Our 19th century

It's Dickens' birthday. He was just 58 when he died, after penning and performing all those marvelous tales of 19th century travail. What a legacy of great expectations, as I stare down the barrel of another milestone birthday just a week away. What else might he have left us, if he'd had another seven healthy years!

Speaking of the 19th century...

I'd been getting a bit disappointed at the failure of so many of our department's interviewees' for the position of Assistant Prof to acknowledge, let alone enthuse about, a place in the curriculum for 19th century British and American philosophers. But that changed in our most recent bracket of zoom calls. One candidate loves William James, another wants to learn more about Peirce, another wants to do Darwin and the Brits, and another even mentioned Rorty. 

And that's my cue to burrow deeper into Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Today's meditation is on a couple of arresting assertions in "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism":

• "If atheism is interpreted as anti-monotheism, then Dewey was as aggressive an atheist as has ever lived."
• "Dewey is the better exponent of a properly pragmatist philosophy of religion" than James.

The first is questionable because atheism need not be defined primarily as anti-anything. Let's keep it positive, I say. Also, "aggressive" is not a word I generally associate with the Dewey of A Common Faith. But he does speak of becoming more "militant"...

We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.

 So we'll see.

The second is surprising, in light of James's eagerness to embrace the radical pluralism of Varieties. But Dewey's common faith is all about uniting our ideals and with an ameliorated reality in the future, and one could make a case for James's position being more retrospective, more about conserving past pieties that seem to have had a value for life according to their votaries. So again, we'll see. 

Dewey wrote The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, James dedicated Pragmatism to J.S. Mill. This is an Anglo-American meditation, and a conversation absolutely central to the 19th century philosophical legacy. 

So whatever the upshot of my morning meditation, I'm just buoyed to see young scholars on the horizon who are themselves engaged with these thinkers and their ideas. 

Impressed by the candidates for our 19th-cen opening who (without prompting) volunteer their enthusiasm for Mill, Darwin, Emerson, James. Less so those who laugh off "anglophones" as beneath serious consideration. No wonder so many students here don't know their own tradition.

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) February 5, 2022