I am somebody

I'm excited to have been invited to participate in the "I am an American Philosopher" interview series.

1. What does American philosophy mean to you? It means a pursuit of wisdom and happiness informed and guided by the best and brightest lights in our heritage, pre-eminently Emerson's repudiation of "borrowed traditions and living at second hand" and his affirmation of the ever-renewing "present hour"; Thoreau's sunny dawn spirit ("to be awake is to be alive," "the sun is but a morning star"); James's "really vital question for us all... What is life eventually to make of itself?"; Dewey's democratic commitment to "the continuous human community in which we are a link"; John McDermott's culture of experience; John Lachs's celebration of immediacy. It is pragmatic, pluralistic, melioristic, impatient with scholastic obfuscation, eager always to identify some practical difference our ideas might make in our lives and communities. And particularly noteworthy in this semiquincentennial year, American philosophy signifies political freedom from tyranny and mental freedom from dogmatic slumber.

2. How did you become an American philosopher? I became disillusioned with my undergrad Political Science major at the University of Missouri and, motivated by Durant's Story of Philosophy and Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection, went looking for something more expansive. I found what I was looking for in Mizzou's philosophy program. Professor Peter Markie, just a shade older than my cohort, came to our Friday afternoon "Hegel Society" meetups at Michael's Bar and Grill on campus and made philosophy seem cool. Professor Alex von Schoenborn made it seem profound. My pal Andy Cling, a year ahead of me (and recently retired from the University of Alabama in Huntsville), went down to Nashville for grad school at Vanderbilt and sent back positive reports. I followed him, and there found American philosophy via John Lachs, John Compton, Michael Hodges, John Post, and a raft of congenial pluralists and fellow students.

3. How would you describe your current research?

I'm an applied ethicist (environmental and bioethics), so I'm always researching and reflecting on the dangers humans engender for ourselves with our Dr. Seussian "Onceler" approach to commodified nature and, lately, with a potentially dehumanizing infatuation with artificial minds.

I've long taught a course on the Philosophy of Happiness, and intend to write more about how to flourish in troubled times. "How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness" is, as James said, crucial.

I'm a peripatetic (in the walking-and-thinking sense), and want to emulate public-facing scholarship akin to our recent MTSU Lyceum speaker Megan Craig's Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion (co-authored with Ed Casey).

And I want to turn my long collaboration with a former student, who earned a post-retirement philosophy degree, into a book on the value of philosophy as a "golden years" pursuit. Also, I'm inheriting a retired colleague's Existentialism course so I look forward to teaching and researching that for the first time (inspired by another of our recent Lyceum speakers, Mariana Allesandri).

4. What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?

I walk the dogs, watch baseball, read fiction and history, post to my blogs, Substack, and Blue Sky (where I channel William James), and I try to promote American philosophy (I'm current president of the William James Society).

5. What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading? It's hard to pick just one. James's Pragmatism, I suppose, or his collected correspondence. But I'm extremely fond of the essays addressed to students at the end of Talks to Teachers, "on some of life's ideals" - especially "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings". But I also think we should all be reading good literary fiction, which remains the best virtual reality technology humans have yet devised. I'm teaching "Philosophy in Recent American Fiction"; there's a lot of it. My personal favorite contemporary novelist is Richard Powers. Everyone should read Overstory, Bewilderment, Playground... and maybe go back to his incredibly prescient anticipation of AI from 1995, Galatea 2.2. The message for students these days is simpler, though: Read books. I'm always quoting Twain at them: there's no practical difference between someone who doesn't read and someone who can't. We see the spoiling fruits of increasing functional illiteracy all around. It's scary. But I do still have confidence in the top crop of this generation of students. They're bright. If they can resist distraction and stay engaged, they'll do us proud.

A World Appears

Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness, A World Appears, was released Tuesday. He announced it on Substack.* I was pleased to be able to express there my appreciation and gratitude:

Enjoyed the opening chapter on my commute from Nashville to Murfreesboro this morning. Excellent! And may I offer a much-belated thanks, Michael, for your having taken the time back in '99 [or maybe a bit earlier] to respond with constructive comments to the unsolicited draft chapter of my Vanderbilt dissertation on William James and consciousness. It was such a generous act on your part, and came for me at the most opportune moment. And now I'm president of the William James Society (wjsociety.org) - thanks in no small part to your kind encouragement.

That's not idle flattery. Michael's positive reinforcement was a shot in the arm at a time when I needed one. We corresponded after the publication of his second book, A Place of My Own, and discovered our mutual interest in the permeable boundaries of nature and culture (and of John Dewey's exploration thereof). I'm still envious of Michael's "place":

 

*https://open.substack.com/pub/michaelpollan/p/a-world-appears-appears?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

"Evacuation Day"

I've been invited by a journalism student to comment on our school's upcoming "Evacuation Day" celebration and reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence on March 17.

1. Dr. S mentioned that your class was taking the lead in the reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Honors College lawn. I was curious if you had any comments on that. 
2.  You had mentioned in your email from yesterday about how the NEH grant would go towards looking at America's founding and all. What does it mean to be able to explore and learn about America's founding and early years from a humanities standpoint? 
3. Any other specific comments 

1. I'm happy to participate, with my Honors Intro class (or "CoPhilosophy," as I prefer to call it) in the Evacuation Day commemoration and reading of the Declaration of Independence. It will be a timely reminder of the great privilege it is to live in a free and democratic society, and of the great fragility of freedom and democracy when its citizens are distracted and its leaders dishonest and uncommitted to honoring the nation's founding ideals. I agree with the historian Walter Isaacson, who identifies the second sentence of the Declaration as "the greatest ever written": We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

2. The humanities disciplines (history, languages and literature, the arts, communications, philosophy, religious studies) are committed to interpreting and enhancing the human experience and the conditions of human flourishing. The American revolution, with its dedication to universal freedom, justice, individual rights and dignity, and everyone's right to pursue happiness in a society bound constitutionally to those values, was one of the great humanistic milestones in our history. We ought often to celebrate that, and to insist that our leaders honor it. We must hold them and ourselves accountable for failing to uphold and sustain the founders' legacy. Let's hope March 17 reinvigorates our commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice for all.

3. I'd like also to take this opportunity to invite MTSU students to consider the American Culture minor (I am its current advisor).* I don't think there's ever been a more important moment for those who believe in American ideals to study the conditions under which they may succeed or fail.

*American Culture Minor Philosophy and Religious Studies Advisor: Phil Oliver The 18-hour interdisciplinary minor in American Culture is intended for students who want to explore a variety of disciplines as a way of thinking about U.S. culture. This minor is ideal for students who have wide-ranging interests. It is also an excellent choice for students who are politically engaged and want to understand contemporary U.S. culture and its problems. It is especially suited for students who wish to highlight the liberal arts element of their education.

Free bird

 Alysa Liu's improbable comeback, her gold medal performance yesterday in Milan, and above all her demeanor in celebrating and lifting up her disappointed Japanese competitors who took silver and bronze, are an inspiration. And she's just 20 (after "retiring" at 16). 

Hope I'm as joyous and free, two-plus years after my retirement. That impends after next year, unless I can somehow arrange to lose the commute. Took me twice as long to get to school as it should have yesterday. And normal days are too often harrowing, with so many seeming to think of I-24 as the Bristol Speedway. 

Maybe the most inspiring thing about Alysa is the way she took charge of her own destiny and got out from under the shadow of her stage-managing parent. He'd sapped her joy in skating. She took it back. Good for her. She (like the USA women's hockey team) was truly a "free bird" on ice.

"That's what life is about: learning"

Before she stood atop the podium, Alysa Liu stepped away from the ice.

Her advice to young athletes (and people generally)? "Don't let anyone push you past your breaking point… you are the only one that knows your limit."

Proof that rest isn't quitting — it's growth.

==
Another impressive young Olympian, Eileen Gu:

“I spent a lot of time in my head, but not in an egotistical way” - She is indeed a "thoughtful young woman," neuro-plastic as we all are but actually meta-cognitively aware of the fact and using it to her deliberate advantage. Much smarter than, for example, the Vice-President...

Not a slave to fashion

Dean Lyons was pleased to see me sporting our department's Philosophy tee-shirt, on the College of Liberal Arts's "Tee-shirt Tuesday," when I ran into her at the library. (She was wearing our Religious Studies colleagues' shirt.) The selfie was her idea.

Many of our colleagues always seem to "forget" it's Tuesday. Not me. I'm happy not to have to think about what to wear to school. One less thing.

Happy Prez's Day

David McCullough quotes Abigail Adams on George Washington:

"He is polite with dignity, affable without familiarity, distant without haughtiness, grave without austerity, modest, wise, and good. He was a good man. There are traits in his character which perfectly fit him for the exalted station he holds." Thr 

—

That's the sort of character we need in the White House.

pbs American Experience

And it's their great-grandson Henry's birthday...

It’s the birthday of the writer Henry Adams, whose memoir, The Education of Henry Adams (1918), came out the year he died. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, which left the sensitive, introverted boy burdened by an almost stultifying sense of responsibility to play a prominent part in the world. But Adams preferred to be an observer only, later writing of himself that he “never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it, watching the errors of the players.” After attending Harvard, he traveled extensively through Europe, became a political journalist for a time, and eventually returned to his alma mater in 1870 to teach medieval history.

He wrote two novels, Democracy (1880), which he published anonymously, and Ester (1884), a comic romantic tale about the battle of the sexes that he published under a pseudonym. He also wrote numerous biographies and The History of the United States of America: 1801–1817 (nine volumes; 1889–1891), which is considered a neglected masterpiece.

Unlike many autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams is really a record of Adams’s introspection rather than his accomplishments. Adams had long since come to the conclusion that his traditional education had failed to help him come to terms with the changing world — changes that included the discovery of X-rays and radio waves and radioactivity, a world war, and the invention of the automobile — and that was the thrust of his memoir. But, while the memoir was an intimate portrait of his own life, Adams avoided any mention of his wife, Clover, whom he was in love with and who committed suicide 13 years after they married. WA

==

Henry once wrote a pessimistic letter to William James, suggesting that entropy in the universe (according to the 2d law of thermodynamics, etc.) doomed humanity to misery and meaninglessness. 

WJ's reply was classic:

...The "second law" is wholly irrelevant to "history"—save that it sets a terminus—for history is the course of things before that terminus, and all that the second law says is that, whatever the history, it must invest itself between that initial maximum and that terminal minimum of difference in energy-level. As the great irrigation-reservoir empties itself, the whole question for us is that of the distribution of its effects, of which rills to guide it into; and the size of the rills has nothing to do with their significance. Human cerebration is the most important rill we know of, and both the "capacity" and the "intensity" factor thereof may be treated as infinitesimal. Yet the filling of such rills would be cheaply bought by the waste of whole sums spent in getting a little of the down-flowing torrent to enter them. Just so of human institutions—their value has in strict theory nothing whatever to do with their energy-budget—being wholly a question of the form the energy flows through. 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 the millennium—in other words a state in which a minimum of difference of energy-level might have its exchanges so skillfully canalisés that a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. 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." You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility. You seem to me not to discriminate, but to treat quantity and distribution of energy as if they formed one question... Letters of William James, June 17, 1910.

WJ died later that summer. 

When my time comes, let his words be my epitaph:

"I am so happy...that I can stand it no longer."

69!

  

What a terrific birthday: catfish by the river, chocolate cake, Nashville Sounds tickets in April, and the charmed company of the best family I've got. 

#Lucky #Grateful #Day-to-day

69

That's a big number, in the human calculus. I've now outlived my muse WJ, creeping up on Hamlet's undiscovered country. Thinking of it as bonus time. But of course, it's all been bonus time— from 2.14.57 on, in my case. We who are here are all bonus babies. We are the lucky ones, as Richard* rightly said. I'm just happy to be here. Think I'll ink that. 

 

And this. 

 

* 

Sacred matter

During our peripatetic walk in #3 yesterday, The subject of materialism versus immaterialism came up. Some (like Descartes) think of a matter as mere, crudely deficient in potentiality and incapable of giving rise to all the rich and animated phenomena of life. William James thought otherwise:

"To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities."

—William James, Pragmatism lecture 3 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116-h/5116-h.htm#link2H_4_0005

Good message

New England fans this morning

Positive change

Our power is on again in Nashville, we've been told. We'll head home tomorrow.

Last week in the hotel was pretty stressful, but this week at the Airbnb just 15 minutes from school is something I could get used to. It would mean more delightful walks on the Stones River Greenway, like the one the dogs and I enjoyed Monday; and more chance encounters with old students on non-teaching days, like I had yesterday.

That Greenway walk reacquainted me with Bertha Chrietzberg, whose efforts enhanced the quality of life of countless walkers over the years. She was a true meliorist, someone who achieved her potential and left the world better than she found it. And gave me a new talking point when we encountered Aristotle in class.

Day 7

 Wind chill below zero. Robert Frost comes to mind...

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To know that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Day 6

Still without power, holed up in a downtown hotel a stone's throw from the Seigenthaler pedestrian bridge so artfully depicted in the lobby. Want to dogwalk it, but it's forbiddingly icy. Hurry please, NES.

Day 4 without power

Our temporary lodging on the 12th floor afforded a view of the new Titans' stadium, until problems with climate control in the room uprooted us. Taking the dogs out is still a challenge, but at least we've thawed out and stayed warm. Could be worse. Sadly it is, for many.

Big chill

Day 2 without power. Thank goodness for firewood, extra blankets, dogs, good neighbors, and the right attitude. It's ALL temporary, after all.

The Peculiar Magic of a Winter Snowstorm

Our Lyceum guest at MTSU last Fall, Megan Craig, sees the beauty and descending spirit in a day like this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/opinion/winter-snow-storm.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Snowy sleety icky afternoon

Good time to pick up the little book about the Parnassus pooches I was gifted for Christmas. Hauled the elliptical in from the barn too, no dogwalk for us today.

petulant, violent and deranged

The "straight line" is actually more than 500 years long, in Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland account.

"How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world's longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man's dementia? That's an important question, the answer to which I believe lies in the straight line from Bush vs Gore and the Roberts Supreme Court, to January 6th, to the execution of Renee Good. However, what's more important is that we realize where we are right now, that we don't try to sugarcoat and sanewash what's happening: A petulant, violent and deranged individual is running America."

Paul Krugman

https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkrugman/p/its-sundowning-in-america?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Opening Day '26-first contact

 It's 12 degrees in middle Tennessee on the first day of the Spring semester. No matter. Spring means renewal and a fresh start, just like Opening Day in my favorite sporting pastime. Pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in just a few weeks now.

I think these "first contact" days in academia, meeting bright-eyed eager young learners for the first time (they get younger every year, somehow), hearing who they think they are and why they're here and what they think philosophy is (et al) are what I'll miss most when I stop teaching.  Is this really going to be the penultimate year? We'll see. Meanwhile, I fully intend to enjoy today. 

I see that several more student introductions have surfaced on our course site since last night, before we've entered the classroom for the first time (starting at 9:40 this morning). Pleased to see that so many of the kids have responded to my challenge, when I said in my own intro that I worry about their generation not reading books. They're mentioning titles that are unfamiliar to me, mostly, and that's good. I do learn from them at least as much as they learn from me, when I remember to pay attention and make connection. George Saunders is right: "[W]riting and reading [and teaching and learning] is a way of simply underscoring that human connection is important, that you can know my mind and I can know yours, which is a vastly consoling idea, and we need it."

So here we go. Another fresh start. Tabula rasa time. My mentor John Lachs didnt quit 'til he was 87. I begin to understand why.

On MLK day, 2026

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”

“Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.”

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

“Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”— Martin Luther King Jr.

Gifted an inscribed copy to 

Younger Daughter for xmas (two days ago)

"We can succeed only by concert. It is not "can any of us imagine better?" but, "can we all do better?" The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Abraham Lincoln in the 1862 annual address to Congress

"Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject."
John Stuart Mill
1867

Heroes. HCR

I have a dream, in living color

Connect

A good point to note, on the Spring semester's Opening Day tomorrow:

"But to me, it's becoming clear that writing and reading [and teaching and learning] is a way of simply underscoring that human connection is important, that you can know my mind and I can know yours, which is a vastly consoling idea, and we need it."

George Saunders Is No Saint (Despite What You May Have Heard),
NYT Magazine 1/18/2026

Complain!

"...Unless climate change, nuclear war, or both burn us to cinders entirely, humanity will stagger forth from this dreadful era, and once the dizziness has stopped will look back, and will condemn: and condemn us all, unless we did something – even just complain, but the complaint needs to be public and constantly iterated – to refuse to accept this vicious assault on the prospects of a better world." Anthony Grayling

https://open.substack.com/pub/acgrayling/p/pictures-from-an-exhibition?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

Or cones

Stitches come out Monday.

"You may not agree, you may not care, but
if you are holding this book you should know
that of all the sights I love in this world —
and there are plenty — very near the top of
the list is this one: dogs without leashes."
— Mary Oliver, Dogsongs

Biblio-patriotism

"So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut

WJS Newsletter – William James Society

Spring 2026 Newsletter

President's Message from Dr. Phil Oliver

LISTEN (audio file on Google Docs)

'Tis the season of William James's birth, in 1842.

By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife's birthday. So it's a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.

The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James "family tradition" according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be...

https://wjsociety.org/news/

Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato

Definitely planning, now, to discuss Plato's Symposium in my classes around Valentine's Day. What a moment we're living through! And what a platonic irony, as they're literally killing poets too.

… On Wednesday, as word of disputes like Dr. Peterson's spread, critics of the Texas A&M policies said free-speech clashes became inevitable after the board's moves. The College Station campus's chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the move against Dr. Peterson "raises serious legal concerns."

The group said its misgivings went beyond the Constitution.

"Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world's most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought," the group said. "A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust — and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/tamu-plato-race-gender.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

'Who am I?' (etc.)-time yet again for introductions

It's a real treat, relatively late in an academic career, to teach a new course for the first time. I'll be doing that next semester with Existentialism, and this semester (beginning in less than two weeks now) with Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. I always ask my new students some basic Opening Day questions. Here are my own responses, this time:

*Who are you? - I'm the Prof, probably the oldest guy in the room (though that isn't always the case, in MALA classes). I've been teaching at MTSU for a quarter century, but this is the first time I've offered THIS course. My special interest is in American philosophy, particularly that of pragmatist William James. [And btw: I am current president of the William James Society.]

*Why are you here? - I'm at MTSU because they hired me, not long after the Belmont provost un-hired me when I expressed sympathy for the Unitarian Universalist credo ("guided by reason and inspired by love, we celebrate diversity, confront oppression, and promote environmental and social justice"). And in retrospect, I'm glad he did! I've been happy at MTSU (and teach a course called Philosophy of Happiness). I'm in Middle Tennessee because I came to Vanderbilt (from Mizzou) for grad school and liked it enough to stay.

*What's your definition of philosophy? - "An unusually stubborn attempt to think [and write and speak] clearly" in the pursuit of wisdom. (The quoted/un-bracketed bit is, naturally, from William James.)

*What are the best and the most recent novels you've read? What did you like/dislike about them? Did you find in them anything "philosophical," by your definition? - Most recent, and among the best, are those by the two Richards (Ford and Powers) we'll be reading. We'll get into my thoughts (and yours) concerning their relation to wisdom. Suffice for now to say that Ford's Frank Bascombe is a character I find amusing and occasionally wise, living his life in Periods (The Existence Period, The Permanent Period, etc.); and Powers's Playground touches on themes I find vitally relevant and potentially either an advance or a big setback for humanity: the environment, and Artificial Intelligence. It's too soon to tell about that, but it's pretty clear that we've got to address those issues effectively as individuals AND as a species, if we're to survive and flourish for long.

== 

 Postscript. Frank says things like:

• "For your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined".
• "Maturity, as I conceived it, was recognizing what was bad or peculiar in life, admitting it has to stay that way, and going ahead with the best of things".
• "If you lose all hope, you can always find it again".
• "Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts."

A day of infamy

 

Jan 6 now signifies surgery, for Nell (and Mom too), as well as insurrection. But this Jan 6 had a better outcome than in '21, even if Nell doesn't quite believe it yet. Substack

A Case for Beauty in a Fleeting World

We turn to art to make sense of a life that is heartbreakingly fragile.

"...Because the rest, as Shakespeare knew, is silence."

Margaret Renkl

New day

But history does matter. Make some more.

Reinstated

Good! I shared the same headline in class, the morning after. Once in a while, school administrators get things right:

Clarksville, TN — the APSU professor who was fired over a post he shared online about the death of Charlie Kirk, has been reinstated. He was fired for resharing a 2023 headline that said, "Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths 'Unfortunately' Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment." Then Sen. Marsha Blackburn shared his post calling for the university to take action.

https://www.threads.com/@allie4tn/post/DS5n_efkU9J?xmt=AQF014Eu4a3E7IgbJRH9K1grF5eYm6lV-mQ2WUT-ibMys6o0yS3y7EznwdMpMbnV6n2NwryL&slof=1

Desiderata

Someone else on the Internet asked about a popular monologue/poem/prayer from the '20s, Desiderata.

It was popular on posters in the '60s and '70s, back when I was into bedroom-wall posters like "If a man does not keep pace with his companions…" (Thoreau) and "Great minds, like parachutes, function only went open" (Einstein-or was it merely coupled with a picture of Einstein on his bicycle?)… 

Desiderata was widely and falsely attributed to some anonymous sage from the 17th century, but no: it was written by a lawyer from Terre Haute in 1927, one Max Ehrmann. It's actually pretty good, and closes with advice. I endorse: "With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy." one line, though, offends my meliorism. "No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

Three words too many.

Useful fiction, stubborn facts

Someone on the Internet asked the William James Society if a useful fiction can be true.
WJ's reply:

Literary fiction can be true in the pragmatic sense, definitely. But unlike my shallower younger* brother the novelist, I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. We pragmatists do not deny reality. We do sometimes attempt to defy it.

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3mb7gbzit2c22

*Re: WJ's shallower younger (and "vainer") brother, a recent Paris Review essay characterizes the sibling rivalry that I take to have been mostly affectionate as more sinister than I hope it was: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04/01/william-and-henry-james/

JCO

James Clay Oliver, 1928–2008. He'd be 97 today.

Tested + for Covid on Xmas eve

 So we've still got this to look forward to:

Men at Work: The Japanese Way of "Wa" Meets the American Way of Play

My proposal for the 29th Baseball in Literature and Culture conference in 2026, in Ottawa KS:

When former Cub/Met/Card George Altman died recently, the New York Times reported of his post-MLB career in Japan: "During seven seasons... he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases." [emphasis added] *

Altman worked at fitting in culturally, as teammate and guest.

Professionals in every endeavor, not just athletes, must of course work at their craft as well as their collegiality; but in the western world we're often implored to do what we love, so that we'll "never really have to work a day in our lives."

Freddie Freeman, asked why he banters and jokes with opposing players at first base (and takes abuse from young Blue Jays fans in video ads), says he tries to remember that he's playing a kid's game and should be having fun.

Robert Whiting, in You Gotta Have Wa, observes that "Americans played ball. Japanese worked at it." The Japanese game is more like a martial art, a game of "control" (kanri yakyu) mostly devoid of fun (or at least not primarily aiming at fun).

With so many Japanese stars now shining in MLB, and more on the way, we have an opportunity and an incentive to study and try to understand this contrast in cultural styles. They seem to have meshed effectively for the Dodgers these past couple of years, with Ohtani, Yamamoto, et al.

 (And, having now read Altman's memoir, I can report that he seems to have had at least as much fun playing in Japan as in the U.S.)

Will east meet west between the lines, and ultimately sync up? Will the Freeman style of fun endure, for fans and players alike? Here's an invitation to philosophy, which I'll take up in my presentation in March as players resume working and playing ball.

* And there are some great Japanese phrases... my favorite is Ikigai. There needs to be a word for what gets you out of bed (besides "dogs").

William James Society Prez's message, winter '25-6

 AUDIO version: LISTEN

‘Tis the season of William James’s birth, in 1842.

By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife’s birthday. So it’s a date I cannot and dare not ever forget.

The late great biographer Robert Richardson, noting the legendary James “family tradition” according to which Emerson blessed infant William, cautioned against attaching either too much or too little import to that mythic connection. It does seem too right to be true, but also too good not to be.

   

But isn’t it also a nice (and documented) twist, whether coincidental or fated, that WJ ended up delivering the keynote commemorative address at Emerson’s centenary in 1903? “Emerson's revelation,” suitably naturalized, was also his: “the point of any pen can be an epitome of reality; the commonest person's act, if genuinely actuated, can lay hold on eternity.” That is to say: Emerson and James both defended the actual experience of everyday people (as against the esoteric metaphysical daydreams of system-building philosophers, themselves not excluded) as reality’s surest sign.

It’s no coincidence that a devout philosopher of experience would take particular delight in sharing his own and others’ experience via the now-sadly-disappearing art of literary correspondence. WJ definitely did. His letters, like so much of his colloquially rendered and public-facing philosophy, shine and sparkle with wit, wordplay, and (above all) a profound humanity. So much of the message he meant to give the world in published form was even better conveyed in intimate missives to friends and family. 

And so it was a particular delight for me personally when a perceptive student in my Philosophy of Happiness course gifted me, at semester’s end this past December, with the two-volume 1925 edition of James’s letters (edited in 1911 by his son Henry). 

What a delicious trove! (And just a tip of the iceberg, compared to the unabridged edition that runs to over a dozen thick volumes and three feet on the shelf.) I often find myself consulting, for quick convenience, Project Gutenberg’s online version (II). But the books–the book books–are very special. (Rhys had already nailed down his A, by the way, but this gift sealed his happy Happiness legacy.)

Richardson notes that “by his mid-twenties William James already had a remarkable capacity to convert misery and unhappiness into intellectual and emotional openness and growth. It is almost as though trouble was for him a precondition for insight, and accepting trouble was the first step in overcoming it.” What a useful skill for us to emulate, in these times of trouble! 

“In January 1868, as his twenty-sixth birthday rolled past and he did his annual stocktaking, he wrote [his friend Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Jr.] that he was in the dismalest of dumps, unable to understand ‘how it is I am able to take so little interest in reading this winter.’ He could not have known that it would be a little over two years before he really hit bottom” (as he would confide in the famous diary entry of February 1, 1870: “I about touched bottom, and perceive plainly that I must face the choice with open eyes: shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard . . . or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else merely stuff for it?”

The  “moral business” for WJ was the active and proactive will he’d not quite believed in before. But now, as RIchardson aptly summarizes, he began to reject any fate as a fait accompli. “It is not what fate does to us that matters; what matters is what we do with what fate does to us.”

In a charming letter decades later in 1896, to his salvific hero Renouvier, he complained (as we academics are perennially wont to do) about his extra-academic workload: “Our University inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month.”

Yes indeed, we can relate. What was on your holiday reading list?

But then he said: “During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels…”

‘Nothing serious’!! Was he joking? He went on to say of Tolstoy:“I don’t like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but…”

In any event, here we are on the cusp of a new year and a fresh semester, as light expands and “light reading” gives way to something supposedly more continuously serious. I think WJ would enjoy the course I get to teach for the first time, Philosophy in Recent American Fiction. We’re reading Richard Ford, Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, and more. He’d like their anti-fatalism and semi-optimistic meliorism, as I know you Jamesians do too.

One more thing: many thanks to Professor Kevin Decker for his stellar service as secretary to WJS; and a hearty welcome to his incoming successor, Professor Alexis Dianda! Their transition has been smooth, and the state of our society is strong.  

Happy 2026, everyone. Let’s see if we can make it better. 

Phil Oliver

President@wjsociety.org

Nashville, TN

December 2025