Friday, July 02, 2010

Rée, Jonathan. "Variety." NEW HUMANIST 25.4 (2010).

I love William James. He’s just about the only philosopher who didn’t end up as either a pettifogging nit-picker or an overbearing egomaniac with delusions of genius. He was generous too – witty, honest, modest and flexible – and more interested in promoting productive conversations than hogging the last word. He was also a brilliant writer. At first glance, his prose may look like an easy outpouring of spontaneous colloquialisms, but in fact he took great pains to make it cover lots of rough ground without any hard words and without any tired ones either. He was a brilliant phrase-maker too: inventor of “subliminal consciousness”, the “divided self” and the “sick soul”, of “mental states”, the “stream of consciousness” and, last but not least, “religious experience.” . . .

Read the rest here: http://newhumanist.org.uk/2320/variety.

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