WJS Newsletter (NEW!)

The newsletter will periodically announce, anticipate, and recap WJ Society events (such as the recent WJS session at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) annual meeting in Washington DC (March 13-15 2025), and will share other items of interest. Meanwhile, you can follow the William James Society at Bluesky (and follow the WJS president at Bluesky). If you have something relevantly Jamesian you’d like to share, you can submit it to president@wjsociety.org or the WJS secretary at secretary@wjsociety.org

President’s Message: Dr. Phil Oliver, WJS Presidential Address at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

Good morning. Thank you for rousing yourselves so early for this event. It’s no great sacrifice for me, long a habitue’ of the pre-dawn. Ignore the clock and embrace the hour, I say with Thoreau, “morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me… To be awake is to be alive.” Etc.

I do recognize the temperamental element involved in the varieties of auroral experience. If you’re not a morning person, your presence here is all the more gratifying. And if you flew to DC it may even be heroic, these days. Just being here at all is frankly a bit unsettling, tasked as we are with trying to cast a little Jamesian light in the shadow of so benighted a national presidency (albeit one that makes all before it, less one, shine brighter in retrospect).

But since we are here, we should rise to appreciate what Adam Gopnik has lately called our “truly unique, only-once-in-the-universe gift of consciousness. That’s some comfort. We’ll sleep long enough soon enough.” Being “woke” is not in vogue with the current DC in-crowd, but we interlopers recognize the deep appeal of eyes wide open before eternal dormancy resumes. I like Jane Fonda’s definition: being woke just means “giving a damn.”

The unfortunate timeliness of my title this morning, its allusion to these “dark times,” may need no extensive elaboration. Many of us felt the civic darkness descending well before November’s election, but I don’t think so many of us anticipated, then, the full depth and suddenness of its descent. Those of us who’ve spent decades deliberating (strolling, conversing) with William James, though, know the threat of personal darkness to be perennial for all but the “once-born”… (continues)

 

Lighting candles AND cursing darkness

[Accompanying slideshow…]

Response to 2025 WJS Presidential Address, John Shook

Phil Oliver’s reflections on William James help to remind me about recentering as a pragmatist. That’s been James’s role in my own philosophical development. The round table of philosophers from Peirce, James, and Royce to Santayana, Dewey, and Mead are only congruent through that core of James himself. They encircle together, and defend a singular approach to philosophy, thanks to a Jamesian sensibility that I feel pulsing at the heart of all of them.

They were contemporaries philosophically as well as generationally. The youngest among them, Santayana and Mead, born in 1863, became professors in 1889 and 1891 respectively, well in time to witness the 1890s eruption of pragmatism from Peirce and James at close hand. But that was an era of grand metaphysical contests among dualistic, neoKantian, Hegelian, and materialist systems. None of them satisfied our Americans, who adapted what they could and borrowed from each other in order to refine and define what they found to be livable philosophies.

It must be remembered that no less less than four original philosophies of life and knowledge emerged from the crucible of northeastern academia of the late 1800s: namely personalism, pluralism, pragmatism, and naturalism. That these philosophies were, and remain to this day, mutually conversant and cooperative was almost entirely due again to the shining example of James, who exemplified all four in harmony. His was the intellectual and spiritual canopy under which our Americans could root down their tenets and raise up their theories without crowding out the rest.

Indeed, none of their sprawling philosophies could have by themselves flourished. They fertilized each other’s conceptual soil, made niches for the other’s discoveries, balanced each other’s productivities, and together grounded a sustainable ecology for further endeavor. Together in symbiosis they were more inhabitable for the mind as well as livable for the spirit, than any of them could have been in isolation.

Their metaphysics when brought together and posed for a family portrait makes one squint hard and struggle to focus for lack of any one obvious tenet or systematic feature. That very lack should shift the eye elsewhere. There is indeed one evident commonality, illustrated well by James’s philosophy. My earlier hint is now your clue, about their collective resilience against those grand totalitarian systems so dominant during their careers.

Our Americans did not miss in their efforts to capture something essential about absolutely everything, having offered comprehensive philosophies themselves. They each beheld cosmologies and stitched epistemologies and attached axiologies. I am referring not to the breadth of their ambition or the depth of their thought, but instead to their hub centering each one’s philosophical core. James expressed that heart with all his heart in every one of his major writings and most of his occasional pieces.

Phil Oliver has pointed directly at it with his illustrations about that power of James to deliver us from bigness and grant us a moment’s peace, so long as energies are refreshed for trying again to make a difference in the only place where we can ever make any difference, right where we are still positioned. All the meaning we merit and make is generated in the here and now, or else nowhere and never.

The safest characterization to be made about our American philosophers as a collective lies in this principle:

The ultimacy of the Local.

And a corresponding self-sufficiency – a sense of presence and persistence, no matter the lure of the eternal or the security of the universal.

The primacy of the local has a message for the intellectual totalitarians: your Arches and Axioms and Abstractions actually need locality to literally make any sense whatsoever. The greatest potency and abundancy of any reality already has its ur-Ground of Being right here and right now. Philosophy in its metaphysical and cosmological mappings can stretch as far or farther than the imagination, but every spot on any map in its entirety bears the identical marker – “Here is a place to be.” Only the local in all its plenitude holds together the All and the Almighty.

No absorptions into pure absolutes, no dissolutions of stubborn objects, no frameworks for frail finitudes, no postulates to arrest doubt, and above all no imperatives to command action. The current of the cosmos runs through us, and the course of cosmic fates carries us. No mastermind beyond the skies has any right to leave us in doubt about empowering ourselves. No assembly of essences could have significance unless they make an appearance for appreciation. No laws for regimentation work better than the self-organization from little interdependencies. No nets of necessities can make anything move one millimeter or illuminate one idea. No orchestration of objectivity would convey any knowledge without incorporating every perspective. No rendering of uniform justice should strictly prevail over the just causes of individual deeds.

The view from eternity is just another perspective from which to survey what really matters, what has always only mattered, the local perspectives, the only perspectives, from where anything could be seen. The view from nowhere is a blind view of nothing for no one.

It is said that philosophy’s owl of wisdom takes flight only at dusk. Yet that owl glides through a charted woods that reaches up to the sky with every day’s light. Philosophy’s wide eyes can take in the smallest details and track the least as well as the great. Much lays in shadow, but of the absolute night, philosophy need know nothing, because there’s nothing there to follow or to fear. Here, and only here, does the ultimate find its footing and its fulfillment. Your own thoughtful pause at the sight of a bright moon over a stilled lake is imbued with more reality in that serene situation than a million multiverses in calculated multiplication.

James always told us, Your own philosophy as a well-lit way to guide your life won’t be a trackless path into oblivion. The trek you take helps to stitch together the fabric of space-time in wavey fields of fortune, hopefully making the future more habitable for those who come up after us. We can make a safe bet on a philosophy of meliorism since that attitude towards life made our own lives possible, and bearable. Totalitarianism pities smallness and counsels surrender. We reply that pessimism is the bitter betrayal of all humanity. Courage is never wasted, and sacrifice is never unrewarded, for we are weaving what is most worthy of ourselves into that meaningful tapestry of ultimate reality.

Response to 2025 WJS Presidential Address, Kevin Decker

We found out that John Kaag wouldn’t be able to attend about a week ago, so I asked Phil Oliver if I should prepare some comments as a pinch-hitter. I wasn’t able to do that over the course of the week, for this reason: while those of you at semester schools are likely luxuriating in your spring break, this week has been the final week of courses for quarter-based schools like mine.

But on the long plane ride from Washington state, I had time enough to think—and to discover that Peirce was essentially right. If you let your subconscious play around with a set of disconnected ideas for long enough, you will either muse your way to a plausible hypothesis or come up with Trump’s tariff policy. I did the former.

I appreciate Phil Oliver’s attempt to re-present William James to us as an inspiration in the current moment. We share at least two things: we both walk dogs as our “moment of Zen” and publicly hold that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is not a particularly deep thinker. On the plane ride, I re-read a number of James lectures and essays for another kind of inspiration. And “The Moral Equivalent of War” did it.

If I attempt to re-trace the thread of my Peircian musement, it probably started with the book project that I am presenting a selection from later today. I have been trying to take James’ and Dewey’s injunction against intellectualism seriously by applying pragmatism to the philosophy of craft. That effort soon blossomed into a wider look at the role of human labor in civil society, and to the eventual realization that it is not only globalization or social complexity that MAGA is reacting against, but that there has also occurred a serious weakening of the value of the dignity of work in the United States.

This is not an original thesis. It is pursued by critical theorist Axel Honneth in his new book which I highly recommend, called The Working Sovereign, and shows up in the writings of Harvard public philosopher Michael Sandel. In fact, it was in a public conversation between Sandel and French economist Thomas Piketty (published as Equality: What it Is and Why it Matters) that the new conservative attack on public goods was raised. As an antidote, Piketty and Sandel discussed introducing National Service to the US as one crucial way to attack the declines of quality, craft, personal investment, and social valorization in our lives at work. It is worth noting that in France, Emmanuel Macron introduced voluntary national service for teens aged 15 to 17 in 2021.

Which brings us back to James. “The Moral Equivalent of War” was written as a leaflet for the Association for International Conciliation. Most of the scholarly attention it has received has rightly been spent on James’ attitude toward the history of war, traditional masculine virtues, and the Spanish-American War and American imperialism in general. But if we can get past the fact, that James favors “instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population [boys only, he makes clear later] to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature”—and if we can also ignore James the pacifist conceding that “so long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war’s disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war …so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the [militarist’s] situation. And as a rule they do fail”—if we can get past both these things, then James is proposing a program for American national service that had (and I would argue), still has the potential to help reverse the loss of public goods that neoliberals and paleoconservatives seem determined to strip away from us. It provides a valid counter-narrative to “warrior” mentality for public service that the military under the loathsome drunkard Pete Hegseth represents. And as fewer high school graduates are choosing to go to college, we face the problem of how to instill cooperative, citizen virtues in the next generations. This is a concrete melioristic project.

Between 2003 and 2013, former U.S. Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) made five unsuccessful attempts to pass the Universal National Service Act, which would have required all people in the United States between ages 18 and 42 to either serve in the military or perform civilian service specifically related to national defense. This is too close to what James is rejecting in “Moral Equivalent,” and I agree that service in national defense is too narrow to serve the multifarious purposes that such a program would need to fulfill. We would not be able to invite our own “gilded youth,” as James referred to those in his time, “to get the childishness knocked out of them” “according to their choice” of project or skill set. But compulsory—but also paid—civilian national service could be modelled on FDR’s National Youth Administration in the late 30’s. And by contributing to the rebuilding of American infrastructure or even serving as hard-working American ambassadors to allies (we can get them back!), what could potentially become a “lost generation” of American youth could learn, as James put it, “to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking.” And leave the cell phones at home, kids.

Agnes Callard’s recent book delves into Socratic philosophy, emphasizing the importance of continuous inquiry. While the primary focus is on Socrates, Callard’s discussions resonate with Jamesian themes, particularly the interplay between belief and evidence.

“In ‘The Sentiment of Rationality,’ William James describes ‘the two great aesthetic needs of our logical nature, the need of unity and the need of clearness.’ There is no one who thinks like William James; he is in a league of his own.” –Agnes Callard

https://wwnorton.com/books/open-socrates

January 1, 2025: A Note from the President– Happy New Chapter!

On behalf of the society I invite you to (re-)join our growing, pluralistic community. We reflect various backgrounds, disciplines, and traditions. Some are institutionally affiliated scholars, others are independent. But all share the belief that William James’s philosophical and humanistic legacy offers something crucial our time desperately needs.

The future is (as ever) uncertain but, we Jamesians believe, is also malleable and at least partly, potentially responsive to our most thoughtful and committed exertions in the present. “The really vital question for us all,” he said, “is What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?”

James also liked to say life feels like a “real fight,” not a mere game of inconsequential “private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.” That rings at least as true in 2025 as it must have in 1884, when in Dilemma of Determinism he sought to rally his peers to the spirit of “meliorism”–of trying to improve the human prospect, without any advance guarantees of success.

But because James was a happy fighter, a seeker and celebrant of what he called our “springs of delight,” I think an organization devoted to promoting his distinctive mode of thought and action must also court joy, hope, and a resolute resilience in the face of whatever hard challenges await us.

And because he was a pluralistic humanist, we should also embrace his philosophy of ‘co’: “The pluralistic form [of philosophy] takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘co’…”

As so, my fellow James Society cohorts, we can afford neither of the twin luxuries of excessive optimism or pessimism in these challenging times. Neither of those attitudes can summon our best efforts. Let us get on with doing our small bit to try and build a better world.

The great essayist E. B. White said “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Hard, sure. But a Jamesian will insist on both.

So let us be meliorists. And let us have a good time doing it.

Happy New Year!

Phil Oliver
President, William James Society

president@wjsociety.org

2020