Message from the prez, Fall '25

Time to draft my Fall message from the prez, for the William James Society. Maybe run this up the flagpole, for starters...

LISTEN

Autumnal season's greetings, fellow friends of William James. 

I first began to think of WJ in casually-friendly terms back in the Fall of my first year of grad school at Vanderbilt in the '80s. One of my new mentors, the late John Compton (accurately described by a classmate as the very epitome of our Platonic Idea of a philosophy Prof), sidled up to me in the campus bookstore one afternoon and remarked of the text I happened at that moment to be browsing--it was John J. McDermott's Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition-- "Willy James!" 

It wasn't the first time a mentor had modeled such an attitude of easy familiarity with a long-gone thinker. Alex von Schoenborn at Mizzou had in class habitually referenced "Friend Hegel," "Friend Husserl," even "Friend Reinhold"... but those old Germans somehow seemed too remote and distant for a philosophical novice to truly befriend.  

"Willy" was different. I had at that point scanned just enough of the James correspondence to grasp what Alfred North Whitehead must have meant when he called our namesake "that adorable genius" and lauded his determination to "forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts." [Science in the Modern World, ch.1] He meant that WJ was a philosopher, sure, but still more was he a man. A mensch. A Humean human being: Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

These have been difficult days of late, in humanistic terms. Just when you think a society couldn't be more violently ruptured, another bullet fells another partisan. Another executive act of fiat trashes another normative democratic tenet. Another spike seems to seal the coffin of the republic Ben Franklin challenged us to keep. Men and women of pragmatic-pluralist conscience and conviction suffer yet another spell of despair for the American experiment. 

But then, behold: the sun rises again. Henry told us: it is but a morning star, after all. We Jamesians will also always expect greater and better things of each new dawn.

One of the continuing delights of being a William Jamesian, I've found, is the perpetual discovery of new angles on our philosopher. He was, is, truly a multi-faceted and omni-dimensional philosophical wellspring of fresh and novel narrative possibility. In recent weeks I've been pleased to encounter several new (to me) takes on our old friend. To name but a few (while anticipating a continuing stream of more to come in the seasons ahead):

Alexis Dianda of Xavier writes (most appropriately) in her Varieties of Experience: William James After the Linguistic Turn that "philosophy is grounded in the quest for perspectival shifts and new postures in which the philosopher learns to imagine the alien, to see the unusual, to notice what has passed unnoticed. To see and feel differently than what we have become accustomed to is the ultimate goal of James's philosophy." 

Emma Sutton of Queen Mary University of London insists, in William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician, on the vital and enduring relevance of WJ's medical education, something I for one have tended to underrate (errantly, she's persuaded me) as a mere diversion and way-station on his youthfully indecisive and meandering path to philosophy. "As mercurial as James was in many ways, there was also a consistency to his theories and beliefs and the words that he used to express them, namely, the medical agenda within which he put them to work. As he journeyed across the disciplinary landscapes of physiology, psychology, and philosophy, James mined them all for useful insights into a linked set of concerns: the promotion of health; the prevention and amelioration of disease and suffering; and the justification of the place of the invalid within society."

Megan Craig, in Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (which I should have picked up long ago, finally and gratefully prompted by her September appearance at my school for our Fall Applied Philosophy Lyceum), "clears a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers." 

And in her newest book, Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion, she and co-author Ed Casey "celebrate forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines." I've asked her about that, and am sure that WJ would heartily endorse her statement that academics, especially us Jamesians, need to stand and move. "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."

So here's to a season full of motion, attention, health, and happy amelioration of this ever-not-quite world in transition. Sic transit gloria mundi, of course, and it's increasingly hard these days to detect even a fleeting glory; but in the spirit of William James, let us continue to stride confidently into that open and evolving universe of plural experience. Let us dare to disturb the troubled universe, and (as the courageous Congressman said) make some good trouble. 

Phil Oliver

President@wjsociety.org