences” (see the Thomistic Institute’s flyer pictured below). For me, “truth” is a probabilistic concept (see, for example, here, here, or here), not an absolute or all-or-nothing one, so I cannot wait to exchange ideas at this symposium.