How to Save the American Experiment

To see a way out of our destructive spiral we should look to the innovation of the 1920s.

As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany's interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago.

At the outset of the 1920s, a wave of attempted assassinations and political violence crested alongside new barriers to immigration, a campaign of deportations and a government crackdown on dissenting speech. America was fresh off a pandemic in which divisive public health measures yielded widespread anger and distrust. Staggering levels of economic inequality underlaid a fast-changing industrial landscape and rapidly evolving racial demographics. Influential voices in the press warned that a crisis of misinformation in the media had wrecked the most basic democratic processes.

Even presidential elections eerily converge. In 1920, national frustration over an infirm and aging president helped sweep the Democratic Party out of the White House in favor of a Republican candidate offering the nostalgic promise of returning America to greatness, or at least to normalcy. A faltering President Woodrow Wilson gave way to Warren Harding and one-party control over all three branches of the federal government.

Yet what is striking about the 1920s is that, unlike the German interwar crisis, America's dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era. Across the sequence of emergencies that followed — the Great Depression and eventually World War II — the United States ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment and prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow in the South and established free speech with court-backed protections for the first time in its history...


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/politics/how-to-save-the-american-experiment.html?smid=em-share

Russell vs American philosophers and the attack on truth | John Kaag » IAI TV

Let's get something very clear straight away: James never claimed that truth was a matter of mere convenience or momentary utility. John Dewey might have made this mistake occasionally, but James did not. James's pragmatism, at its core, is a philosophy of experience—not experience in the fleeting, subjective sense, but experience extended, socialized, and tested across the rough surfaces of reality. It is not unlike C.S. Peirce's conception of truth as an approximation to the facts in the infinite long run, tested scientifically by observation and experience. Once this is understood, Russell's critique begins to falter...

https://iai.tv/articles/russell-vs-american-philosophers-and-the-attack-on-truth-auid-3165

John Kaag: “James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”

NYTimes: Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

"The findings of psychedelics wouldn't have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James," John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an "analytic turn," been "trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable," he said. "And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that's for the best."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/books/review/justin-smith-ruiu-on-drugs-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Meliorist reading list

"I was looking for books that offer good, practical ideas on how to make the world a better place"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/saving-the-world-nicholas-kristof/

William James Society newsletter, Fall '25: message from the president

 LISTEN

Autumnal season's greetings, fellow friends of William James. 

I first began to think of WJ in casually-friendly terms back in the Fall of my first year of grad school at Vanderbilt in the '80s. One of my new mentors, the late John Compton (accurately described by a classmate as the very epitome of our Platonic Idea of a philosophy Prof), sidled up to me in the campus bookstore one afternoon and remarked of the text I happened at that moment to be browsing--it was John J. McDermott's Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition-- "Willy James!" 

It wasn't the first time a mentor had modeled such an attitude of easy familiarity with a long-gone thinker. Alex von Schoenborn at Mizzou had in class habitually referenced "Friend Hegel," "Friend Husserl," even "Friend Reinhold"... but those old Germans somehow seemed too remote and distant for a philosophical novice to truly befriend.  

"Willy" was different. I had at that point scanned just enough of the James correspondence to grasp what Alfred North Whitehead must have meant when he called our namesake "that adorable genius" and lauded his determination to "forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts." [Science in the Modern World, ch.1] He meant that WJ was a philosopher, sure, but still more was he a man. A mensch. A Humean human being: Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

These have been difficult days of late, in humanistic terms. Just when you think a society couldn't be more violently ruptured, another bullet fells another partisan. Another executive act of fiat trashes another normative democratic tenet. Another spike seems to seal the coffin of the republic Ben Franklin challenged us to keep. Men and women of pragmatic-pluralist conscience and conviction suffer yet another spell of despair for the American experiment. 

But then, behold: the sun rises again. Henry told us: it is but a morning star, after all. We Jamesians will also always expect greater and better things of each new dawn.

One of the continuing delights of being a William Jamesian, I've found, is the perpetual discovery of new angles on our philosopher. He was, is, truly a multi-faceted and omni-dimensional philosophical wellspring of fresh and novel narrative possibility. In recent weeks I've been pleased to encounter several new (to me) takes on our old friend. To name but a few (while anticipating a continuing stream of more to come in the seasons ahead):

Alexis Dianda of Xavier writes (most appropriately) in her Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn that "philosophy is grounded in the quest for perspectival shifts and new postures in which the philosopher learns to imagine the alien, to see the unusual, to notice what has passed unnoticed. To see and feel differently than what we have become accustomed to is the ultimate goal of James's philosophy." 

Emma Sutton of Queen Mary University of London insists, in William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician, on the vital and enduring relevance of WJ's medical education, something I for one have tended to underrate (errantly, she's persuaded me) as a mere diversion and way-station on his youthfully indecisive and meandering path to philosophy. "As mercurial as James was in many ways, there was also a consistency to his theories and beliefs and the words that he used to express them, namely, the medical agenda within which he put them to work. As he journeyed across the disciplinary landscapes of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, James mined them all for useful insights into a linked set of concerns: the promotion of health; the prevention and amelioration of disease and suffering; and the justification of the place of the invalid within society."

Megan Craig, in Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (which I should have picked up long ago, finally and gratefully prompted by her September appearance at my school for our Fall Applied Philosophy Lyceum), "clears a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers." 

And in her newest book, Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion, she and co-author Ed Casey "celebrate forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines." I've asked her about that, and am sure that WJ would heartily endorse her statement that academics, especially us Jamesians, need to stand and move. "It’s not just movement outside in the fresh air that we need, but forms of attention and encouraging habits of self-care (eating well, sleeping, resting, taking breaks, making friends), so that we might stop perpetuating the model of the slightly ill, socially isolated, but genius academic."

So here's to a season full of motion, attention, health, and happy amelioration of this ever-not-quite world in transition. Sic transit gloria mundi, of course, and it's increasingly hard these days to detect even a fleeting glory; but in the spirit of William James, let us continue to stride confidently into that open and evolving universe of plural experience. Let us dare to disturb the troubled universe, and (as the courageous Congressman said) make some good trouble. 

Phil Oliver

President@wjsociety.org

I am an American Philosopher: Bryan Norton

 What does American philosophy mean to you?

For me, American philosophy means pragmatism and all the influences on it, and especially its many implications for environmental and social thought. More specifically, I associate pragmatism with the philosophy of language understood as the intellectual space where science fosters the development of new terminology and concepts.

How did you become an American philosopher?

This question requires a two-part answer:  First how did I become a pragmatist? And, second, how  did I become an American Philosopher?

First, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I took a class taught by Jaegwon Kim where he assigned Rudolf Carnap’s essay “Empiricism and Ontology.” I became intrigued with this paper because it spoke to a concern I had at the time (and still do): How can we be empiricists and still engage “big questions” about the nature of reality? This fascination motivated me to write a paper, followed by a dissertation, and finally my first book (Linguistic Frameworks and Ontology). This led me to understand Carnap’s work as reinterpreting philosophy as a coherent “metaphilosophy.” In other words, I took Carnap’s later work to be explaining and developing what was called “the linguistic turn” in philosophy. I was persuaded by Carnap’s argument, developed in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” that philosophy can, when married with empirical science, contribute to our understanding of the world by clarifying emerging scientific concepts. In particular, I remain convinced by Carnap’s argument that linguistic choices in science must be addressed pragmatically.

Second, once I had embraced Carnapian pragmatism, I became fascinated with the Quine/Carnap debates over meaning, analyticity and ontology and learned that American Pragmatism is a rich philosophical tradition with roots in American philosophy and branches growing in many directions, and with applications to real and important scientific problems. I was also influenced by Louis Menand’s book, The Metaphysical Club, which encouraged me to see pragmatism as a rich tradition in American history, one worth studying and applying to contemporary problems.

How would you describe your current research?

Building on this foundational understanding of philosophy, and influenced by Earth Day and growing interest in the environment, I then turned my attention to environmental science. Here, I was fortunate to receive funding (with help from Mark Sagoff) for a research project on the justification for the Endangered Species Act. This research required that I take a deep dive into the relevant science and I spent two and a half years studying the philosophy of ecology.  I then completed two books on ecology and economics of environmental protection.

About 1990, I recognized that my research could contribute to emerging work on sustainability—the science-based understanding of our obligations to future generations. Since then I have focused on developing a philosophical foundation for sustainability and ecological resilience. My recent work has concentrated on understanding and guiding collaborative efforts in communities to self-govern including, especially, collaborative efforts to build polycentric, self-governing communities.

More specifically, Paul Hirsch (a former graduate student) and I have completed a paper on how collaborative management efforts can be built on trust, even though the usual forms of trust (which typically develop as a result of face-to-face and other direct interactions among individuals) are often inadequate to address contemporary problems that affect large-scale systems and remotely related individuals. Our paper develops a concept of “system-level trust,” which is not based on individual trust, but rather on characteristics of collaborative groups in their efforts to achieve self-governance.

What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

I’m a voracious reader. I read biographies of historical and political figures and I especially enjoy twisty crime novels by authors including John D. MacDonald and Harlan Coben.  When not reading, I enjoy watching documentaries on cutting edge scientific topics, while hanging out with my husband, Rafael, and my dog Millie.

What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?

Of course, everyone should read my two books on sustainability (Sustainability and Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change).

And while it may signal that I’m stuck in the past, and in 20th century arguments about philosophy as linguistic analysis, I would recommend that novices in philosophy read, cover-to-cover, Richard Rorty’s anthology The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Methodology. I’d also recommend the lively discussion by critics of that work (including Rorty himself).

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-bryan-norton/

Pragmatism- 5 books

"Peirce is cited and recognized as the founder of pragmatism. He's the one who coins the term and spends his career, in a way, trying to give a proof of pragmatism."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/robert-talisse-on-pragmatism/

The experience of perspective

James's philosophy of experience offers us a different way to understand philosophy, one grounded in perspective. 

"However sceptical one may be of the attainment of universal truths . . . one can never deny that philosophical study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective." 31 

Philosophy is no longer conceived as a love of Truth. Philosophy is grounded not in the search for Truth or Beauty or Reality, but in the quest for perspectival shifts and new postures in which the philosopher learns to imagine the alien, to see the unusual, to notice what has passed unnoticed. To see and feel differently than what we have become accustomed to is the ultimate goal of James's philosophy. This is an individual goal as much as it is a social one. It is a goal that I argue is better served by a philosophy of experience.

The Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn, by Alexis Dianda

"Doing and creating and suffering"

A slightly different take on WJ's youthful commitment to free will-

"Set in the biographical context of James’s back pain and mental ill health, it would seem that free will, as a philosophy of indeterminism, represented, for him, the chance that his own situation might improve. It was the intellectual foundation on which hope and resilience were made possible; the hope that eventually, perhaps, his future and others’ would be less blighted with the evils of illness and pain.116

A diary entry for April 30, 1870, recorded James’s adoption of this new perspective and how he applied it to his own life. He wrote of how, “hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, . . . suicide seemed the only most manly form to put my daring into.” He then proposed a new way of thinking about his future, however, one that was predicated on a belief in the reality of his own “free will” and “creative power,” a life built on “doing and creating and suffering.”117"

"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" by Emma K. Sutton: https://a.co/hWf2zf8

"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician"

"James was awarded his MD from Harvard Medical School in March 1869, after more than five years of interrupted study. This certificate lists his examiners, who included Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr., and the subject of his thesis, namely, the effects of cold on the body. (Diplomas, degrees, notifications of appointments, etc., William James papers [MS Am 1092.9–1092.12, MS Am 1092.9 (4571), Box: 40], Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

There is one element of James’s life and work that unites these disparate identities, however. In 1869, several years before he secured his first lectureship, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and earned his MD. Hampered by his own ill health, James abandoned his plans to practice as a doctor, but these studies were only the beginning of a profound and lifelong occupation with questions about the essential nature of health, healing, and invalidism and their implications for society. His writings, across their disciplinary breadth, return time after time to issues of a medical provenance. In this book I make the case that James’s medical interests, concerns, and values are the threads that bind many of his seemingly unconnected pursuits together. They are the warp and weft of many of his best-known publications and major lines of thought."
...
"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" by Emma K. Sutton: https://a.co/4PTkAZq

William James and I went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field

 It was a nice dream. We didn't care if we ever got back.

"When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on “A Moral Equivalent for War,” I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations, and William James’s were due to the fact that he lived in Cambridge, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of 100,000 souls (including the professors), is not represented in any baseball league that can be detected without a microscope..." Morris R. Cohen, in The Dial,Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919)

Baseball as a National Religion, John Thorn

In the beginning (of the William James Society): "The Streams of William James"

This is exciting (if you're a Jamesian):

William James Society executive board member and (with his Pragmatism Cybrary) master archivist of American Philosophy John Shook informed us at yesterday's board meeting that he has recovered the earliest society publications, going back to "The Streams of William James" which launched, with the Society itself, back in 1999. And here they are... including my own contributions to the first issue (which I remembered, vaguely) and the third (which I'd entirely forgotten), here:


Thanks for the memories, John. And the institutional memory.

Stoic Pragmatism 6: Open Seminars Online (Chris Skowronski)

  Stoic Pragmatism: Open Seminars Online 

SEMINAR SIX: Why Has Cultural Pluralism (so often) Been a Challenge?  Wednesday, August 13, 2025, 19.00-20.30, Berlin Time (CEST) 

 Zoom link HERE: 

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88293106089?pwd=Uaef7fHbPCAPLu0XkgdcJ9SQUuIYMA.1 

Programme of Seminar Two:  

I Chris Skowronski’s talk 

II Open discussion about the talk 

III Questions and Comments about other topics, if there are any 

Questions and Issues to be discussed 

1 When did the term “cultural pluralism” (as philosophical stance) appear in pragmatism and what did  it refer to? And how is it difference with a colloquial meaning of this term? 

2 Can we talk about cultural pluralism in the context of stoic pragmatism? 

3 Why cultural pluralism (in a colloquial meaning) is so challenging? 

4 Any links with the Cynic/Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism? 

5 What is the difference between cultural pluralism (philosophical stance) and such cultural policies  as multiculturalism, the Melting Pot, globalization, DEI/EDI, and similar policies? 

A short presentation of some published claims or stances related to these questions and issues (see full bibliography  below). 

Definition of and conditions for cultural pluralism by German-American pragmatist, Horace  Kallen: 

A “Standpoint” saying that culture means a positive and “sympathetic recognition and understanding  of differences” (Kallen 1998 [1924], 56). 

“Cultural growth is founded upon Cultural Pluralism. Cultural Pluralism is possible only in a  democratic society whose institutions encourage individuality in groups, in persons, in temperaments,  whose program liberates these individualities and guides them into a fellowship of freedom and  cooperation“ (Kallen 1998 [1924], 43). 

Kallen’s teacher at Harvard, Santayana’s related stance: 

“Human virtues and human forms of society had various natural models, according to differences of  nature or of circumstances. Virtue, like health, has different shades according to race, sex, age, and  personal endowment. In each phase of life and art a different perfection may be approached” (Santayana 1995 [1951], 337). 

Stoic cosmopolitanism (Marcus Aurelius) 

“If thought is something we share, then so is reason—what makes us reasoning beings. If so, then the  reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared. And if so, we share a common law. And thus, are fellow citizens. And fellow citizens of something. And in that case, our state must be the  world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it—from this state that we  share—come thought and reason and law“ (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations IV, 4) 

Stoic (Hierocles) metaphor of concentric circles (widening circles of concern, oikeiosis) “The first and closest circle is that which each person draws around his own mind, as the center: in  this circle is enclosed the body and whatever is employed for the sake of the body. For this circle is  the shortest and all but touches its own center. The second after this one, standing further away from  the center and enclosing the first, is that within which our parents, siblings, wife, and children are 

ranged. Third, after these, is that in which there are uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers,  the children of one’s siblings, and also cousins. After this comes the one that embraces all other  relatives. next upon this is the circle of the members of one’s deme, then that of the members of one’s  tribe, next that of one’s fellow citizens, and so, finally, that of those who border one’s city and that of  people of like ethnicity. The furthest out and largest one, which surrounds all the circles, is that of the  entire race of human beings” (Hierocles 91) 

Stoic pragmatist stance (Lachs/Skowroński on cosmopolitanism and widening circles of  concern) 

“The idea of oikeíôsis (most famously pronounced by Hierocles) says that my interests and social  engagement should move outwards, from my individual self to my family, then, if possible, to my  fellow citizens, and then finally to my fellow human beings. The metaphor of a stone thrown into the  water and creating waves, smaller and smaller, yet spiraling out to the farther regions of the pond,  illustrates the direction my energy should go out into public, social, and cultural life. Lachs makes this  picture more social, pragmatist, normative, and even sees this ‘expansion of ego-boundaries” as “an  aim of civilization’(Lachs 1998, 35)” (Skowroński 2023, 20) 

Stoic pragmatist stance (Lachs on cosmopolitanism and widening circles of concern) We should “distinguish our obligations to those near and dear from duties to unknown multitudes  around the globe. If I owe everything I can provide to everyone who can use it, I must not prefer  meeting my children’s needs to feeding the hungry in East Timor” (Lachs 2012, 105). 

“The history of civilization coincides precisely with the gradual expansion of the boundaries of the  self. We have learned to see first others close to us, then anonymous members of our group,  eventually our enemies, and finally, in a halting way, the multitude of strangers that constitute  humankind as somehow vitally involved in who we are. Only such extended ego-boundaries can  explain why industrial nations offer helping hands when disaster strikes on the other side of the globe.  We can see self-interest as the source of foreign aid, of peacekeeping missions, and of humanitarian  help only if we think in terms of such an enlarged notion of self” (Lachs 1998, 33-34). 

Santayana’s stance on cosmopolitanism and widening circles of concern 

“A psychological sense in which an individual may transcend himself. His thoughts will embrace all  his familiar surroundings; and his habits being necessarily social, his passions will be social too. The  scope of his affections may eventually extend over the whole world” (Santayana 1969, 196). 

“The full grown human soul should respect all traditions and understand all passions;; at the same  time it should possess and embody a particular culture, without unmanly relaxation or mystical  neutrality” (Santayana 1986 [1944-1953], 464). 

Related stance by M. Nussbaum: cosmopolitanism / concentric circles  

“I argue that Cicero provides a promising way forward, which we can further develop. Just as we can  defend the intrinsic and motivational importance of ties to family and friends without denying that we  owe something to all our fellow citizens (which a just tax system would presumably arrange), it is  possible to cultivate (through moral and civic education) a type of patriotism that is, on the one hand,  compatible with strong familial, friendly, and personal love, and, on the other hand, builds ties of recognition and concern with people outside our national borders. This has often been done, and great Political leaders including Lincoln, Nehru, F.D.R., and Martin Luther King, Jr. have succeeded, at  least for periods of time, in cultivating that type of mixed concern in their nations” (Nussbaum 2019,  13).

“In practical terms, we may give what is near to us a special degree of attention and concern. But we  should always remember that these features of placement are incidental and that our most  fundamental allegiance is to what is human. Special duties are just delegations from the general duty to humanity. The special measure of concern we give to our own is justified not by any intrinsic value  of the local, but by the overall requirements of humanity. (The Stoics think that we usually promote the goals of humanity best by doing our duty where life has placed us—raising our own children, for  example, rather than trying vainly to care for all the world’s children)” (Nussbaum 2019, 78). 

Bibliography 

Hierocles 2009. Hierocles, the Stoic: Elements of Ethics, Fragments and Excerpts. Translation David Konstan.  Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. 

Kallen, Horace 1998 (1924). Culture and Democracy in the United States. New Brunswick and London: Transactions Publishers. 

Lachs, John and Shirley Lachs, eds. 1969. Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously  Unpublished Essays of George Santayana. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 

Lachs, John. 1998. In Love with Life: Reflections on the joy of living and why we hate to die. Nashville:  Vanderbilt University Press. 

Lachs, John. 2012. Stoic Pragmatism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Translation Gregory Hays. New York; The Modern Library. Nussbaum, Martha 2019. The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Harvard University Press. Santayana, George 1986 (1944–1953). Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. 

Santayana, George 1995 (1951). Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. 

Santayana 1969; see Lachs 1969. 

Skowroński, Krzysztof P. 2023. A Meaningful Life amidst a Pluralism of Cultures and Values: John  Lachs’s Stoic Pragmatism as a Philosophical and Cultural Project. Leiden-Boston: Brill.  See also: stoic pragmatism bibliography http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/stoic-pragmatism-bibliography updated-may-2024/ 

See more about stoic pragmatism here: http://berlinphilosophyforum.org/stoic-pragmatism/

The general’s greatest conquest

Grant's battlefield heroism was matched by the courage to complete his memoirs, pain and pressure be damned, as cancer closed in and the light dimmed. When he finished writing,
he was done.

Equally impressive was his winning battle against alcohol. Twain understood:

"Mark Twain had struggled with similar cravings for alcohol and tobacco. When they discussed the subject, Grant mentioned that although doctors had urged him to sip whiskey or champagne, he could no longer abide the taste of liquor. Twain pondered this statement long and hard. "Had he made a conquest so complete that even the taste of liquor was become an offense?" he wondered. "Or was he so sore over what had been said about his habit that he wanted to persuade others & likewise himself that he hadn't ever even had any taste for it." 95 Similarly, when Grant told Twain that, at the doctors' behest, he had been restricted to one cigar daily, he claimed to have lost the desire to smoke it. "I could understand that feeling," Twain later proclaimed. "He had set out to conquer not the habit but the inclination—the desire. He had gone at the root, not the trunk." 96 Although Twain hated puritanical killjoys who robbed life of its small pleasurable vices, he respected abstinence based on an absence of desire."

— Grant by Ron Chernow
https://a.co/1C1oYrI

Another day

Hang on…

William James Society: summer '25 newsletter

 

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.

🔗 Read the article

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