I am...

I'm excited to have been invited to participate in the "I am an American Philosopher" interview series. These are my questions:

1. What does American philosophy mean to you?
2. How did you become an American philosopher?
3. How would you describe your current research?
4. What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy? <—that’s intentionally open-ended. It could mean “I read lots of Wittgenstein” or it could mean “I’m an amateur pastry chef.” Or both, or neither.
5. What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

Answers coming soon...

Prez's Day

David McCullough quotes Abigail Adams on George Washington:

"He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. He was a good man. There are traits in his character which perfectly fit him for the exalted station he holds." Thr 

—

That's the sort of character we need in the White House.

pbs American Experience

And it's their great-grandson Henry's birthday...

It’s the birthday of the writer Henry Adams, whose memoir, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), came out the year he died. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, which left the sensitive, introverted boy burdened by an almost stultifying sense of responsibility to play a prominent part in the world. But Adams preferred to be an observer only, later writing of himself that he “never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players.” After attending Harvard, he traveled extensively through Europe, became a political journalist for a time, and eventually returned to his alma mater in 1870 to teach medieval history.

He wrote two novels, Democracy (1880), which he published anonymously, and Ester (1884), a comic romantic tale about the battle of the sexes that he published under a pseudonym. He also wrote numerous biographies and The History of the United States of America: 1801–1817 (nine volumes; 1889–1891), which is considered a neglected masterpiece.

Unlike many autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams is really a record of Adams’s introspection rather than his accomplishments. Adams had long since come to the conclusion that his traditional education had failed to help him come to terms with the changing world — changes that included the discovery of X-rays and radio waves and radioactivity, a world war, and the invention of the automobile — and that was the thrust of his memoir. But, while the memoir was an intimate portrait of his own life, Adams avoided any mention of his wife, Clover, whom he was in love with and who committed suicide 13 years after they married. WA

==

Henry once wrote a pessimistic letter to William James, suggesting that entropy in the universe (according to the 2d law of thermodynamics, etc.) doomed humanity to misery and meaninglessness. 

WJ's reply was classic:

...The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question... Letters of William James, June 17, 1910.

WJ died later that summer. 

When my time comes, let his words be my epitaph:

"I am so happy...that I can stand it no longer."

Heather Keith

I Am An American Philosopher: Heather Keith

-An Interview Series with John Capps-

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
SAAPList archives:            listserv.sc.edu/archives/saaplist.html
Other SAAPList Information:   www.american-philosophy.org/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

We’re #32

Americans like to boast that "we're No. 1." But a careful new study suggests that in quality of life, we rank No. 32. And we're slipping. This study should be a wake-up call. Nick Kristof

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/14/opinion/america-quality-of-life.html?unlocked_article_code

As Newsroom's Will McAvoy said…

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