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

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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