Supporting the study, critique, and appreciation of American philosophy and culture--"American Studies"-- in the tradition of William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, Emerson, Thoreau, et al... This site was constructed initially to support an Independent Readings course at Middle Tennessee State University in the Spring 2021 semester.
"James ends this extraordinary essay, which is a call for a whole new philosophy of mind based on what mind actually is and does, by saying, provocatively, “The peace of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails,” and he appeals for an example to Whitman: “Even the least religious of men must have felt with our national ontologic poet, Walt Whitman, when loafing on the grass on some transparent summer morning that ‘Swiftly arose and spread around him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth’. . .To feel ‘I am the truth’ is to abolish the opposition between knowing and being.”6"
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/46keh29
"28. The Action of Consciousness ABOUT A MONTH AFTER he sent off his “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” James sent off, in January 1878, an article called “The Sentiment of Rationality.” He later described it as “the first chapter of a psychological work on the motives which lead men to philosophize,” and he noted ruefully that it might better have been called “The Psychology of Philosophizing.” We may, at this distance, prefer the original title, if only for its fresh and unorthodox, not to say brash, announcement that rationality is at bottom a feeling. Not a matter of logic or math, not reasoning or ratios, not induction, deduction, or syllogism, not something higher than and detached from the senses, not the opposite of a feeling or emotion—rationality is itself a feeling or emotion. He might even have called the essay “The Feeling of Rationality.” He begins by asking how we recognize the rationality of a conception, and he answers, “By certain subjective marks, that is, a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest.” He amplifies, saying, “This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness—the absence of all need to explain it, account for it or justify it—is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality.”1 James simply sidesteps the long history of reason, right reason, pure reason, and practical reason, walking right past the conventional notion that rationality means abiding by set rules of reasoning. James is not really interested in the history of philosophy or the taxonomy of logic; he is interested in how particular minds actually work. His starting point is not Greek or medieval philosophy but modern scientific or experimental knowledge of the functions of the brain and the senses. “All logical processes,” James says in another piece written at this same time, “are today hypothetically explained as brain processes.”2"
"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson: https://a.co/5zjnn6I
As William James said, pragmatism is a house with many rooms. And there's a Rortian room. And that Rortian room is that of a Cold War liberal who's concerned about getting beyond the subjectivism and the solipsism of Descartes. It's all about a move toward community. And community for him was all about solidarity. We begin with a "we," not an "I." That's pragmatism…
"GETTING RID OF THE APPEARANCE-REALITY DISTINCTION COMMON SENSE DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN THE APPARENT color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are really real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato's distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. That distinction has outlived whatever usefulness it may have had. We should do our best to get rid of it. If we did so, we should no longer wonder whether the human mind, or human language, is capable of representing reality accurately. We would stop thinking that some parts of our culture are more in touch with reality than other parts. We would express our sense of finitude not by comparing our humanity with something nonhuman but by comparing our way of being human with other, better, ways that may someday be adopted by our descendants. When we condescended to our ancestors, we would not say that they were less in touch with reality than we are, but that their imaginations were more limited than ours. We would boast of being able to talk about more things than they could. Parmenides jump-started the Western philosophical tradition by dreaming up the notion of Reality with a capital R. He took the trees, the stars, the human beings, and the gods and rolled them all together into a well-rounded blob called "Being" or "the One." He then stood back from this blob and proclaimed it the only thing worth knowing about, but forever unknowable by mortals. Plato was enchanted by the notion of something even more august and unapproachable than Zeus, but he was more optimistic than Parmenides. Plato suggested that perhaps a few gifted mortals might, by replacing opinion with knowledge, gain access to what he called "the really real." Ever since Plato, there have been people who worried about whether we can gain access to Reality or whether the finitude of our cognitive faculties makes such access impossible. Nobody, however, worries about whether we have cognitive access to trees, stars, cream, or wristwatches. We know how to tell a justified belief about such things from an unjustified one. If the word "reality" were used simply as a name for the aggregate of all such things, no problem about access to it could have arisen. The word would never have been capitalized. But when that word is given the sense that Parmenides and Plato gave it, nobody can say what would count as a justification for a belief about the thing denoted by that term. We know how to correct our beliefs about the colors of physical objects, or about the motions of planets, or the provenance of wristwatches, but we have no idea how to correct our beliefs about the ultimate nature of things. Ontology is more like a playground than like a science. The difference between ordinary things and Reality is that when learning how to use the word "tree" we automatically acquire lots of true beliefs about trees. As Donald Davidson has argued, most of our beliefs about such things as trees and stars and wristwatches have to be true. If somebody thinks that trees are typically blue in color, and that they never grow higher than two feet, we shall conclude that whatever she may be talking about, it is not trees. There have to be many commonly accepted truths before we can raise the possibility of error. Any of these truths can be put in doubt, but not all of them at once. One can only dissent from common sense on a particular point if one is willing to accept most of the rest of what common sense says. When it comes to Reality, however, there is no such thing as common sense. Unlike the case of trees, there are no platitudes accepted by both the vulgar and the learned. In some circles, you can get general agreement that the ultimate nature of Reality is atoms and void. In others, you can get a consensus that it is God—an immaterial, non-spatio-temporal, being. The reason quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of his favorite things and claim ontological privilege for them. Despite the best efforts of positivists, pragmatists, and deconstructionists, ontology is as popular among contemporary philosophers as it was in the days of Democritus and Anaxagoras. Most analytic philosophers still take the question of whether the human mind can get in touch with the really real with perfect seriousness. My hypothesis about why ontology remains so popular is that we are still reluctant to admit that the poetic imagination sets the bounds for human thought. At the heart of philosophy's quarrel with poetry is the fear that the imagination goes all the way down—that there is nothing we talk about that we might not have talked of differently. This fear causes philosophers to become obsessed by the need to achieve direct access to reality. Direct, in this sense, means "unmediated by language"—for our language, we are uneasily aware, might well have been different. Before we can rid ourselves of ontology we are going to have to get rid of the idea of nonlinguistic access. This will entail getting rid of faculty psychology. We shall have to give up the picture of the human mind as divided into a good part that puts us in touch with the really real and a bad part that engages in self-stimulation and autosuggestion. To get rid of this cluster of bad ideas we need to think of reason not as a truth-tracking faculty but as a social practice—the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of marks and noises, thereby making it possible to use words rather than blows as a way of getting things done. We need to think of imagination not as the faculty that produces visual or auditory images but as a combination of novelty and luck. To be imaginative, as opposed to being merely fantastical, is to do something new and to be lucky enough to have that novelty be adopted by one's fellow humans, incorporated into their social practices. The distinction between fantasy and imagination is between novelties that do not get taken up and put to use by one's fellows and those that do. People whose novelties we cannot appropriate and utilize we call foolish, or perhaps insane. Those whose ideas strike us as useful we hail as geniuses. On the account of human abilities I am suggesting, the use of persuasion rather than force is an innovation comparable to the beaver's dam. Like the beavers' collaboration in getting the dam built, it is a social practice. It was initiated by the novel suggestion that we might use noises rather than physical compulsion to get other humans to cooperate with us. That suggestion gave rise to language. Rationality, thought, and cognition all began when language did. Language gets off the ground not by people giving names to things they were already thinking about but by proto-humans using noises in innovative ways, just as the proto-beavers got the practice of building dams off the ground by using sticks and mud in innovative ways. Language was, over the millennia, enlarged and rendered more flexible not by adding the names of abstract objects to those of concrete objects but by using marks and noises in ways unconnected with environmental exigencies. The distinction between the concrete and the abstract can be replaced with that between words used in making perceptual reports and those unsuitable for such use. On the view I am sketching, expressions like "gravity" and "inalienable human rights" should not be thought of as names of entities whose nature remains mysterious but as noises and marks, the use of which by various geniuses gave rise to bigger and better social practices. Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past. Beaver dams improved over the millennia as gifted beavers did novel things with sticks and mud, things that were then incorporated into standard dam-building practice. The arts and the sciences improved over the millennia because our more ingenious ancestors did novel things not only with seeds, clay, and metallic ores but also with noises and marks. What we call "increased knowledge" should not be thought of as increased access to the Real but as increased ability to do things—to take part in social practices that make possible richer and fuller human lives. This increased richness is not the effect of a magnetic attraction exerted on the human mind by the really real, nor by that mind's innate ability to penetrate the veil of appearance. It is a relation between the human present and the human past, not a relation between the human and the nonhuman. The view that I have just finished summarizing has often been called "linguistic idealism." But that term confuses idealism, which is a metaphysical thesis about the ultimate nature of reality, with romanticism, which is a thesis about the nature of human progress. William James put the latter thesis forward in the following passage: "Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the part of inventors, great or small, and imitations by the rest of us—these are the sole factors active in human progress. Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry of the patterns is the history of the world." In that passage, James is echoing Emerson, whose essay "Circles" is perhaps the best expression of the romantic view of the nature of progress. "The life of man," Emerson writes there, is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. . . . Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. . . .There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. . . . In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations. . . . Men walk as prophecies of the next age. (Emphasis added) The most important claim Emerson makes in this essay is that there is no "inclosing wall" called "the Real." There is nothing outside language to which language attempts to become adequate. Every human achievement is simply a launching pad for a greater achievement. We shall never find descriptions so perfect that imaginative redescription will become pointless. There is no destined terminus to inquiry. There are only larger human lives to be lived. As James echoed Emerson, so Emerson was echoing the romantic poets."
— Philosophy as Poetry (Page-Barbour Lectures) by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/bEt8LMx
Having the Will to Believe and Respecting the Believing of Others – A Justification of Faith in Religious Matters from The Will to Believe
PREFACE This is an essay on believing. What is a belief, and how do we come to believe? Do you believe that God exists? 'Do you believe in God?' is a question we all are asked by others and of ourselves at one time or another. The answer is either 'yes', 'no', or 'I don't know'; a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic. The theist believes in God; the atheist believes in not-God. Both believe. How do they know their belief is the true belief? What makes a belief true?
This is an essay on William James's famous essay, The Will to Believe, and the lessons to be learned from it. In his essay, James provides a justification for a believer's faith in God, and the basis for respecting the religious believing of others. He provides lessons in the psychology of believing. He shows what it means for a thing or proposition to be true. He shows how our psychological nature determines what we believe when objective proof of a fact is lacking, and how we can, through believing, create a fact. In the end, he argues that certain people, those who are strongly inclined to believe in God, ought to summon the courage to believe. Summoning courage is an act of will — the will to believe.[1]
INTRODUCTION Imagine a conversation that begins with these questions: Do you have religious faith? Do you believe the teachings of your religion are true? Do you believe the teachings of other religions are false? Do you believe that other religions' believers believe that the teachings of their religion are true and yours false? Whose teachings are true? These questions will necessarily lead to a discussion about belief, the truth of a belief, and faith. If you say you believe in God and the teachings of your particular religion, why do you? How did you come to your beliefs? Is there objective evidence of the truth of your beliefs? You can through your intellect and rational thought know that Abraham Lincoln existed, but what evidence can you provide the skeptic of God's existence?
Ultimately your answer must come down to a 'leap of faith'. You choose to believe. You know God exists because something inside of you, your very nature, tells you so...
"What I seek to demonstrate is that James's integrated view is best understood as beginning with radical empiricism - as traditionally understood from the perspective of the posthumously collected Essays in Radical Empiricism - and including pragmatism. More importantly, however, James's world-view must also be taken to incorporate several crucial modifications to these more familiar views: namely, a modified and expanded notion of rationality on a spectrum between intimacy and foreignness, and a moderately panpsychist interpretation of reality that allows for the possibility of superhuman (or "supernatural") entities or activities. On my reading it is probably better to refer to James's overall view as "radical empiricism" rather than "pragmatism," but it is also crucial to take this radical empiricism to include several critical refinements to the views familiar from Essays in Radical Empiricism."
"William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought Book 5)" by David C. Lamberth: https://a.co/c1AJiQN
Dear Brother Hobhouse,—Don't you think it a tant soit peu scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent—I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 ff.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe) in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, substitute a travesty for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from my polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk... Letters II
Mainly for me it means the pragmatist tradition, although I’ve gotten very interested recently in earlier figures like Emerson: so Emerson, Thoreau, the Concord group as well. I’m a big fan of Bruce Kuklick’s work on the history of American philosophy. But mainly I’m interested in the pragmatists and in James and Dewey more than Peirce. And then some of the neo-pragmatists: Dick Rorty and Hilary Putnam, less Bob Brandom and Huw Price, but also Cheryl Misak and Dick Bernstein. So it means basically the pragmatist tradition though I’ve started to take it back to earlier figures. I think both James and Dewey were significantly influenced by the Concord group and by Emerson in particular.
I have to say I really have a soft spot for James. There are lots of things in James that I greatly like but for me Dewey is the pinnacle. I think I say in at least one place that I think Dewey was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century—and I firmly believe that.
Sometimes James is too good a writer for his own philosophical good, so the problem is that his sense of style gets in the way, and he muddles and fuzzes some of his concepts because he can’t bear to use the same phraseology twice. That leads to unclarities and ambiguities. But there are wonderful things in James: I think “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” is a brilliant essay; I think the “The Will to Believe” is great; I think some of the early essays are fantastic; I think the Pragmatism lectures are very rich; The Varieties of Religious Experience is extraordinary. As James gets more scholarly and scholastic I think he’s less interesting.
How did you become an American philosopher?
It’s hard for me to identify as an American philosopher since I’m in danger of saying something both true and false at the same time. I actually am an American citizen, but I don’t think many people would consider me a true American. I was born in Britain and so under one description it’s a bit odd for me to say I’m an American philosopher. But I am a philosopher who is profoundly influenced by the American tradition. I’m also influenced by the logical empiricist tradition, particularly by people like Hempel and Reichenbach. I’m somebody for whom the American tradition is dominant, but it’s also inflected by Hempel, Reichenbach, and Kuhn. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a major work for me. I think it’s interesting that Kuhn himself was influenced by the pragmatists at a time when they weren’t at all fashionable. I think had Neurath lived the pragmatists and logical empiricists would have been closer. Hempel had some sympathies for Dewey. And then Ernest Nagel of course, who was Dewey’s colleague, and you can see Nagel continuing the pragmatist tradition, and you also have Quine and Goodman. Later on Putnam goes back to it in I think some very interesting ways and Ruth Anna Putnam does as well.
I’ve told the story many times about how I got interested in Dewey. I arrived at Columbia in 1999 and Isaac Levi said to me, “Look, Sidney Morgenbesser’s housebound and he’d appreciate it if you went over to visit him sometime.” So I went and I enjoyed talking to Sidney so much that I would go see him every week and I would always come out walking on air. I’d written this book called Science, Truth, and Democracy and I gave a copy to Sidney. The next time I went he said, “you sound just like Dewey. You ever read any Dewey?” And I said “no, it’s so difficult.” And Sidney said, “you need to read The Quest for Certainty” and so I went away and read it. In Dewey I found all these thoughts that I’d struggled to reach for years. I thought, my God, there’s so much in this. And then I read everything.
How would you describe your current research?
So I’ve recently been writing—in fact I’ve just published in the last year—the first two parts of what’s envisaged as a trilogy on pragmatism. The first part is a book called Moral Progress which is distinctly Deweyan and quite short and the second is is a big fat book with an Emersonian title: The Main Enterprise of the World (which comes from “The American Scholar”). Its subtitle is Rethinking Education. It began with an attempt to redo Dewey’s Democracy and Education but it just grew enormously. The third part of the trilogy is tentatively titled Homo Quaerens: Progress, Truth and Values. Now my line here is that “Homo sapiens” is a complete rubbish. We’re not “wise”. Homo cognoscens would be more accurate, but still an over-statement. “Homo quaerens”: we’re the species that inquires. We try to know, we try to find things out. In my book, I focus on inquiry, trying to craft a successor discipline to epistemology, in a Deweyan spirit. It’s an attempt to develop a theory of inquiry that will cover not just the sciences but also everyday inquiries of all sorts: inquiry into value and into mathematics and into religion and so on.
In the meantime, I have a short book coming out called What’s the Use of Philosophy? And I’m going to do another Deweyan-inspired book called Bringing Home the Goods. There’s this line in Experience and Nature where Dewey says, “as empirical fact, however, the arts, those of converse and the literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human perception” (LW 1:322) So, Bringing Home the Goods seems to me a good title for showing how works of literature bring home some really essential points. I may at some point write a short book on James. I’m having a great time just because I’ve got all this stuff inside my head that seems to want to come out.
What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?
Well, I do lots of things: I do still sometimes write in philosophy of science; I do other philosophical things. I love listening to music and I love delving into works of literature. Since the pandemic came, and after a 50-year hiatus, I started writing poetry again, so I write poetry from time to time. And I run and I like to walk and I like to go to concerts and I like to cook and I like to see my grandchildren. It’s a pretty good life.
What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?
Well, those are two different questions. My favorite works in American philosophy are written by John Dewey and I do think that Dewey is almost impossible to read unless you read more than one of his works. I’m not sure what I would pick out as my favorite work of Dewey’s: that’s terribly hard to answer. I think people should read Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, Human Nature and Conduct, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Democracy and Education, A Common Faith, and The Public and Its Problems. If we read those that would be good.
But if I had to recommend one book that we ought to be reading, I think it would either be James’ The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy or Pragmatism. Those are accessible, as single books, in a way that Dewey’s books aren’t. But what I want to say is this: read several of Dewey’s books. If that doesn’t count as an answer I’ll go either for The Will to Believe or Pragmatism, and probably Pragmatism, but there are things in The Will to Believe that I think are really important for people to read, like “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” american-philosophy.org
"INTRODUCTION THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS COUNTRY W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil Richard Rorty (1931–2007) is best known to the wider public as the philosopher who predicted Trump. During the 2016 presidential election, eerily prescient warnings from his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that existing forces of American politics might set the country on a road to fascism, went viral on social media. With neither the left nor the right showing concern for the growing economic disparities in America, he contended in 1998, a large swath of voters already experiencing the negative impact of globalization would become acutely disillusioned with the political establishment. Suffering from economic inequality and insecurity, these mostly white, working-class citizens would feel that they had nowhere to turn for advocacy on their behalf, since conservatives had neglected their interests and liberals were rejecting their values. "At that point, something will crack," he prophesied, and "the nonsuburban electorate would decide that the system had failed." They would start looking around for a populist "strongman" who would pay homage to their fears. He would be elected to the Oval Office and ultimately roll back the progressive achievements of the previous decades. "Jocular contempt for women," Rorty predicted, would come back into vogue, along with racial and ethnic epithets thought to have been defeated. "Media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war," would be manufactured to distract citizens from exploitation by the "super-rich" and "the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates" would be stoked. "This strongman leader, he concluded, "will be a disaster for the country and the world." 1 The same premises that led Rorty to predict Trump generated other predictions and warnings: predictions about a new civil war in America, a new feudalism in the West, and a new, brutal world order resulting from global overpopulation. These potential outcomes are universally grim and look even more probable now than when Rorty first envisioned them. He may well turn out to be the philosopher who predicted not only the 2016 election but the political upheavals still ahead of us. This book gathers these and other Rortyan prophecies about the dark and disturbing currents still coursing through the bodies politic in America and around the globe. It also contains essays that show that, if he were alive today, Rorty would be uneasy about the label "the philosopher who predicted Trump." Not because it diminishes the contributions to perennial philosophical subjects that made him one of the most cited American thinkers of the twentieth century. Quite the contrary, he would be uneasy about the label because, judged from the theoretical perspective he advocated, it makes his philosophical contributions look too important. It suggests that he predicted Trump thanks to some superior philosophical acumen and thereby strengthens the traditional image of philosophers as people whose special expertise allows them to see the world more clearly than everyone else. Rorty believed that image to be mistaken and argued that taking it seriously was one of the reasons why the American academic left, which he believed to be "overphilosophized," was failing miserably. These diagnoses and critiques, still of enormous relevance to understanding how the contemporary left, in the United States and elsewhere, has boxed itself into a corner, are included here as well. What Can We Hope For? also conveys Rorty's pragmatic philosophy of democratic change. It contains his recommendations for concrete reforms to ameliorate injustice and inequality and his positive vision for what safeguarding our democracy and our highest aspirations requires. He understood that the integrity of democracy depends on stable and secure institutions like a free press, a free judiciary, and free elections. He also grasped that democracy requires a moral community that must be actively cultivated, grounded in our sense of who we and our fellow citizens are and should become. These essays outline Rorty's strategies—more timely now than ever—for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust."
…
— What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/064zo9B
The debut episode ofStrange New Worlds includes a wonderful Jamesian speech from Captain Pike, to the warring parties of an alien planet the federation has contaminated with a glimpse of warp technology they weren't ready for.
“I choose to believe that your destinies are still your own. Maybe that’s why I’m here: to remind you of the power of possibility...right up until the very end life is to be worn gloriously. Because, ‘til the last moment, the future’s what we make it. So, go to war with each other. Or, join our federation of planets and reach for the stars. The choice is yours.”
That's Jamesian, on my reading, because it echoes WJ's forward-looking, risk-taking, ready-for-anything attitude of openness to possibility, of refusal to be locked into a deficient actuality. "No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance."
