WJ's correspondence "arrestingly profound": Emma Sutton

"...My favorite work in American philosophy is the twelve-volume collection of The Correspondence of William James. For me his landmark publications, The Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism etc., are like the studio photographs of his era; they preserve one moment in his thinking, carefully staged and curated for public viewing; but his letters are more akin to home movies, less polished and professional but also more revealing. Owing to their frequency and intimacy, they capture James’s philosophy in motion and, crucially, in context; the juxtapositions of his comments and ideas are frequently gossipy, humorous, and mundane but at the same time arrestingly profound.

In place of recommended reading, I’d like to propose some recommended viewing! I recently watched this video of a talk by James scholar Ariel Dempsey. She’s a medic and dancer who is currently carrying out research for her PhD on James’s ideas about living with uncertainty, with the aim of enriching medical approaches to end-of-life care. (Her focus on the difficulties of coping with uncertainty also, I’d suggest, has practical applications within the field of mental health more generally.)

She performs some of her own choreography as part of her presentation, and this type of embodied philosophical enactment is appealing on many levels, not least its valuable public engagement potential. In his essay on the “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James himself began unpacking the links between emotion, body and gesture, and his embedding of emotion and feeling into the project of philosophy is well known. It seems to me that there is much to be gained, in practice and pedagogy, from moving beyond text and brain-based conceptions of philosophy and into a realm of whole-body thinking." 

--Emma Sutton

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-emma-sutton/