Summer 2025 Newsletter
President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver
When I think of William James in summer, I think naturally of his annual escape at term’s end to his Chocorua summer home in New Hampshire, with (he told his sister Alice) its “fourteen doors, all opening out”…
I think as well of his many Adirondack excursions, where at the end of one day’s hike he came upon a “ferocious metaphysical dispute” surrounding a squirrel…
and where he had what he called a Walpurgis Nacht pseudo-mystical experience…
And then I think of the terrific split-venue Chocorua/Cambridge centenary celebration of his life and work the James Society sponsored in August 2010, “in the footsteps of William James,” coinciding with Harvard’s Houghton Library exhibition Life is in the Transitions.
I think of the time he got horribly lost on a hike and probably propelled the heart-strain that expedited his exit from this earth at age 68 in August 1910.
And of course I think of the nobility of that exit. It was in his dying summer a hundred and fifteen year ago, when he penned a marvelous riposte to Henry Adams’s morose pessimism over the universe’s own mortality. The entire letter (dated June 17, 1910) is a tour de force of indomitably life-affirming human spirit, even in the shadow of looming personal extinction. It concludes with a crescendo of defiantly insistent hopefulness: “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… 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.'”
Isn’t that an exit!
It was in his terminal summer that James declared, a bit disingenuously, that there were “no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given,” in the conclusion of his final publication, “A Pluralistic Mystic”-a paean to his eccentric friend Benjamin Blood, but from our vantage more a brave “Farewell!” at the conclusion of a remarkably inspiring, perceptive, and humane life devoted to the unyielding defense of experience in all its irreducible variety.
The disingenuity in question has less to do with fortune-telling (though he was more than sufficiently receptive to the experience of unscrupulous seers and non-creditable prognosticators) than with advice. He was full of that. “Be not afraid of life” was one of his better lines, in this regard.
And it’s probably the line we need most to heed ourselves, in this summer of our own (and America’s) unsettled fortune. He’d tell us, I’m sure: you can stand it.
As he told us just before that final farewell: “There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?”
We’re still here, to enjoy experience and to shape it; to enjoy the world and to change it.
So say we at the William James Society, in the spirit of our namesake: enjoy your summer, and ameliorate your world.
Phil Oliver, President, William James Society
Digital Spotlight
“Revisiting the Classics with AI” – John Kaag (May 13, 2025)
WJS Vice President John Kaag considers what it means to engage James in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. He explores how digital tools might extend James’s commitment to pluralism and the varieties of experience.
This short piece is ideal for faculty and students interested in public philosophy and digital pedagogy.
Access the Rebind AI E-book of Varieties of Religious Experience with John Kaag and Bessel Van Kolk
Community Updates
- WJS Member Wayne Viney recently published “James on Unification” in History of Psychology 27, No. 4, (2024) 371-383 https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000265
- Past WJS President Sami Pihlström published Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion (Lexington, 2023), containing two chapters focusing on James. James figures prominently in Pihlström’s edited volume, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Pragmatism (Bloomsbury, 2024).
- 2025 SAAP Recap: The March meeting in Washington, D.C. featured strong Jamesian representation. Look for reflections and photos in William James Studies.
- WJS Member Highlights: New fellowships, recent publications, upcoming events? Let us know! Submissions for the Fall newsletter due by October 15, 2025.
- Membership Reminder: Renew for the 2025–2026 academic year. Encourage colleagues and graduate students to join—especially those working in psychology, religious studies, education, and political theory. Our pluralism is stronger with broader participation.
Recent Publications on William James
The Spring 2025 issue of William James Studies (Vol. 20, No. 1)
Published in June, this issue features:
Proceedings from SAAP Boston 2024
Original research articles including:
“Depression and Pragmatism”
“Environments of Madness in James and Dewey”
Book reviews of Philip Davis’s Pathways in William James
and Clifford Stagoll’s Pragmatist Imagination
A curated list of James-relevant works published in other venues over the past academic year
🔗 Read the full issue here
Recent Publications in Focus
Bernadette Baker, William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
This provocative and rigorously researched volume places James’s psychology and pluralism in dialogue with the cultural and political legacies of American empire. A timely resource for scholars interested in James’s transnational relevance and the politics of epistemology.
🔗 Publisher’s page
J. Edward Hackett, William James’ Radically Empirical Philosophy of Religion (Springer, 2025)
This book takes a stand against and critiques readings of William James that do not pay attention to the metaphysics of experience. Such interpretations overlook the first mentions of radical empiricism in James’s Will to Believe argument. By attending to James’s metaphysics of experience, this book argues that James’s universe is a “quasi-chaos” of becoming in our relations with nature and other people, so that things independent of us relate, evolve, and change in space and time. James’s metaphysics of relations is what unifies his various psychological, poetic, mystical, and religious commitments. These metaphysical implications have consequences for how James understood what metaphysics can do in philosophy, how it relates to theology, what we can say about his will-to-believe argument, mysticism, free-will, God’s finitism, the problem of One and the Many, and panpsychism.
🔗 Publisher’s page
Essay: “Censoring William James” (May 2025, Forbidden Histories)
This accessible piece explores how James’s psychical research—long marginalized in mainstream academic discourse—is now being re-evaluated in light of broader concerns about the boundaries of science, credibility, and intellectual openness.
By revisiting James’s willingness to engage what others dismissed, it subtly affirms his melioristic and democratic spirit.
🔗 Read here
More recent publications on William James
Compiled by WJS At-large member John Shook
An evaluation of philosophically driven palliative care research using the pragmatist philosophy of William James A Pettifer, P Guo – Palliative Medicine, 2025
Bridging the theory-practice divide in public administration: A virtuous pragmatic approach of Wang Yangming and William James Y Ni, N Liu – Public Policy and Administration, 2025 – journals.sagepub.com
Mysticisme et pragmatisme dans la philosophie religieuse d’Alfred Loisy: une comparaison avec William James A Lannoy – Revue de Theologie et de Philosophi, 2025
The Issue of the Pragmatist Sources of Post-Truth, Considered in the Light of William James‘ Definition of Truth M Wójtowicz – Forum Philosophicum, 2025 – pdcnet.org
William James and Scientific Medicine. A Portrait of the Critic Within P Croce – European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 2025
William James M Sehgal – Whitehead-Handbuch: Leben–Werk–Wirkung, 2025 – Springer
William James‘ Debt to Hermann Lotze M Vagnetti – Geltung, revista de estudos das origens da filosofia …, 2025 – revistas.pucsp.br
William James, David Bohm, and the Puzzle of Consciousness W Seager – Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2025 – ingentaconnect.com
REVIEWS
Review of The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science. Edited by HK Andersen and Sandra D. Mitchell N Stamenković – 2025 – JSTOR
Review of Philip Davis, William James. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. J Torrance – 2025 – JSTOR
Review of Clifford S. Stagoll, Transforming One’s Self: The Therapeutic Ethical Pragmatism of William James P Stephens – William James studies, 2025
Review of Emma Sutton, William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician A Dianda – HOPOS, 2025
Review of Emma Sutton, William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician J Dunham – The British journal for the history of science, 2025
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