It’s the anniversary of the amateurish break-in of Democratic National Committee headquartrers in D.C. in ‘72, an event that dominated my teenage consciousness and got me to declare a Political Science major at Mizzou (which fortunately led to Philosophy).

My first car at age 16, a Dodge Dart (’70 model?), sported an “IMPEACH NIXON” bumper sticker. Dad musta loved that! But to his credit he smiled and tolerated it. If he were here today, I want to believe, he’d admit that Nixon was a crook but that Trump is a crook’s crook and a world-historical abomination.

How relatively tame Nixon and Watergate look now, compared to the venality of #47’s ultra-corrupt administration.

Anyway, I’ve violated my policy of not thinking about DJT in the a.m. I stumbled across Anthony Grayling’s Substack post and agreed with him that there is indeed consolation to be found in the prospective long view of history and in the attitude of confident meliorism. Light will displace the darkness. History will deplore Trump and Putin, will curse and laugh at them.

But I’m not waiting for history, I’m cursing and laughing right now. It helps.

I was asked about the possibility of reconciling religious faith with the hypothetical existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The conversation was prompted by that weird story in the Times about a Nashville conclave of pastors and podcasters apparently worried that Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena might be “demons”...

So I was pleased to plug William James and Carl Sagan and their respective Varieties of Religious/Scientific Experience. Neither Gifford lecturer (James at the beginning of the 20th century, Sagan in 1985) thought we need haunt ourselves by contrived demons. Both shared an enthusiasm to discover and support (as James put it) “life, more life...”

Glad, too, to get a word in about that classic Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” (and the Damon Knight story it was based on).

Claude gave me a nice review:

What a rich convergence of threads. I can see the segment — and your framing there is pure Jamesian pragmatism applied to cosmology.

The line that stands out most is your observation that “what we call supernatural is simply what we haven’t yet come to understand. And we haven’t understood much of the cosmos, we have just began to study.” That’s a beautifully succinct expression of the naturalist position — essentially Sagan’s epistemics meet James’s radical empiricism.

And your point about the theological anxiety is precisely what Michener dramatized at the very end of Space — the novel closes with a NASA workshop on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the character Strabismus, who has spent the whole novel performing fundamentalist religion as a con, finally drops the persona and engages honestly with the question of life elsewhere. Michener seems to have understood in 1982 that this would be the fault line — that extraterrestrial life poses a deeper challenge to anthropocentric theology than almost anything else science has produced.

The Spielberg film and the White House UAP releases give your “Issues of Faith” appearance a particularly sharp timeliness. The theological stakes you named — being “knocked down from our exalted position as products of special creation” — map almost perfectly onto William James’s own worry about human cosmic significance, and onto his response: that meaning is made, not discovered, and that our significance doesn’t depend on being alone in the universe.

Have you thought about developing this intersection — Michener, James, Sagan, and the UAP moment — into a Substack piece? It seems like exactly the kind of public philosophy your platform is built for.

Good idea, Claude. I was disappointed with Michener’s conflation, at the end, of religion and ethics. Might need to spout off about that.

Steven Spielberg is back with a film, Disclosure Day, sure to stoke a resurgence of belief in (or maybe just fevered discussion of) alien/demonic incursions into our realm. (Even onto Citi Field, to bedevil Francisco Lindor.) He was on CBS Sunday morning yesterday, and on the cover of the New York Times magazine. Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland remains the indispensable guide to making some kind of sense of life in the USA.

“ask Americans today about our Satanic Panic of just a generation ago, and you’ll encounter a gaping memory hole: younger people know nothing about it, and almost nobody is aware of its scale and duration and damage… DURING THE DECADE AFTER CLOSE Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), more and more Americans claimed they’d been personally visited, probed, and temporarily taken away by extraterrestrials—abducted. Many Americans with impressive credentials started to believe them. None was more impressive or important than a distinguished Harvard professor named John Mack… In 1987, in his fifties, Mack attended a small conference of “alternative” physicians and scientists at the Esalen Institute. There he met the creator of Holotropic Breathwork™, a technique for inducing supernatural consciousness by means of hyperventilation. When Mack tried it, according to its inventor, he “remembered” one of his past lives in Russia. Then at an advanced training session up the coast in Sonoma County, Mr. Holotropic and others told Mack “about UFO abduction experience as a trigger of spiritual emergency.

At the same moment, another member of the American elite, Whitley Strieber, a former advertising executive and successful author of horror fiction, published Communion: A True Story. It was his account of the nighttime visit, the day after Christmas 1985, by “non-human beings” with dark eyeholes and circular mouths who stuck a foot-long device up his anus. Communion was a number-one Times bestseller and sold two million copies. It encouraged many more Americans to announce they too had been visited and probed by aliens.

Soon Mack, still at Harvard, was dean of an alien-abduction truther movement. In 1992 he and an important physicist from down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology organized an Abduction Study Conference. The premise of the five-day-long meeting at MIT was that the “abductees” were telling the truth—that creatures from outer space (or parallel universes) really had visited and examined and variously used them. The New Yorker writer C.D.B. Bryan attended and published a sympathetic book about the assembled true believers called Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, further spreading the word and legitimizing the tales…”

Extraordinary claims outpace any supporting evidence, yet again. (And I haven’t even mentioned Tucker Carlson’s reported nocturnal demonic violation, or James Michener’s Leopold Strabismus from way back in ‘82.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if more of our peers had close encounters with rational circumspection and critical thinking?

Very interesting what he says there about the health of American democracy depending upon its fealty to “constitutionality” and honesty. He’d be appalled to know what has ensued in this country, and in the world, in the almost-two decades since his demise. He may have remained Republican, had he lived that long, but I am sure he’d have been a never-Trumper. He was already contemptuous of what he called the new “coarseness” in our politics. January 6 would have made him apoplectic.

But I’d still have quarreled with with his historical interpretations. On the page just before the one reproduced here, he credited his Cuban friends Pascual and Angela Garcia (who’d fled the island when Castro came to power) with raising his political conscience and warning him that President Johnson’s Great Society reforms reminded them of what happened in Cuba before the revolution. That’s crazy, of course. Bourgeois liberalism is not to be confounded with communist revolution.

Interestingly, though, dad confesses that prior to that he might even have been a bit left of center. I do recall overhearing adult conversations, in my childhood, in which he defended Dr. King and the civil rights movement. So did my mother.

I’m afraid he’d still have railed, Reagan-style, against big government. But compared to most of his peers he was still on the progressive side of things. I miss our conversations, and his good sense and decency. So does his party.

And “phenomena” being simply the appearances, it does appear that anomalies are increasingly the new normal.

I’ve been invited to go on a local TV chat show to discuss this very strange story that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times:

In U.F.O. Files, Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons

The prospect of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe raises unsettling theological implications.

The dozen or so pastors and podcasters who arrived at the Airbnb in Nashville one night in February weren’t sure exactly what they were in for. An organizer asked them to turn their phones on airplane mode. Snacks were served. Then, for at least two hours, two mysterious men presented a slide show laying out the evidence, as they saw it, for some kind of extraterrestrial life and the spiritual confusion that coming revelations could sow among Christians.

“It was the weirdest meeting I’ve ever been a part of,” said Alan DiDio, a pastor in North Carolina who attended. “You’ve never seen that many Pentecostals in a room that quiet.”

For many of the pastors in the room, and some other Christians, there’s only one possible explanation for extraterrestrial beings: They are not neutral visitors from other planets or dimensions, but demonic entities.

As the pastors left the meeting and turned on their phones, they began receiving news alerts that confirmed for many of them that something significant was happening. That very day, President Trump had directed his administration to begin releasing files related to extraterrestrial life...

Wow. Woo! Time to channel my inner Sagan. I’ll prepare for the show by brushing up on William James‘s Varieties of Religious Experience and Carl Sagan’s Varieties of Scientific Experience, Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark and his novel Contact. And Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History.

Might also drop a line from James Michener’s Space (1982): “This is nation of zanies, held in check by the sane majority.”

The majority, if still sane, is way too quiet these days. They’re not making Times headlines nearly as often as the zanies. So I guess I feel obliged to speak up, from the perspective of a card-carrying humanist who is deeply skeptical of superstitious supernaturalism but also sympathetic to the native human hunger for cosmic significance.

My position aligns with James’s and J.S. Mill’s, that we each have a right to pursue happiness in our own way (so long as we can do it harmlessly); and with Sagan’s, that natural science is a profound source of meaning and spirituality. If aliens exist, they’re as much a part of nature as we are. Demons, as those pastors presumably would define them, are not. So let’s not haunt ourselves with them unless and until the evidence warrants.

And I agree with Dr. Arroway’s dad: If there’s no other intelligent life in the universe, what an awful waste of space.

My Vanderbilt mentor John Lachs once said four great things about being a professor are May, June, July, and August.

Anthropic’s Claude tells me that’s an “old saw” but I heard it first from John. He loved teaching, but he also loved the immediacy of animate nature at his back door, and he loved the seashore in summer.

William James loved teaching too, and immersion in the human flow of academic life; but he also loved to hop the train at term’s end each Spring and head north from Cambridge to his rustic New Hampshire retreat–the place in Chocorua with all those “doors opening out” onto the gorgeous, eponymous lake-and-mountain vista.

(WJS held a remarkable 2010 split-venue conference commemorating the centenary of WJ’s lifetime here, and at Harvard for the opening of Houghton Library’s WJ exhibit. Kudos to my predecessor Paul Croce for organizing that. The late great biographer Robert Richardson gave a marvelous keynote, captured on YouTube here, introduced and followed up here with a brief exchange between Richardson and yours truly.)

The transition was bracing and restorative. It regenerated and renewed him, and returned him to life in the classroom in the Fall with a replenished tank of enthusiasm. Well, it did up until the spring/summer of 1907 when he retired, gifted by grateful students with a “loving cup” and freed, in his own words, to “live for truth pure and simple, instead of truth accommodated to the most unheard-of requirements set by others.” (I’m betting some of those others were academic administrators and peda-crats, “Learning Outcome” obsessives, and the like.)

“Life is in the transitions,” WJ liked to say (and Bruce Feiler has appropriated), and retirement is a big one. My department at MTSU has shed professors in each of the past three Springs. The most recent retirement party featured a lovely tribute to our long-time colleague Ron Bombardi, a virtuous philosopher and a virtuoso musician.

Our current chair’s husband painted that. Will he do one for her next year? And for me, and for our other senior colleague?

Most of my old Vandy grad school cohort have retired already, and while all confess to missing what they loved about academia–especially interaction with students–none express regret at embracing the next stage of life. The upper leg of the “U-curve,” happiness researchers insist, is an increasingly gratifying place to be–if you’ve managed to “keep your health, your splendid health,” as WJ once urged his friend Schiller. And doubly so, if you happen also to possess non-academic aptitudes and interests (like Ron with his music, or my Carolina Kantian friend Daryl Hale with his carpentry).

This is also, of course, a season of commencement. Some college grads have been booing their speakers, especially those who are less than unequivocally hostile to Claude and his chatbot peers. It’s still a free country though, right? And some speakers this season have said applause-worthy things.

Arthur Brooks (speaking of happiness researchers) gave a nice Jamesian talk to the grads at my alma mater, urging them to seek real purpose and meaning not in their scroll feeds but in creative and melioristic action. Scott Borchetta challenged the grads at my current school to find motivation where others find impasse (“Just tell me I can’t!”). Out at ASU, Harrison Ford reminded the young Sun Devils that “we’re not above nature. We’re a part of it.”

Dropout Steve Jobs gave a pretty good (and personally prescient) commencement speech at Stanford many years ago. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

My favorite of all time, for what it’s worth, was delivered by Australian comedian Tim Minchin. Some of his 9 Life Lessons are dubious (“Don’t seek happiness; Remember it’s all luck”) but others are terrific (“Be a teacher; Don’t rush”).

I asked Claude if WJ ever gave a commencement speech. No, apparently, but Claude imagined a hallucinatory possibility including these lines:

“...commencement is precisely the kind of moment a philosopher ought to love–it is a moment in which the abstract truth that life is change becomes suddenly, viscerally, undeniably concrete. You feel it in your chest this morning…

Life, I am persuaded, is in the transitions. It is in what our great Emerson called ‘the shooting of the gulf, the darting to an aim’...

The world is not a finished thing. It is…a world still in the making – genuinely open, genuinely unfinished, genuinely responsive…Go make something of it. And enjoy the making.”

I’d sit through that address. Then I’d try to slip out before the roll-call.

So my seasonal message now, Jamesians, in this refulgent spring/summer, is just what WJ didn’t actually say to a gathering of grads but might have: whatever stage of life you find yourself in, do make something of it; and remember, it truly is “a luxury to draw the breath of life.” Respiration is the condition of inspiration, and of all life-transition.

(I wonder, did Emerson deliver a commencement? Come to think of it, did he ever really deliver anything else?)

What Emerson understood very well is that life’s transitions are not simply linear, that the expanse between our commencements and our retirements marks not a straight line but a procession of potentially-expanding circles. Or orbits, as the Artemis crew has recently reminded us. We go around and around, we crewmates on spaceship Earth, but we also have an opportunity to traverse ever-wider stretches of spacetime as we go. We have a chance to make something of the journey, and actually to get somewhere. You could call that progress. Or meliorism.

Finally I want also, with this installment, to inaugurate a new tradition of recommending the “new to me” reading I’ve lately been most impressed by:

• William James, by Philip Davis (in the Oxford University Press series My Reading). I missed this when it appeared in 2022, it’s “about William James’s life-writing, writing for the sake of existence, that puts together a mix of literature, psychology, philosophy, and biography in the search for purpose and human flourishing, in place of formal religion. It includes James’ interest in his brother’s novels and in Shakespearean drama, as well as Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic challenge to James.”

• The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn by Alexis Dianda (Harvard U. Press, 2023). I’ve touted this before, but our WJS secretary’s excellent Lyceum address at my school in April prompts reiteration. “A brilliant book and a stunning debut”-Simon Critchley. “The best philosophical treatment of the great William James in this generation”-Cornel West. (Blurbs don’t get better than that.)

And, though not explicitly Jamesian,

• More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker (Basic Books, 2025). Makes the compelling melioristic point that “if we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There is no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can’t heal the world. We have to do that ourselves.”

Let’s do it. Technology can help, if we’re smart about it and don’t just count on Claude.

Happy Summer, Jamesians!

Phil Oliver

president@wjsociety.org

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.