Susan Dieleman

 

What does American philosophy mean to you?

I should note, at the outset, that I consider myself to be a pragmatist philosopher more than an American philosopher—not just because I’m not “American” (I’m Canadian), but also because “American philosophy” is a much more capacious category. Though I do draw from some other traditions within this more capacious category, my primary focus is on pragmatist philosophy, and on the work of Richard Rorty in particular.

When I began my new position at the University of Lethbridge in 2023, the first course I taught was a 3000-level survey of pragmatism. Since I was a new faculty member, I wanted to provide students with an opportunity to ask questions and get to know me a little better. One of the questions asked was something along the lines of “why pragmatism?” My answer to that question, which I have given on other occasions since, was that I like studying pragmatism for the same reasons I like reading fantasy. Pragmatism (at its best) is, for me, the theoretical counterpart of fantasy (at its best). It shows us that things could have been otherwise than they are, and that things still could be otherwise—indeed, could be better—in the future. Both “traditions” or “genres” offer a way to hold disappointment and hope together... https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-susan-dieleman/

WJS Newsletter – William James Society

Spring 2026 Newsletter

President's Message from Dr. Phil Oliver

LISTEN (audio file on Google Docs)

'Tis the season of William James's birth, in 1842.

By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife's birthday. So it's a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.

The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James "family tradition" according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be...

https://wjsociety.org/news/

New day

From the Paris Review William and Henry James

When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt "more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you." There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, "bro't to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter." As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William's attempts to keep Henry's visit at bay. William's letter seems more to the point when he notes: "The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome."

William's discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. "You are very dissuasive," he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It's as if Henry must plead for his brother's approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry's self-assertion, he's thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he's doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry's relation to William passive-aggressive. William's to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry's desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he'd rather not have his brother around...


William and Henry James  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04/01/william-and-henry-james/

Useful fiction, stubborn facts

Someone on the Internet asked the William James Society if a useful fiction can be true.
WJ's reply:

Literary fiction can be true in the pragmatic sense, definitely. But unlike my shallower younger brother the novelist, I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. We pragmatists do not deny reality. We do sometimes attempt to defy it.

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mb7gbzit2c22

Review of Talisse's Civic Solitude

To his credit, Talisse mentions humanities education. As a philosophy professor, I wholeheartedly agree that liberal arts education, which includes the humanities, is valuable not only in developing critical thinking skills but also in developing capabilities for better citizenship. However, it seems that humanities education (or liberal arts, or democratic education), although vital to democracy, is under great duress. So, the same political dynamics that give rise to polarization also undermine the education that affords the opportunity to develop depolarization.

Philosophy Now
Dec '25

Exit line

What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: " I am so happy I can stand it no longer!"

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m7rz2pr6ok2c

I Am An American Philosopher: Patricia Shields

Pragmatism is very much about the world of practice where people live and work. It seems that most philosophers—even American Philosophers—dwell in the world of ideas. I have come to see that I have a mediator role as a philosopher. I mediate and translate the ideas of pragmatism to people who live in the world of practice filled with problematic situations. I can translate and apply philosophical ideas in ways that are understood and used in the world of practice.

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-patricia-shields/

Henry James: the horror

"The 'new' America that Henry James encounters [in 1904], as he roams over it at the dawn of the American Century, leaves him little less than horrified." —John Banville https://go.nybooks.com/4a4bKwh

Dewey’s faith

 Barbara Stengel's contribution to the John Dewey Society Democracy Initiative. She contemplates how fear is operating against collective community action, and argues in favor of having a "working faith" in human nature to ground us. 

Stengel writes: "There is a critical truth in all this that John Dewey understood clearly, that was evident in the United States of 1939. Fear can't ground a community; it takes faith. The required faith is not a faith in the divine but a faith in the oh-so-human. The faith Dewey calls out and calls forth is a "working faith" in the possibilities of human nature, in the capacities that humans possess to address one another without "fear or favor.""