Scopes centenary

100 years ago today, Dayton, Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching evolution.

It had gone exactly according to plan: Scopes and a group of local businessmen had decided to provoke the indictment in order to challenge a new Tennessee law making it a crime to teach evolution in public schools.

https://to.pbs.org/45nhlsy

WJS Newsletter (NEW!) – William James Society

https://wjsociety.org/news/

Remembrances for John Lachs

The Pluralist

https://bsky.app/profile/illinoispress.bsky.social/post/3lnzuc76hmj2b

“cowboy individualism”

As we were discussing last night in our MALA class "Engaging American Philosophy"…

"…The rate at which America's government, health, defense, and economy is degrading shows that reality will not conform to the myth of the American cowboy. The cover of The Economist today shows a battered and heavily bandaged eagle under the caption: "Only 1,361 Days To Go."

The American people seem to be realizing that the rhetoric of cowboy individualism is a very different thing than its reality. Trump's poll numbers are dropping sharply. A Reuters poll found that just 37% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, which was supposed to be his strong suit. An Economist/YouGov poll found Trump's approval rating was –13, with 54% of Americans disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and only 41% approving."

HCR https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/april-24-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Due process

Suddenly no one knows what due process means?
Let me help.

https://www.threads.com/@sherrilynifill/post/DI176T_R8xj?xmt=AQGzsVmc3cmQrGwuU59pIrFu1Q_4yA28XAXDbxYrncbdKA

"How did you become an American philosopher?"

...I stumbled into it while stumbling into philosophy. After earning an undergraduate degree in physiological psychology, I worked as a night watchman while exploring process philosophy by reading Teilhard de Chardin, Goethe, and evolutionary theorists. I became enamored with A. N. Whitehead but was stumped by Process and Reality. I also thought science was ruining the world, and I had to master it to save myself. I decided to pursue a doctorate in the philosophy of science and another undergraduate degree in physics. (I later realized I was mistaken about science.) Having never taken a philosophy course, Florida State accepted me provisionally... Jim Garrison

Bewilderment

Such a gorgeous, gorgeous reminder that the future is not yet written and the pen is in our hands: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/05/richard-powers-thea/

MALA 6010: Engaging the Liberal Arts/American Philosophy (Spring 2025)

MALA students: this is the site I've created to support courses in American philosophy. Feel free to browse here, and comment on anything you find of interest. jpo

Engaging the Liberal Arts MALA course (my block Apr 17, 24)--

Block Title: Engaging American Philosophy

Block Description: This block introduces the classical American philosophical tradition of William James, John  Dewey, Richard Rorty and others. It is a broadly pragmatic, humanistic, melioristic, and interdisciplinary tradition, oriented to action (not merely contemplation) in the public arena. It insists that thought without action is vacuous, while action without thought is reckless. It demands relevance from philosophy and the other liberal arts disciplines, and is unwilling to sacrifice meaning or happiness in the fight for a better world. We'll investigate the philosophers' views and how they might apply to our present situation and circumstances.

Week 1 Readings/assignments: Selections from classic sources James, Dewey, Rorty... tba

Week 2 Readings/assignments: Selections from contemporary sources like Martha Nussbaum, Rebecca Solnit, Louis Menand, Doug Anderson... tba

Grade Distribution: 75 points participation (attendance, blog posts), 75 points report (classroom presentation on an assigned topic)

Vicious anti-intellectualism

Looking forward to getting over the virus that sent me to the Vandy walk-in clinic twice in the last four days (and home yesterday with antibiotics). 

And, looking forward to speaking with Agnes Callard Friday afternoon before her Lyceum address about her new book Open Socrates, and her advocacy of a kind of Socratic intellectualism. 

In preparation, I've revisited what William James says about "vicious intellectualism"— it confuses words and concepts for the reality they intend to illuminate.

And, I've  revisited Richard Hofstadter's 1963 classic Anti -intellectualism in American Life. Its message: anti-intellectualism has been the more vicious strain in our national experience. It certainly is now. "Turning answers into questions" may just be the Socratic salvation the times demand.

"As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying whereas consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamour; truths long known and widely believed have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are bore and too many of them become half truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions."

"The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by applauding the politicians as the pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes, or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place."

"Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote. "If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place." Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be discreet and restrained in the use of its influence; the only assurance that can be given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever subversive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or interest is constantly falling under the scrutiny of the intellectual class and becoming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.

2025 William James Society Presidential Address

Listen on Substack... 

Invited session, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy annual meeting Washington DC, Howard University - March 15, 2025. 8 a.m. Scheduled respondents John Shook, John Kaag

Good morning. Thank you for rousing yourselves so early for this event. It’s no great sacrifice for me, long a habitue’ of the pre-dawn. Ignore the clock and embrace the hour, I say with Thoreau, “morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me… To be awake is to be alive.” Etc.

I do recognize the temperamental element involved in the varieties of auroral experience. If you’re not a morning person, your presence here is all the more gratifying. And if you flew to DC it may even be heroic, these days. Just being here at all is frankly a bit unsettling, tasked as we are with trying to cast a little Jamesian light in the shadow of so benighted a national presidency (albeit one that makes all before it, less one, shine brighter in retrospect).

But since we are here, we should rise to appreciate what Adam Gopnik has lately called our “truly unique, only-once-in-the-universe gift of consciousness. That’s some comfort [my emphasis]. We’ll sleep long enough soon enough.” Being “woke” is not in vogue with the current DC in-crowd, but we interlopers recognize the deep appeal of eyes wide open before eternal dormancy resumes. I like Jane Fonda’s definition: being woke just means “giving a damn.”

The unfortunate timeliness of my title this morning, its allusion to these “dark times,” may need no extensive elaboration. Many of us felt the civic darkness descending well before November’s election, but I don’t think so many of us anticipated, then, the full depth and suddenness of its descent. Those of us who’ve spent decades deliberating (strolling, conversing) with William James, though, know the threat of personal darkness to be perennial for all but the “once-born”... (continues)

Lighting candles AND cursing darkness

[Accompanying slideshow…]

==

William James Society website/newsletter https://wjsociety.org/news/

Spring 2025 Newsletter 

President’s Message: Dr. Phil Oliver, WJS Presidential Address at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Good morning. Thank you for rousing yourselves so early for this event. It’s no great sacrifice for me, long a habitue’ of the pre-dawn. Ignore the clock and embrace the hour, I say with Thoreau, “morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me… To be awake is to be alive.” Etc.

I do recognize the temperamental element involved in the varieties of auroral experience. If you’re not a morning person, your presence here is all the more gratifying. And if you flew to DC it may even be heroic, these days. Just being here at all is frankly a bit unsettling, tasked as we are with trying to cast a little Jamesian light in the shadow of so benighted a national presidency (albeit one that makes all before it, less one, shine brighter in retrospect).

But since we are here, we should rise to appreciate what Adam Gopnik has lately called our “truly unique, only-once-in-the-universe gift of consciousness. That’s some comfort. We’ll sleep long enough soon enough.” Being “woke” is not in vogue with the current DC in-crowd, but we interlopers recognize the deep appeal of eyes wide open before eternal dormancy resumes. I like Jane Fonda’s definition: being woke just means “giving a damn.”

The unfortunate timeliness of my title this morning, its allusion to these “dark times,” may need no extensive elaboration. Many of us felt the civic darkness descending well before November’s election, but I don’t think so many of us anticipated, then, the full depth and suddenness of its descent. Those of us who’ve spent decades deliberating (strolling, conversing) with William James, though, know the threat of personal darkness to be perennial for all but the “once-born”… (continues)