How William James offended the English mind | Mark Vernon

On the centenary of James's death, is there now more appetite for his pragmatic cherishing of beliefs that are good for life?
Thu 23 Sep 2010 11.00 EDT

Today, in Oxford, a group of academics are trying to right something of a wrong. Meeting in the Rothermere American Institute, they are discussing the work of William James, the psychologist and philosopher whose centenary of death falls this year.

He is well celebrated on the other side of the Atlantic, commentators and academics alike routinely citing him. And he is eminently quotable. In one letter to HG Wells he reflected on "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success". We are indebted to him for expressions such as "stream of consciousness" too. Some have said he was a better writer than his brother, the novelist Henry James.

But in Europe he's far less visible, which is arguably an oversight, even injustice. It's this argument that the academics in Oxford will be pursuing today.

Why is this so? We can turn to Bertrand Russell for a possible explanation. In his A History of Western Philosophy, Russell records how James was universally loved as a person. "His religious feelings were very Protestant, very democratic, and very full of the warmth of human kindness," Russell writes. "He refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness." But if Russell is generous about the man, he is less so about the man's philosophy.

James was a tremendous populariser of the philosophy of pragmatism. The principle of pragmatism is, roughly, that something can be said to be true if it works. James wrote: "We cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it." This led him to the conclusion that "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief". He argued that there is a bridge between our ideas about reality and reality itself, and that our notions about what is true can provide us with the bridge. This is what he meant by what works. So, again, he writes: "Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them."

There is something about this way of thinking that is offensive to the English mind, and Russell was quick to spot it. He pointed out that the veracity of some truths do not depend upon their efficacy at all. Did not Columbus sail across the Atlantic in 1492? The truth of the date does not depend upon whether his voyage turned out to be good for humanity. But James can defend himself against that retort, since he also argued that the principle of pragmatism comes into its own when there isn't enough evidence to decide whether something is true.

Russell had another line of attack, though, and it was particularly pointed in relation to James's theological views. Religious beliefs are the quintessential case for which there's not enough evidence to decide. The sceptical mind of Russell looks at the evidence for belief in God and, while seeing it's not conclusive, decides that he does not want to believe in God for fear of believing in an error. James, though, has a different thought. He looks at the evidence for belief in God and, while seeing it's not conclusive, feels the force of the duty to believe what's true as well as the duty to avoid error. The sceptic ignores the first part of that duty, which James also called the "will to believe". He noted that while both believer and nonbeliever run the risk of being duped, he thought it was better to be duped "through hope" than "through fear".

Russell was not convinced. "James's doctrine is an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of scepticism," he concluded, "and like all such attempts it is dependent on fallacies."

Identify a fallacy, and the English mind moves swiftly on. It was a principle that shaped much of 20th-century philosophy on this side of the Atlantic: the logical positivists thought that much of what had passed as philosophy in history was, in fact, meaningless – not least in the realm of metaphysics – and they sought to drop it as a result. It was more Russell's century over here, than James's.

Has the mood now changed? Is there today more scope for Jamesian modesty – a preparedness to run with a belief because it is good for life, and not to drop it simply because the human mind cannot master it? Pragmatically, in James's deeper sense, he would commend that attitude to us. After all, as he added, "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/23/william-james-centenary

"Why Philosophy Tried to Commit Suicide in the 20th Century"

Published on Jan 28, 2021

Crispin Sartwell delivers the Fifth Annual Institute Lecture for AIPCT, January 21, 2021. The lecture was delayed from its usual November date by the pandemic, and was held virtually. The full title is "Why Philosophy Tried to Commit Suicide in the 20th Century (and a Bit about Why It Failed)." The lecture ranges across numerous figures who proclaimed the "death of philosophy," from Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and up through Adorno, Rorty, and the postmodernists. There is a lively discussion following the talk.

https://youtu.be/t39pLl2yiKE

William James's colleague saved Wonder Woman's life

 Really, kinda. G.H. Palmer brought James to Harvard and taught young William Marston, whose suicidal impulse was checked by philosophy.

Here's a story I'd like to see on the big screen, Wonder Woman 1911. But thanks to the negative buzz around WW 1984, I've discovered Jill Lepore's compelling account of the real story behind "Diana Prince"...

"What checked Marston’s hand as he held the vial [of poison acid] was the study of existence itself. There was one course he loved: Philosophy A: Ancient Philosophy. It was taught by George Herbert Palmer, the frail, weak-eyed, sixty-nine-year-old Alford Professor of Philosophy and chairman of Harvard’s Philosophy Department. Palmer had thin, long white hair, bushy black eyebrows, blue eyes, and a walrus mustache. He lived at 11 Quincy Street, where he pined for his wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been president of Wellesley College, an advocate for female education, and a suffragist. She’d died in 1902. He refused to stop mourning her. “To leave the dead wholly dead is rude,” he pointed out, quite reasonably. Early in his career, Palmer had made a luminous translation of the Odyssey—its aim, he said, was to reveal “that the story, unlike a bare record of fact, is throughout, like poetry, illuminated with an underglow of joy”—but his chief contribution to the advancement of philosophy was having convinced William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana to join what became known as “the Great Department”: Harvard’s faculty of philosophy. The key to teaching, Palmer believed, is moral imagination, “the ability to put myself in another’s place, think his thoughts, and state strongly his convictions even when they are not my own.” He “lectured in blank verse and made Greek hedonism a vital, living thing,” Marston said. In the fall of 1911, Philosophy A began with a history of philosophy itself. “According to Aristotle,” Palmer told his class, as Marston sat, rapt, “the rise of philosophy has three influential causes: freedom, leisure, and wonder.” For weeks, he raved about the Greeks: they, to Palmer, were geniuses of dialectics and rhetoric. After Thanksgiving, he lectured on Plato’s Republic; by December, he was expounding on how man was “a rational being in a sensuous physical body,” underscoring, as he often did, that by “man,” he meant men and women both. He eyed his class of Harvard men sternly. “Girls are also human beings,” he told them, “a point often overlooked!!” The equality of women was chief among Palmer’s intellectual and political commitments, and it was a way, too, that he remembered his wife. George Herbert Palmer, who saved Marston’s life, was faculty sponsor of the Harvard Men’s League for Woman Suffrage."

"The Secret History of Wonder Woman" by Jill Lepore https://a.co/hJ0TTzx

Rorty on Dewey

The philosopher whom I most admire, and of whom I should most like to think of myself as a disciple, is John Dewey. Dewey was one of the founders of American pragmatism. He was a thinker who spent 60 years trying to get us out from under the thrall of Plato and Kant. Dewey was often denounced as a relativist, and so am I. But of course we pragmatists never call ourselves relativists. Usually, we define ourselves in negative terms. We call ourselves 'anti-Platonists' or 'antimetaphysicians' or 'antifoundationalists'. Equally, our opponents almost never call themselves 'Platonists' or 'metaphysicians' or 'foundationalists'. They usually call themselves defenders of common sense, or of reason. Predictably, each side in this quarrel tries to define the terms of the quarrel in a way favourable to itself. Nobody wants to be called a Platonist, just as nobody wants to be called a relativist or an irrationalist. We so-called 'relativists' refuse, predictably, to admit that we are enemies of reason and common sense. We say that we are only criticizing some antiquated, specifically philosophical, dogmas. But, of course, what we call dogmas are exactly what our opponents call common sense. Adherence to these dogmas is what they call being rational. So discussion between us and our opponents tends to get bogged down in, for example, the question of whether the slogan 'truth is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality' expresses common sense, or is just a bit of outdated Platonist jargon. In other words, one of the things we disagree about is whether this slogan embodies an obvious truth which philosophy must respect and protect, or instead simply puts forward one philosophical view among others. Our opponents say that the correspondence theory of truth is so obvious, so self-evident, that it is merely perverse to question it. We say that this theory is barely intelligible, and of no particular importance – that it is not so much a theory as a slogan which we have been mindlessly chanting for centuries. We pragmatists think that we might stop chanting it without any harmful consequences...

Philosophy and Social Hope

Rorty's neo-pragmatism

[M]y own version of pragmatism... makes no pretence of being faithful to the thoughts of either James or Dewey (much less Peirce, whom I barely mention). Rather, it offers my own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements of Jamesian and Deweyan themes. My choice of themes, and my ways of rephrasing them, result from my conviction that James's and Dewey's main accomplishments were negative, in that they explain how to slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic tradition. Each of the three essays, therefore, has a title of the form '— without —', where the first blank is filled by something we want to keep and the second something which James and Dewey enabled us, if not exactly to throw away, at least to understand in a radically un-Platonic way. The title 'Hope in Place of Knowledge' is a way of suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind's most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are – to penetrate behind appearance to reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate appearance–reality distinction and with metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which pragmatism shows us how to do without. I want to demote the quest for knowledge from the status of end-in-itself to that of one more means towards greater human happiness. 

My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future. Under favourable circumstances, our use of this capacity culminates in utopian political projects such as Plato's ideal state, Christian attempts to realize the kingdom of God here on earth, and Marx's vision of the victory of the proletariat. These projects aim at improving our institutions in such a way that our descendants will be still better able to trust and cooperate, and will be more decent people than we ourselves have managed to be. In our century, the most plausible project of this sort has been the one to which Dewey devoted his political efforts: the creation of a social democracy; that is, a classless, casteless, egalitarian society. I interpret James and Dewey as giving us advice on how, by getting rid of the old dualisms, we can make this project as central to our intellectual lives as it is to our political lives.

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope

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Rorty on democracy, in Achieving Our Country... Dewey on democracy...