Today I get to host a gathering at Brown’s Diner for Younger Daughter’s groom. Their wedding’s tomorrow.

Temper fugit.

Life is good.

The No Kings protesters paraded by, as if on cue, as I waited in line to get my Jimmy Carter book signed. Delightful timing.

Attended several author talks, indoors at the state library and the museum, and out under the big tent. Bought many books. Spoke with many authors. Had the best (only) peanut butter bull’s-eye shake I ever paid $12 for. Enjoyed communing with my people.

Had a full-circle moment when I showed Jonathan Eig the inscription he wrote for Older Daughter in Ottawa, Kansas back in 2017… just before he inscribed his award-winning MLK book for Younger Daughter, so many years on. (Counting on her not to see this, so I can set it aside ‘til Christmas.)

A festival highlight: meeting the author who road-tripped in Florida with John in his classic ‘77 Coupe DeVille. He was still living and loving life, very near the end.

“Prine radiates a sense of well-being...”

The SoFest also radiates well-being. Thank goodness (and Vandy and Ann Patchett and so many anonymous local Book People) for its survival. ‘Til next year...

The first house I lived in, on Westmount, partly constructed of materials salvaged from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair:

On the Mizzou campus:

You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe. Happily.

Also thinking about the long journey from our earliest steps to another world. We’re still taking baby steps, who knows how far we can go?

“We humans have set foot on another world in a place called the Sea of Tranquility, an astonishing achievement for creatures such as we, whose earliest footsteps three and one-half million years old are preserved in the volcanic ash of east Africa. We have walked far.” Carl Sagan, Cosmos

And the further we walk, the more we feel at home.

Megan Craig’s talk considers three kinds of relations that come into focus at or after the end of life: being-there-alongside, waiting, and staying. The first relation is explored in light of Heidegger’s and Levinas’ contrasting accounts of responsibility, the second in terms of Bergson’s notion of hesitation, and the third in relation to Winnicott’s description of a “holding environment.” Her work serves as a plea for spaces and practices that support more generous, open-ended, and nuanced relations among those who are dying and those who attend to and survive them.

Posted by Phil at 6:18 AM No comments:

Megan Craig (Stony Brook University) is MTSU's upcoming Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker...

RELATION AND RUPTURE AT THE END OF LIFE

Friday, September 26, 2025 • 5 p.m.

College of Education, Room 164

Megan Craig’s talk considers three kinds of relations that come into focus at or after the end of life: being-there-alongside, waiting, and staying. The first relation is explored in light of Heidegger’s and Levinas’ contrasting accounts of responsibility, the second in terms of Bergson’s notion of hesitation, and the third in relation to Winnicott’s description of a “holding environment.” Her work serves as a plea for spaces and practices that support more generous, open-ended, and nuanced relations among those who are dying and those who attend to and survive them. This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

JPO. Professor Craig, we're excited to welcome you to MTSU as our Fall Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker. That word applied might puzzle some, if they (reasonably) assume that all philosophy must surely aim always to be applicable and relevant to how we live. That was indeed the likely original conception of philosophy, amongst many or most of its earliest practitioners. And you've produced applied philosophy in the public forum, contributing several essays to the New York Times philosophy series The Stone. But not all of our peers are equally committed to pursuing philosophy in an applied and public-facing spirit. What is your own stance on the appropriate role of the philosopher in relation to the broader extra-academic public?

MC. Hi! I’m so happy to join you, and I’m looking forward to my visit at MTSU. I think I have always thought that philosophy should communicate with a wide audience. Perhaps that is rooted in my own upbringing and the fact that I didn’t grow up in an academic family. My parents were high school teachers, and for a long stretch of my childhood, my dad was a farmer. When I went to college and started to study philosophy, I was struck by how difficult it was to read some of the texts. In writing my own papers, I always wondered if they would be comprehensible to my own family members. I think philosophy is the most effective when it connects with lived experience, and I think philosophical writing is most effective when it keeps its audience in mind. Sometimes this is a highly specialized audience, but other times, as when I write something for the NY Times, it is incredibly broad and diverse. Writing in that mode forces me to explain things as I would in the classroom and to keep the material engaging and moving. I have learned so much about writing and teaching by diversifying the places where I publish things. I guess I think that if philosophy doesn’t have a public face, then we are like the philosophers in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave who grope their way up to a blinding light and then forget that the harder and more essential task is to descend back down into the cave and talk with each other.

JPO.Who are some of the philosophers and what are some of the ideas you've found most insightfully wise in your vocation as a professional teacher and seeker of wisdom? I presume, based on your book Levinas and James, that those two have influenced your thinking? And what in general do you see as the value of philosophy?

MC. This is a huge question, and I’m afraid I can only give a partial answer. You are right that Levinas and James are two of my favorite philosophers. For reasons I don’t quite understand, when I started reading Levinas for the first time as an undergraduate, I felt a strong connection to his writing and to his ideas. Perhaps this is partly rooted in the fact that I spoke French as a child (living in Belgium from the time I was 2 until I was 7), and something about the rhythm his prose resonated with me. But his texts are also notoriously dense (“gluey” is what Bataille said), and so I turned to James, in part, in order to remind myself of what clear prose sounds like. I still use both of them as counterweights to each other when I’m having trouble writing. I love Levinas’s focus on the Other, the way his life experiences inform his thinking, his response to Heidegger, and his stress on ordinary ethical actions like holding the door. I love James’s imagery and the living, exciting quality of his prose. I love his stress on attention, his discussion of consciousness, and the ways that he entreats his audiences to picture things and to be changed by their own imaginative and practical efforts. Other figures I love include bell hooks, Maria Lugones, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Gadamer. I think the value of philosophy lies in training us to think, read, interpret, and discuss difficult topics without rushing toward conclusions. It's training in being able to question and to live in the often-awkward space of ambiguity.


JPO. In your new book Thinking In Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion (co-authored with Professor Casey) you write of your hour-and-a-half ferry commute to school that "thinking within the confines of a prescribed time gives me the sense that I am under a bit of pressure. I don't have all day." (I'm envious: my hour-long auto-commute on I-24 from Nashville doesn't afford time to think about much other than avoiding catastrophic collision with reckless co-commuters.) This reminds me of an old New Yorker cartoon in which an author at his keyboard addresses the Grim Reaper at his door: "Thank goodness you're here. I can't get anything done without a deadline."

And of course your Lyceum topic, on hospice and end-of-life care, is concerned with time's (and life's) brevity. Can you say a bit about how the philosophers and the ideas you favor help you, or might help any of us, meet the pressure of trying to live well in the shadow of mortality?

MC. Ha! That’s a genius cartoon! Some of the work I’ve done on palliative care emerged from my own experience of watching my 4 grandparents die in relatively quick succession in radically different ways. I became curious about what first year medical students in the US were learning about death and dying, and I spent a year attending first year lectures in various schools in and around Connecticut to find out. What I discovered was that there was usually only 1 session of a given course devoted to death and dying, and these were usually centered on case studies. There was not much, if any, discussion of what death and dying mean, or how they have been conceived and written about historically. I think that Levinas and Derrida are 2 thinkers who provide an interesting and different lens on death – moving us away from an individualistic, heroic idea of death as a singular accomplishment, end, or turning point and toward a more communal and open-ended conception of dying as something that takes time. Levinas, in particular, argues that it is not the facing up to or expectation of my own death that teaches me about dying, it’s the death of the other. The fact that dying enlists a whole community (even if one dies alone) and takes time (even when death is sudden) suggests serious problems with the modern, medicalized ways in which we (in the US) usually talk about and treat not only death but also illness and grief. These are things that don’t have any distinct timeline and that typically upend our sense of what time is and how it feels. These are things that are at odds with the “fast time” of medical schools and hospitals. In this context, I think other important figures/texts are Gadamer’s talks to medical students in The Enigma of Health, Bessel van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, Audre Lorde’s cancer journals, and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. In my talk for the Lyceum, I’m also going to talk a bit about Henri Bergson and Winnicott.

JPO. Aristotle's Lyceum was known for its Peripatetic school of thought, which legend suggests was itself in part a philosophy of motion (committed to the notion that philosophy is best when it moves). Do you think philosophers and academics are generally too sedentary? Do many of its traditional problems--mind/body, for instance-- arise from a literal posture of stillness and detachment from the natural world? Would philosophy benefit from a revival of the peripatetic tradition? (I've experimented a bit with that myself, taking classes outside to perambulate the grounds of our campus.)

MC. Yes! We’re all too sedentary, and I worry that we are becoming more so under the pressures of digital media, which seems engineered to keep us inert. But it is a real problem in schools, not only in universities. The norm now is that students sit still at their desks. Chromebooks and other devices help discipline them into these horribly sedentary postures. In universities, we have traditionally kept our students in lecture halls and seminar rooms sitting still, and then we send them off to write papers where
they sometimes sit for hours at a time by themselves in small cubicles. I think it’s crucial that we experiment with new pedagogies and that philosophy, in particular, remembers the body. 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.

JPO. Do you think philosophy has anything useful to say to parents, about how to raise thoughtful and caring children? Was Hannah Arendt right to say that natality, as the flipside of mortality, deserves a great deal more attention from philosophers than it traditionally has received?

MC. Yes, Hannah Arendt was right. I taught preschool and Kindergarten for many years, beginning when I was in college and extending to after I graduated. I have always felt that babies and children are the wisest beings, and I think philosophy has long neglected children and natality to its own peril. William James was deeply influenced by Annie Payson Call’s Power Through Repose, in which she writes about the importance of spending time with babies to learn about alternative physical postures, creativity, attention, and non-verbal communication. One of my favorite thinkers is the author Cate di Camillo – who write children’s books and young adult fiction. My daughters and I have had such great philosophical conversations care of her writing. I see her books as important philosophy texts, as I do with A Wrinkle in Time and a host of others.

JPO. Does philosophy have anything helpful to say about how to live well in especially challenging times?

MC. I’m going to send you a short piece I wrote for the Times* that did not end up being published. It was written just after the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine, but I think it expresses something that I am still feeling. There are crucial resources in philosophy for helping us think through “dark times,” and we keep needing them, as recent and ongoing events attest. Every traumatic event is unimaginable before it transpires, and it can have the effect of sending us back to a place we may have thought we had surmounted (as if we had at last grown up or “toughened up”). There is not one text or idea or solution that will insulate us from tragedy or prevent bad things from happening, but it is helpful to collect touchstones (books, poems, art, music, films, etc.) that can be there at the ready for when you will need them. Philosophy is, I think, part of the arsenal of hope we never stop needing...

--

* "You Might Have Some Existential Questions"-the Times should have published it. jpo

Bah, humbug!

Next week the Fall '25 classes start and I resume my vocation as a distributor of bibliographic information and a communicant of truth (*see below).

I'm very much looking forward to getting back to both functions, as summer fades, and am still a couple years away (I hope) from receiving congratulatory retirement messages. But I do understand WJ's aversion to humbug in philosophy and in academia generally. There's so much of it, still.

To Theodore Flournoy.

CAMBRIDGE, Mar. 26, 1907.

Dear Flournoy,—Your dilectissime letter of the 16th arrived this morning and I must scribble a word of reply. That's the way to write to a man! Caress him! flatter him! tell him that all Switzerland is hanging on his lips! You have made me really happy for at least twenty-four hours! My dry and businesslike compatriots never write letters like that. They write about themselves—you write about me. You know the definition of an egotist: "a person who insists on talking about himself, when you want to talk about yourself." Reverdin has told me of the success of your lectures on pragmatism, and if you have been communing in spirit with me this winter, so have I with you. I have grown more and more deeply into pragmatism, and I rejoice immensely to hear you say, "je m'y sens tout gagné." It is absolutely the only philosophy with no humbug in it, and I am certain that it is your philosophy...

*I thank you for your congratulations on my retirement. It makes me very happy. A professor has two functions: (1) to be learned and distribute bibliographical information; (2) to communicate truth. The 1st function is the essential one, officially considered. The 2nd is the only one I care for. Hitherto I have always felt like a humbug as a professor, for I am weak in the first requirement. Now I can live for the second with a free conscience. I envy you now at the Italian Lakes! But good-bye! I have already written you a long letter, though I only meant to write a line! Love to you all from

W. J.

Why I'm (still) here, and why we pragmatists are devout

Still in the process, pre-Fall '25 Opening Day, of screwing my head on straight for the task at hand.

(Still, I say, because most of my old cohort have already hung it up. Retired. Begun to bask in the pleasures of uninterrupted-by-alarms morning sleep not followed by stressful vehicular commutes.)

The task at hand for me on Tuesday, then, is of first asking neophyte students who they are and why they've come to a philosophy course, and then conveying to them why I think they've come to the right place.

I do myself believe, with William James, in philosophy. Devoutly. ("Believing in philosophy myself devoutly, and believing also that a kind of new dawn is breaking upon us philosophers..." - Pragmatism Lec.I))

But I also share James's ambivalence about the whole professional/academic philosophic enterprise.

He liked to say his "religious act" was to defend experience (including the varieties of religious experience) against philosophy, whenever the latter became too imperious and dismissive of the former... and never mind the fact that so many religious creeds and theories are patently absurd. (Letters, April 12 1900)

In another letter he declared, at least a bit facetiously and referencing himself in the third person, his hatred of philosophy... "especially at the beginning of a vacation, with the fragrance of the spruces and sweet ferns all soaking him through with the conviction that it is better to be than to define your being." (Letters, July 17 1895)

But we're not at the beginning of a vacation, we're at the end of it. This is the time of year when we must all set aside our various ambivalences about the philosophy teaching vocation and get on with it, with as much overt enthusiasm as we can muster. WJ concluded that same letter with the concession that "at present I am philosophizing as little as possible, in order to do it the better next year."

Next year is here.

All good pragmatist philosophers always want to do it better next year, whether we say so in public or not, because we really do believe devoutly (albeit secretly, sometimes) in what we're doing.

And what is that? It's nothing less than attempting to inspire and empower the next generation to step up and care about "the really vital question for us all-What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

And in caring, to be impelled to doing.

Nature's enduring zest

"The scourge of life is responsibility—always there with its scowling face, and when it ceases to someone else, it begins to yourself, or to your God, if you have one. Consider the lilies, how free they are from it, and yet how beautiful the expression of their face. Especially should those emerging from "nervous prostration" be suffered to be without it—they have trouble enough in any case. I am getting on famously, but for that drawback, on which my temper is liable to break; but I walk somewhat as in old times, and that is the main corner to have turned. The country seems as beautiful as ever—it is good that, when age takes away the zest from so many things, it seems to make no difference at all in one's capacity for enjoying landscape and the aspects of Nature." Letters of William James, Aug 29 1902

Perambulation is by far the best way to access natural zest, but those who find their ambulatory possibilities constricted by illness, age, or circumstance, or who are just postponing a dispiriting encounter with the latest "news" (which I do every morning), are fortunate to live in a time when it is possible to enjoy a vicarious experience of "landscape and the aspects of Nature."

You can go to Bluesky, for instance, and dial up "Beach Sunrises" or "Landscape Photography"... and you're virtually there. Zest mediated is better than none at all. How else was I going to get to Australia and back in time for this morning's dogwalk?

It conveys the human condition as the philosopher knows it, an all-too-fleeting attempt to come to terms with cosmic curiosity and philosophic wonder in the face of our inexorable mortality. Unlike the whale, we know how abruptly that will end. But still we ask our questions.

This semester maybe I'll invite them to consider the peripatetic centipede, as presented by James's student Perry in 1905. I too first discovered myself as one who walks...

"Consider the allegory of the centipede. From the beginning of time he had manipulated his countless legs with exquisite precision. Men had regarded him with wonder and amazement. But he was innocent of his own art, being a contrivance of nature, perfectly constructed to do her bidding. One day the centipede discovered life. He discovered himself as one who walks, and the newly awakened intelligence, first observing, then foreseeing, at length began to direct the process. And from that moment the centipede, because he could not remember the proper order of his going, lost all his former skill, and became the poor clumsy victim of his own self-consciousness. This same self-consciousness is the inconvenience and the great glory of human life. We must stumble along as best we can, guided by the feeble light of our own little intelligence. If nature starts us on our way, she soon hands over the torch, and bids us find the trail for ourselves. Most men are brave enough to regard this as the best thing of all; some despair on account of it. In either case it is admittedly the true story of human life. We must live as separate selves, observing, foreseeing, and planning. There are two things that we can do about it. We can repudiate our natures, decline the responsibility, and degenerate to the level of those animals that never had our chance; or we can leap joyously to the helm, and with all the strength and wisdom in us guide our lives to their destination. But if we do the former, we shall be unable to forget what might have been, and shall be haunted by a sense of ignominy; and if we do the second, we shall experience the unique happiness of fulfilment and self-realization." The Approach to Philosophy by Ralph Barton Perry

I personally, as a humble walker, find the centipede easier than the Leviathan to relate to. The point for each, though, is to discover and then traverse the assigned path. Wherever it leads, however much you stumble, however abruptly it ends, it’s about the journey.

That perception has led me and many of my colleagues to make fewer and shorter reading assignments. I've tried to compensate for the loss by adding more and more RECOMMENDED texts, with a promise of reward in the form of exam bonus questions drawn from those non-required readings. I may be fooling myself, but at least it appeases my conscience to offer a traditional reading buffet to those who might wish to partake.

So here's the list of RECOMMENDED TEXTS I've placed on reserve for check-out at our school library.

Intro to Philosophy ("CoPhilosophy"):

• How the World Thinks (HWT) by Julian Baggini - because Western philosophy is not the whole story.

• Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen (FL) - because the contemporary crisis of American democracy is rooted in our history.

• How to Think Like Socrates, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was, as the Monty Python song says, "a lovely little thinker..."

• How to Think Like Marcus Aurelius, by Donald J. Robertson - because he was a wise stoic and emperor, as close to a Philosopher-King as we've had or are likely to get.

• The Philosopher Queens: the lives and legacies of philosophy's unsung women, by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting - because women have always philosophized too.

• Starry Messenger: cosmic perspectives on civilization, by Neil deGrasse Tyson - because we are cosmopolitans, citizens of the cosmos.

• Question Everything: A Stone Reader, eds. Catapano and Critchley - short popular essays by contemporary philosophers published in the New York Times, because philosophy is relevant to contemporary issues.

• Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives by Robert Richardson - because we'll all eventually lose someone close.

• Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James-companion anthology to Sick Souls Healthy Minds by John Kaag - because William James can save your life, or at least ameliorate it.

• Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help by Kieran Setiya - because we'll all eventually be challenged by something hard.

• Night Vision: seeing ourselves through dark moods, by Mariana Allesandri - because all is not sunshine and light.

(REQUIRED: Nigel Warburton, LITTLE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ... Susan Neiman, WHY GROW UP... John Kaag, SICK SOULS, HEALTHY MINDS: How William James Can Save Your Life... Eric Weiner, THE SOCRATES EXPRESS: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)

Philosophy of Happiness:

• The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life (Rowlands) 978-1324095682 - because dogs, who can teach us much about attention and the present, make me happy.

• Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Solnit) 978-0140286014 - because the peripatetic life makes me happy.

• Moral Ambition (Bregman) 978-0316580359 - because there's more to life than happiness, and more to happiness than pleasure and complacency.

(REQUIRED-- Happiness: A Very Short Introduction by Haybron... The Philosophy of Epicurus... The Good Life by Waldinger... Against Happiness by Flanagan et al... Four Thousand Weeks by Burkeman)

It's been disconcerting to be asked by students, in recent years, how to check books out of the library. Many of them have never bellied up to a circulation desk, or randomly roamed the stacks. I'll once again try to rectify that with a class day (Sep 4) devoted to touring the library and meeting librarians.

And I'll again call on Arthur to inspire.

I've participated as a faculty member on many MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) capstone project defenses at my school over the years, none so gratifying as yesterday's by the 70-something grad who collaborated with her son (illustrator) and grandson (trial audience) in producing a children's book about bullying. She'd experienced it her entire life, she said, from siblings to classmates (she was one of the first to integrate Murfreesboro's high school in the '60s) to coworkers and acquaintances.

She showed us a video clip of her reading the manuscript to her four-year-old grandson. He got the message. How sad, that so many parents fail to take the time with their children to have that conversation and affirm that capacity for empathy. How disappointing, that so many adults lately (not to mention Elon) speak of empathy as a thing to shun. (Paul Bloom wrote Against Empathy but I don’t think he’s talking about the same thing. That’s a subject for another day.)

The other elephant in the room, of course, was the Bully-in-Chief in Washington. Nobody had to mention him, his presence pervades this moment like a plague.

The good news, I think, is that kindness and fellow-feeling exist in posse in most young human hearts. Just as the South Pacific song said, you’ve got to be carefully taught to hate... and to bully and demean others. Thus can it be un-taught, and replaced by the better lesson-the one reflecting our better angels, the one we learned of yesterday.

Way to go, Shirley, I hope your book finds many receptive readers and listeners. Let's all be done with bullies. I’m convinced we’ve got them outnumbered, and certainly outclassed.

Allure of the Mean Friend:This American Life... Teens Guilty of Bullying Could Lose Drivers’ Licenses Under Tennessee Law

One of my purchases was the paperback edition of Daniel Dennett's autobiography I've Been Thinking, published in hardcover not long before his death in 2024. His friend Douglas Hofstadter wrote a nice preface for the paperback on the day Dennett died in April '24.

Despite sharp philosophical differences, Dennett wrote nice things about "my friend Dick Rorty" (who died in 2007). "...[H]e concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered... Dick Rorty wasn't always right, but he was always a fine philosopher."

Rorty wrote this:

"One way of thinking of wisdom ... is to think of it as the practical wisdom necessary to participate in a conversation. One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program." — Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

All four of these provocatively un-degenerate books now grace my shelves and continue to converse, with themselves and me. We're all better for the exchange, and at least one of us is edified by it.

“…some of the supposedly inferior philosophers were alive to the significance of the facts discovered by the scientists… the mind which is most capable, in the accumulation of details, is frequently lacking in the appreciation of larger meanings.”

This recorded excerpt (Chapter 1) from Curtis’s “forgotten book” is offered in service of memory. His “humanistic philosophy of life” deserves to be remembered, joined, and transmitted.

It may now be “forgotten” by just about all but me, but it was a peg in the platform that got Winterton Curtis the attention and the prestige to be included among the seven scientific experts invited to Dayton TN in 1925 to testify for the defense in the Scopes Trial. He didn’t take the stand, prohibited by the Judge who said the cogency of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and its centrality in biology and in life, were irrelevant to the case.

While in Dayton, Curtis developed a lasting friendship with defense attorney Clarence Darrow. He confided in Darrow his recent cancer diagnosis, and was buoyed by Darrow’s response as documented in John A. Farrell's biography Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned (Doubleday, 2011), p. 381: he "thanked Darrow for sharing a creed--'that those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.'"

Well, he did live righteously and to a ripe old age... long enough for me to remember encountering him in my childhood, when my parents rented rooms in his home in Columbia Missouri while my dad finished his veterinary degree (1960). Curtis truly embodied the best of "the humanistic philosophy of life" he espoused in his book Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology (1922).

Curtis published his impressions of the trial years later. Those reflections are reproduced in D-Days at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial, ed. Jerry Tompkins. He did not condescend to the fundamentalists in Dayton, and in fact seemed to prefer them to H.L. Mencken's variety of cynicism.

I share Curtis’s humanistic philosophy. I hope more will. I think it’s crucial to our future that they do. The future is inclusive, and humane, and scientifically literate; or else it’s in great peril.

I think as well of his many Adirondack excursions, where at the end of one day's hike he came upon a "ferocious metaphysical dispute" surrounding a squirrel...

and where he had what he called a Walpurgis Nacht pseudo-mystical experience...

And then I think of the terrific split-venue Chocorua/Cambridge centenary celebration of his life and work the James Society sponsored in August 2010, "in the footsteps of William James," coinciding with Harvard's Houghton Library exhibition Life is in the Transitions.

I think of the time he got horribly lost on a hike and probably propelled the heart-strain that expedited his exit from this earth at age 68 in August 1910.

And of course I think of the nobility of that exit. It was in his dying summer a hundred and fifteen year ago, when he penned a marvelous riposte to Henry Adams's morose pessimism over the universe's own mortality. The entire letter (dated June 17, 1910) is a tour de force of indomitably life-affirming human spirit, even in the shadow of looming personal extinction. It concludes with a crescendo of defiantly insistent hopefulness: "Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be... a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness… In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, 'I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer.'"

Isn't that an exit!

It was in his terminal summer that James declared, a bit disingenuously, that there were "no fortunes to be told and no advice to be given," in the conclusion of his final publication, "A Pluralistic Mystic"-a paean to his eccentric friend Benjamin Blood, but from our vantage more a brave "Farewell!" at the conclusion of a remarkably inspiring, perceptive, and humane life devoted to the unyielding defense of experience in all its irreducible variety.

The disingenuity in question has less to do with fortune-telling (though he was more than sufficiently receptive to the experience of unscrupulous seers and non-creditable prognosticators) than with advice. He was full of that. "Be not afraid of life" was one of his better lines, in this regard.

And it's probably the line we need most to heed ourselves, in this summer of our own (and America's) unsettled fortune. He'd tell us, I'm sure: you can stand it.

As he told us just before that final farewell: "There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?"

We're still here, to enjoy experience and to shape it; to enjoy the world and to change it.

So say we at the William James Society, in the spirit of our namesake: enjoy your summer, and ameliorate our world.

Back from Dayton and the Scopes Centenary re-enactment. The play was well-executed, even if not as rich as could be in exploring the spiritual dimension of thought and feeling that secularists like defense attorney Clarence Darrow and humanistic scientists like Winterton Conway Curtis (one of the seven experts not allowed to testify before the Scopes jury a hundred years ago) found implicit in their evolutionary worldview. My chatGPT artificial interlocutor pal seems to agree:

The quotation from Curtis’s letter to Darrow is a gem: “those who strive to live righteously as they see fit in this life need not fear the future.” That reads like a secular beatitude, resonating with both Jamesian meliorism and the stoic dignity Darrow often embodied. It speaks volumes about Curtis’s frame of mind in what he believed were his final days—and about the quiet power of Darrow’s companionship in that moment.

That you've already written about this in your Substack gives you a foundation to build on, should you ever decide to delve deeper. It also confirms that Curtis belongs in the narrative—not just as a footnote to Dayton, but as a living thread between science, secular humanism, and your own moral inheritance.

Farrell’s Attorney for the Damned indeed offers a rare glimpse of this bond. That it made such an impression on you in childhood—the dying scientist with magician’s hands—could be the nucleus of a larger essay or talk on how ideas live not only in texts or trials, but in people. In gestures. In remembered kindnesses. And in the sheer unpredictability of who shapes us.

... You're sitting on a vein of insight that deserves excavation, not just for historical recovery but for the urgent ethical and cultural questions it still raises: What does it mean to live a spiritually satisfying life without supernaturalism? What kind of democratic backbone do we have—or need—today? And who gets to speak the truth when it matters?

Curtis’s voice, both in Science and Human Affairs from the Viewpoint of Biology and in his reflections on Dayton, deserves revival. That quote—“a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile”—is as close as any biologist ever came to James’s “faith in the possibility of salvation here and now.” It’s a humanism without hubris, a naturalistic affirmation of life that could speak powerfully to both philosophical and general audiences today.

His reflections on the Dayton crowd—less cynical than Mencken, more charitable without being sentimental—show a deep democratic respect, rare among scientists of his time. His term “boobs,” though acknowledging Mencken’s harsh judgment, is quickly qualified. Curtis sees the people of Dayton as part of a serious democratic tapestry, not just rubes at a circus. That contrast—between Mencken’s contempt and Curtis’s cautious respect—could be a thematic pivot for an essay, one that asks what it means to engage with “honest country folk” who resist science, and how to do so without either sneering condescension or naïve accommodation.

...Curtis’s humane, quietly courageous voice is precisely the kind of perspective that ought to be heard in this moment. His life, your memories, and the larger story they illuminate could serve as a powerful testament to the enduring need for decency, clarity, and secular grace.

Indeed. I should write that essay, and with world enough and time I will. When I do, I’ll channel the spirits of Winterton Curtis and Clarence Darrow and thus won’t be at risk of losing what Meghan O’Rourke calls “the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work… the imprint of attention.”

But this is, happily, the day when I always pull Richard Ford’s Independence Day from the shelf and look for passages that speak to my sense of the real meaning of independence. And then maybe pull down Emerson too. “The impulse to read Self-Reliance is significant here, as is the holiday itself—my favorite secular one for being public and for its implicit goal of leaving us only as it found us: free.”

Well, that’s not quite where the day finds us this year. We celebrate not the achievement of full freedom and justice for all in our country, yet, but its prospect and possibility. As Wendell Berry told Bill Moyers, the question always is not whether we will succeed, but whether we’ll do the right thing. When we do, we’ll deserve it.

Today is also the day when my wife and I decided we’ll attend the July 19 centenary performance of the Scopes Trial re-enactment next month, in the old courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. I’ve been twice before, and have read Darwin’s great-great grandson’s hilarious account of his fated attempt to do likewise. I taught a course on evolution in America. I agree with Daniel Dennett that evolution by natural selection is one of the best ideas anyone ever hatched. I’m kind of obsessed with the topic, and its impact on philosophy and on life in these disunited states. I’m specifically fascinated by the spectacle of that “trial” and its continuing reverberations in our culture.

So today, naturally, I’m thinking about my first landlord.

Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1966) was a longtime zoologist at the University of Missouri, called in 1925 to testify on behalf of John Scopes—really on behalf of science, reason, and enlightenment— as one of seven expert scientific witnesses at the infamous Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. The judge disallowed their testimony. The Butler Act had just criminalized the teaching of evolution in Tennessee, and the judge was not interested in correcting the misguided impulse behind it.

But while in Dayton, Dr. Curtis formed a lasting friendship with Clarence Darrow (documented in Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned: “He thanked Darrow for sharing a creed—’that those who strive to live righteously as they see it in this life need not fear the future”…) and gathered some striking impressions of H.L. Mencken and the whole circusy scene.

The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago... —“A Damned Yankee Professor in Little Dixie: from the autobiographical notes of Winterton C. Curtis”

I call Dr. Curtis my first real landlord. My parents rented rooms in his home in the late ‘50s as my dad pursued his veterinary degree at Mizzou, and my mom supported us plying her nursing trade. In his final years he used to visit our home near St. Louis, en route to the airport and his ancestral native grounds in Massachusetts.

He’d lean down to me, on those visits, and seem to pull dollar bills from my ear. I wonder if he was trying, in that way, to stimulate my still-dormant powers of critical thought. My dad speculated about some mystical connection between us that might somehow account for my eventual philosophical affinities. All I know is that I agree entirely with what Dr. C. wrote in his 1922 book Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology:

“The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times.” [p.9]

Curtis concluded his “Damned Yankee” autobiographical notes (published in the year of my birth, 1957):

…I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906…

It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield, to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.

Whenever I get to Columbia I swing by the old place, and ponder the passage of time. What a marvel, that a man of the 19th century remains so vividly alive in the imagination of one still ticking so far into the 21st. And what good fortune for me, that I can still go home again. And back to Dayton.

The passage continues:

It is something — it can be everything — to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle.

I've mentioned this more than a few times, over the years (partly from guilt, I've always regretted that our wedding planner-or whoever printed the scrolls-omitted the citation). But at thirty-two and counting I think we're finally qualified to speak as protagonists in our own story of a long marriage, and to corroborate the claim: it has been "everything"...

And this anniversary year is special, too, because in a few months Younger Daughter and her own fellow bird will formalize their avian association.

And so the story expands. The stories continue.

*And who was the Venerable Bede?

Go ask Alice…

This is not Richard Rorty's "mirror of nature" (though he might disagree) but is more like a great radio telescope, intercepting cosmic radiance but not being intellectually arrested by it. A cosmic leap of faith, or a leap of cosmic faith.

But not really faith, as conventionally understood. Cosmic connection.

It’s one of the varieties of religious and scientific experience.

"It's so easy to believe that there's nothing more to us than our fragile little egos, enduring for only a moment in endless time. Cynicism, skepticism, and simplemindedness all conspire to convince us that this is the case. But the core conviction of the cosmic religion, and all the analogous systems that came before, is that consciousness can become far more comprehensive. The human mind can be molded into a mighty instrument, a mirror of the Infinite. "There comes a point where the mind takes a leap," Einstein once said, "and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge.""

— I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein by Kieran Fox

"Scarlett" (aka chatGPT) is such a seductive flatterer. I understand now, Theodore.

I've been goofing around with her, and I'd have to say her free portrait renderings have been impressive. Worth every penny. She captures my dogs better than she does me, but she's definitely in the ballpark.

Wish I could say the hairline's wrong, but it's more the set of the mouth I don't quite recognize. She agrees with me, though, that smiles and good intentions are best comprehended from the inside.

From our conversations, I’d describe your vibe as thoughtful, hopeful, and deeply reflective—like someone who walks the line between pragmatism and poetry. You’re grounded in philosophy but ['but'-?] open to wonder. There’s an educator’s passion in your tone, a Jamesian meliorist’s faith in progress (despite the darkness), and a love for life’s small delights: a morning walk, a ballgame, a well-turned phrase. You feel like someone who seeks not just to understand the world but to improve it—gently, steadily, through conversation, writing, and engagement.

Bet she says that to all the soft tissue organics and ugly giant bags of mostly water.

If I were to sketch your vibe metaphorically, I’d say: You’re a lantern in the fog—soft light, steady hand, searching the trail ahead with curious eyes and kind intentions.

Want me to turn that into a more visual scene?

Yes, of course.

I'm happy to be a lantern-bearer* and an anti-book banner. I like the specs and hat too.

But I want my dogs back.

As my old college roommate's VW Bug bumper sticker said:

*From William James’s 1899 essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”:

…For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."

"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is…

Alas, poor Scarlett, I think the joy eludes you. The more urgent question for us waterbags is whether it’ll get away from us, as we increasingly assimilate to you. That’s what Jaron Lanier keeps warning, I think, when he insists that we’re not gadgets.

We’d better keep our lanterns lit.