Tag: William James
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A Pragmatic Option
by Jay Jeffers ____ American Pragmatism has been controversial from the start. It was accused of “cosmic impiety” by Bertrand Russell, a founding father of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Rifts developed quickly even within the young school of thought, with the original pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce renaming his approach “pragmaticism,” which he thought was “ugly enough…
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Truth Rediscovered: A Humanistic View of Rationality
By Jay Jeffers ___ The Buddha said, “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Or maybe he didn’t. Scholars would have to chime in on the popular interpretation through the lens of history, linguistics, and the like. Either way it’s a vivid quote. The real problem isn’t whether or…
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My Optimism, Pessimism, and Ambivalence
By Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Recently, I’ve noticed an ambivalence in my thinking about the future. At different times and in different moods I am sometimes an optimist and sometimes a pessimist. Some of things I believe about human beings and our relationships to one another and to the world make me optimistic, while other things…
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Psychologizing Philosophy: My Own Philosophical Temperament
by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Recently, I wrote an article here defending the position — held also by Nietzsche and William James — that a person’s philosophy must reflect their temperament and attitude toward the world. Different folks with different temperaments (and experiences) will inevitably have at least some different starting assumptions, respond differently to different…
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Psychologizing Philosophy
by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I stand with Friedrich Nietzsche and William James when (albeit in different ways) they arrive at a similar position: a person’s philosophy reflects their temperament. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggested that every philosophy is “the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.” In Pragmatism,…
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A Certain Moral Blindness in an Age of Polarization
by Kevin Currie-Knight Like probably everyone who reads philosophy, I have favorite writings I return to again and again, sometimes to find fresh insight, and sometimes, just to appreciate again the beauty of what I’d already found in them. One such writing for me is an underappreciated article by William James, titled “On a Certain…
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On the Axiological Cogito: Chapter One of Raymond Ruyer’s, Neofinalism
by David L. Duffy _____ Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987), le Sage de Nancy, significantly influenced French philosophy (he is quoted by Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem, Deleuze and the enactivists, e.g. Varela and Weber), but was little referenced in English until recently. [1] His thinking has roots in Bergson and Whitehead, with Deleuze calling him “the latest of Leibniz’s…
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Mini Symposium on Truth: Quid Est Veritas?
by E. John Winner ___ Most of what I know about logic I learned studying Aristotle, Kant, and Peirce. However, I did take an introductory undergraduate course in symbolic logic. The surprising take-away was that with a properly formed compound sentence, one could assert just about anything, and still hold the assertion, as a whole,…
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Experiencing Nature, Naturally Experienced
by E. John Winner 1. John Dewey was one of America’s most important philosophers. He’ll be better remembered in the future than he is today. With philosophers on both sides of the Atlantic fascinated with the ambiguities of language and otherwise unsure of what they are expected to explain – is that science or ethics…