Perpich, Diane. Review of Megan Craig, LEVINAS AND JAMES. NDPR (August 2011).

Craig, Megan.  Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Megan Craig's Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology is less an academic study of the two thinkers of the title or the two traditions of the subtitle than it is a personal journey of philosophical and aesthetic exploration. With a heightened sensitivity to images and mood, Craig rereads Levinas through the lens of James's radical empiricism, offering us a portrait of Levinas that is at once recognizable and new. Quoting James, Craig notes that philosophy "is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic," and her book clearly strives to embody the "more expansive, creative, and experimental notion of writing and reading" that James advocates (132). The book proceeds in six chapters whose titles are evocative rather than descriptive: a first approach to Levinas's thought is advanced in the two chapters titled "Insomnia" and "Faces." The connection to James's pragmatism is expanded in the middle chapters on "Experience" and "Emotion." The aesthetic dimensions of Levinas's work and their connection to ethical themes are explored in the final two chapters, respectively entitled "Poetry" and "Painting." These are followed by a concluding "Afterword" in which Craig helpfully summarizes the trajectory of the book and some of the positions it seeks to stake out. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25436-levinas-and-james-toward-a/

Vernon, Mark. "William James, Part 3: On Original Sin." GUARDIAN November 1, 2010.

Original sin is a religious doctrine that divides perhaps more than any other. For some, it only makes sense – maybe not the part about the apple and the garden, but the general idea that humankind is flawed: we do what we wouldn't do, and don't do what we would do, as St Paul put it. For others, though, original sin is vile and offensive. It feeds the fear of hell, a hopelessness about progress, and leaves us pathetically dependent on God. Each side has a radically different view of what it is to be human, and William James understands exactly what's a stake.

It follows from one of the most interesting distinctions he draws in the Varieties. There are some, he explains, who take the happiness that religion gives them to be the amplest demonstration of its truth. Then, there are others who take the remedy that religion offers for the ills of the world to be the amplest reason for its necessity. James adopts the terms "once-born" to describe the happy sort, and "twice-born" for the more pessimistic.

The link between the phrase "once-born" and the positive temperament is that these individuals believe that seeing God – or finding fulfilment, or simply living well – is no more or less difficult than seeing the sun. On some days it will be cloudy. But the skies eventually clear.

The cosmos is fundamentally good, they affirm. Human individuals are, basically, kind. Your first birth, as a baby, is the only birth that's required to see the world aright. This temperament is, James explains, "organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe." James's favourite example of the once-born is Walt Whitman. "He has infected [his readers] with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist." . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/01/williams-james-part-three

Vernon, Mark. "William James, Part 2: the Scientific Study of Religion." GUARDIAN October 25, 2011.

The Scotsman of May 1901 records how William James began the lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, "in the English class-room of [Edinburgh] University, where a crowded audience assembled". He was the kind of communicator who attracted more and more auditors as a course proceeded. When, in 1908, he gave the Hibbert lectures in Oxford, the venue had to be changed from a modest library to the vast rooms of the Examination Schools building.

"It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place behind this desk," he opened, "and face this learned audience." The reasons for his strikingly humble tone were several. American universities had only recently started to award higher degrees, so thinkers of James' generation travelled to Europe to research. James himself had no such academic qualification.

That said, it quickly became clear that he had all the boldness of the brilliant amateur. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/25/william-james-religious-experiences.

Pomerleau, Wayne P. "William James." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY February 10, 2011.

William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the most famous living American philosopher of his time. Avoiding the logically tight systems typical of European rationalists, such as the German idealists, he cobbled together a psychology rich in philosophical implications and a philosophy enriched by his psychological expertise. More specifically, his theory of the self and his view of human belief as oriented towards conscious action raised issues that required him to turn to philosophy. There he developed his pragmatic epistemology, which considers the meaning of ideas and the truth of beliefs not abstractly, but in terms of the practical difference they can make in people’s lives. He explored the implications of this theory in areas of religious belief, metaphysics, human freedom and moral values, and social philosophy. His contributions in these areas included critiques of long-standing philosophical positions on such issues as freedom vs. determinism, correspondence vs. coherence, and dualism vs. materialism, as well as a thorough analysis of a phenomenological understanding of the self and consciousness, a “forward-looking” conception of truth (based on validation and revisable experience), a thorough-going metaphysical pluralism, and a commitment to a full view of agency in connection with communal and social concerns. Thus he created one of the last great philosophical systems in Western thought, even if he did not live quite long enough to complete every aspect of it. The combination of his provocative ideas and his engaging writing style has contributed to the enduring impact of his work. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/.

Vernon, Mark. "William James: a Religious Man for Our Times: Part 1." GUARDIAN October 18, 2010.

James the man was ambivalent about the existence of God, and he has been called a humanist. But I think his fascination with what he came to call "the more" – coupled to the fact that in his crises and work alike he was obsessed by spiritual questions – demands that we think of him as a religious person. He described writing the Varieties as "my religious act". He was existentially troubled, intellectually brilliant, linguistically talented, openminded and humane. In short, he is an excellent, even necessary, person to read today if you are interested in matters to do with truth, pluralism, experience and God. This year is the centenary of his death. It's a good moment to explore his thought, as we will do in these blog posts. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/oct/18/william-james-part-one.

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.

"In the Footsteps of William James," William James Society, Harvard University, August 13-15, 2010.

A symposium on the legacy – and the on-going uses – of James's work organized by the William James Society and co-sponsored by the Chocorua Community Association and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Speakers:

Susan Gunter: "Alice Gibbens James and William James in Chocorua"
Doug Anderson: "William James in the Woods: Glenmore and Chocorua"
Charlene Haddock Seigfried: "Four Dimensions of Rationality: William James and Jane Addams"
Amy Kittelstrom: "William James and Liberal Religion: The Context Hidden in Plain Sight"
Tyson-Lord Gray: "The Contemporary Relevance of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience for Religion and Ecology"
Jacob Risinger: "William James, Romanticism, and the Varieties of Environmental Experience"
John Snarey: "All Unplanned for and Unexpected: William James on the Nature of Religious Experiences"
James Pawelski: "Beyond Healthy-Mindedness: William James, Positive Psychology and the Science of Well-Being"
Henry Greenspan: "Trauma, Testimony and Pluralistic Tolerance" (tentative)
Eric Charles: "Edwin Bissell Holt’s William James"
J. C. Hallman: "The Moral Equivalent of Paradise: William James and Utopian Thought"
Alexandra Pleshoyano: "William James’s Varieties of 'Spiritual' Experience"
Deborah Whitehead: "James’s Middle Way: Beyond Pragmatism"
Donald Crosby: "Mind and Body, Self and World in William James"
Renato Kinouchi: "Does Consciousness Still Exist?"
Nobuo Kazashi: "From James to Nishida and Soseki: Two Metamorphoses of the Jamesian Philosophy of 'Pure Experience' in Modern Japanese Thought"
Robert Richardson: "Will You or Won’t You Have It So?: James on the Will"
Miriam Strube: "Racing Pragmatism"
Trygve Throntveit: "James, Obama and Deliberative Pragmatism"
Kevin Zdiara: "Horace M. Kallen and the Legacy of William James"
Mark Franklin: "The Will to Believe and the Will to Truth"
Lee McBride: "William James and Weak Moral Objectivism"
Tadd Ruetenik: "The Book of James: Pragmatism and the Research of Gary Schwartz"
Mike Dieciuc: "James and the Resurgence of Psychedelic Research in Psychology"
Mike Leighton: "Standardized Measures in Psychical Research: Updated James Model for Detecting Causal Source of Agency"
Linda Simon: "'Life is in the Transitions': the James Centennial Exhibit"
Eugene Taylor: "William James and Contemporary Neurophenomenology"
Ezekiel Kimball: "'Old Truth' and 'New Fact' at Harvard: The Pragmatic Relationship of James and Eliot"
Richard Hall: "James on the Humanities"
James Kloppenberg: "What Makes William James Significant?"
Pamela Crosby: "The Social Value of Undergraduate Learning: William James on Educating Moral Leaders for Democracy"
Arthur Lothstein: "The Moment of Transition: Emerson, James and Radical Empiricism"

Further information is here: http://www.wjsociety.org/symposium.htm.

Putnam, Ruth Anna. Review of Francesca Bordogna's WILLIAM JAMES AT THE BOUNDARIES. NDPR (July 2009).

Bordogna, Francesca. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the Geography of Knowledge. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 2008. In her concluding paragraph Francesca Bordogna describes her book as "[a] combination of intellectual history, history of science, and what one may call 'philosophy studies'". I mention this at the outset because one must not expect this book to be a philosophical examination of James' philosophy. Just as "science studies" are not science, so Bordogna chose the characterization "philosophy studies" modestly and wisely. That said, the book is an ambitious and on the whole successful presentation of the disciplinary debates in American universities at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly as they concern drawing or transgressing boundaries between psychology and philosophy. As Bordogna sees it, William James' philosophy engaged in "boundary work". She seeks to answer the question, "Yet what prompted James in the first place to transgress the divides increasingly separating disciplines, types of discourse, and groups of investigators?" I do not find fully persuasive her attempt to show that such transgressions are essential to James' (supposed) aim of reconfiguring not only relations between scholars but also relations between citizens. Indeed, I am not persuaded that this was his aim. Nor do I believe that James' interest in abnormal and psychic phenomena played as large a role in his life as the author suggests. Nevertheless, I am a philosopher not a historian of ideas. As I already said, as history of ideas the book is successful: it provides an interesting, sometimes even gripping, account of certain issues that were very much alive a hundred and some years ago and have their analogues in today's explosion of new cross-boundaries disciplines, e.g., cognitive science. Let us turn to details. Knowledge -- both in the sense of the activity of coming to know as pursued in universities, research institutes, and industrial laboratories and also in the sense of the product of that activity -- lends itself to a geographical metaphor. There are fields, fields have boundaries, fields may be adjacent, and boundaries may be disputed or transgressed or firmly established. Philosophy, in particular, has fluid boundaries. Switching metaphors, the trunk of the tree of knowledge is philosophy while the various sciences, beginning with mathematics, followed by physics and biology, etc. are the branches that in time branched off. Various models of the organization of knowledge are discussed in chapter 7 of the book under review. By the turn of the twentieth century, psychology was sufficiently developed, one might say "sufficiently scientific", to branch off the parent tree. Thus returning now to Francesca Bordogna's geographic metaphor, boundaries between psychology and philosophy were drawn, were disputed, and were transgressed. At the same time, the place of philosophy in the university had to be renegotiated. Its earlier role as the culminating and unifying conclusion of a college education was called into question. Bordogna uses the building and the positioning of Emerson Hall at Harvard to represent one outcome of such negotiation (chapters 1 and 7). Emerson Hall, from its opening to this day, houses the offices of Harvard philosophers as well as many of the halls in which they lecture. According to James' colleague Hugo Münsterberg, Emerson Hall represented both the unification of philosophy and the drawing of its boundaries -- philosophers' studies and lecture halls were no longer scattered among the other disciplines. Meanwhile, Emerson Hall's position relative to the other buildings in Harvard Yard represented philosophy's culminating or unifying position within knowledge (or, perhaps, within the teaching of knowledge). One wishes Bordogna had provided a map. In any case, neither the geographical metaphor nor that of a tree of knowledge suits James' ultimate conception of philosophy as that which unifies knowledge by facilitating communication between the practitioners of various disciplines. A brief glance at the development of William James' position is here in order. In 1890 he published The Principles of Psychology, for many years a widely used textbook. In Principles James drew a clear line between psychology and philosophy. Psychology assumes mind-body dualism, a position inconsistent with James' ontology of pure experience. Psychology takes for granted that there is a mind-independent world and that we can and do know a lot about it. Philosophy subjects these assumptions to critical examination. Nevertheless, one can find interesting and deep philosophy in Principles. Moreover, James frequently and egregiously transgressed the boundaries between philosophy and psychology. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16566.

Miller, Cheryl. "Bad Little Fictions." CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Fall 2008).

Fisher, Paul. House of Wits: an Intimate Portrait of the James Family. Boston: Little, Brown, 2008.

Occasionally, I like to imagine my ideal dinner party. The guest list changes frequently, but George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen are always welcome at my table. Not the Jameses, however—at least not given Paul Fisher's wearying account of them in House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. By turns self-pitying, hypochondriacal, and—it cannot go unmentioned—sexually repressed, a more frustrated (and frustrating) clan of eminent Victorians one could scarcely imagine. In any event, the scheduling would be a nightmare, what with their many engagements and even more numerous nervous breakdowns. House of Wits might have been much more aptly titled "House of Fits." The trouble begins on the very first page, where Fisher, currently a professor of American literature at Wellesley, arranges epigraphs from Nietzsche and psychologist Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child (1983). Yes, it's that kind of book. Success, the Nietzsche selection declares, is the "biggest liar," and "great men" are "bad little fictions invented afterwards." The Miller quotation is all sympathetic psychobabble, with the poor "gifted child" suffering the agonies of "depression," "emptiness," and "self-alienation." There is no better summary of House of Wits: Fisher takes his "great men" and lays them out on the psychiatrist's couch, where he exposes the "gifted children" within, their fragile psyches still bruised from childhood traumas. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1576/article_detail.asp.

Stikkers, Kenneth W. Review of Sergio Franzese's THE ETHICS OF ENERGY: WILLIAM JAMES MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN FOCUS. NDPR (May 2009).

Franzese, Sergio. The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2008. Every scholar and reader of William James is aware of his frequent uses of "energy," especially in his discussions of ethics and most notably in his 1906 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, "The Energies of Men". But while other interpretations treat James's use of "energy" as merely one of his several folksy metaphors, The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus is the first monograph, as its author, Sergio Franzese, rightly claims, to focus upon "energy" as a central concept in James's ethics. Ethics, for James, is not about values, goods, or principles but about the organization of energy, especially into habits, in the service of personal, aesthetic ideals. As such this book is an original and valuable addition to the literature on James, and it does much to bring James into closer dialogue with other recent efforts to rethink ethics without appeal to some rule of reason, whether it be in the form of an utilitarian calculus or a categorical imperative. Such efforts include those of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Franzese discusses extensively, Max Scheler, whom he mentions only briefly (51-52), and especially Michel Foucault, whom he does not mention at all. Previous scholars have missed the importance of "energy" in James's philosophy, and thereby have misunderstood his ethics, because, Franzese argues (11-17), they have uncritically followed Ralph Barton Perry's early interpretation of James's 1891 essay "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" as an outline of some new ethical theory and thus missed the truly revolutionary thrust of that essay. Rather than merely adding one more ethical theory to the lot, James's essay was a radical assault upon ethical theory as such, "a critical analysis of the validity of any moral theory," "intended to show the futility of that traditional philosophical task" (3). The essay aimed to clear the ground for the rethinking of ethics radically anew, to rethink it, as the title implies, in relation to life, rather than as theory abstracted from life. Furthermore, James was not merely cashing in on the popular use of "energy" in his day, as he did with so many other popular terms. "Energy" meant for him no metaphysical substance but rather activity -- living itself (166) -- and for James the pluralist there could be no singular, universal form of right living. The task of ethics is therefore not to prescribe theoretically the features of some universal Good, under which all particular goods are to be arranged and to which all moral agents must submit, but to organize practically the energies of life in service to one's own personal and ideally unified desires and demands against evil, namely, against "limits on the full and free expression of human life" (7): "the ethics of energy does not set moral aims and values"; rather, "it is . . . the way in which one becomes the master and author of one's own energy" (199). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15926.

Pub: WILLIAM JAMES STUDIES 3.1 (2008).

American Philosophical Association Conference Papers:

• Human Blindness (2007 Presidential Address) by John Lachs
• Blindness, Vision and the Good Life for All: Comment on John Lachs' "Human Blindness" by David E. Leary
• The 'Riven' Self as Remedy to "a Certain Blindness" by Frederick J. Ruf

Submitted Essays:

• Flowers in the Desert: F. C. S. Schiller's [Unpublished] Pragmatism Lecture by Mark J. Porrovecchio
• The Concept of Truth that Matters by Laura E. Weed
• Investigations into the William James Collection at Harvard: an Interview with Eugene Taylor by Thibaud Trochu
• "The Many and the One" and the Problem of Two Minds Perceiving the Same Thing by Mark Moller

Review Essay:

• Pragmatism in the 21st Century by Wesley Cooper

Book Reviews:

• The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture. By John J. McDermott by Erin McKenna
• The Dynamic Individualism of William James. By James Pawelski by Doug Anderson
• Brazil through the Eyes of William James: Diaries, Letters, and Drawings, 1865-1866. Edited by Maria Helena P.T. Machado by Douglas McDermid
• The Soul of Classical American Philosophy: The Ethical and Spiritual Insights of William James, Josiah Royce, and Charles Sanders Peirce. By Richard P. Mullin by Mathew A. Foust

Visit the journal homepage here: http://williamjamesstudies.press.uiuc.edu/.