Get up

"You can get up. William James reminds us of the real difficulty of that first step…But… your mind will follow your body…" —Megan Craig & Ed Casey, Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion (Columbia University Press, 2025)

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3m5tdpwj6o22t

 

Percy Warner Park

11.16.25

Repetition and the aging brain

"The more predictable your days become, the faster your neurons quiet down."*

True, but only up to a point. Complete unpredictability is chaos. What the brain needs most is novelty of thought, perspective, insight… not an absence of stable habits. Our days are inevitably predictable, mostly,  in outer form. But they can be constantly improvised and experienced anew from the inside. 

Take my dogwalks, for instance. The pooches and I vary our routes daily, but inevitably traverse familiar ground. Yet no two dogwalks feel exactly the same. It's the old Heraclitus observation: you can't step into the same river twice. Time marches on, as do we. Subjectivity makes the difference. Our repetitive circles can expand their orbits, as inner experience expands and grows. That's how you "break the loop." (See Emerson's essay Circles.)

That's how I do, anyway. As for the dogs? They never seen bored. They never meet a squirrel, for instance, or another dog's backside, that doesn't fascinate them. They never seem old in spirit. (See Mark Rowland's The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living A Good Life.)

*

Confidence

I've got into the habit, in recent months— years, really— of confiding more pre-dawn reflections to my private Moleskine journal  than to Up@dawn. But this entry, for some reason, feels like one to share:

Yesterday in class was one of those days when the conversations—on consciousness, the importance of habit, the experience of grief, the acknowledgment of mortality— reminded me why I teach, and why my work matters… to me, at least.

I am so grateful that, unlike so many, I don't have to get up each day and go to a job making or selling widgets (or their moral equivalent) and peddling absurdities. I should be quite confident, before I retire, that I'm going to find a way to keep filling my days with meaningful activity. 

WE need to be confident we're doing everything in our power to avoid joining the unhappy ranks of Americans— 7 in 10, by one accounting— who say, shockingly, that they expect to age ungracefully and unhappily in their 70s and beyond. ("49% of adults ages 65 and older say they are aging extremely or very well": let's stick with them.)

"Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be…"

Chronic weather

Santayana was right: far better to enjoy each season in turn...

Wed!

Younger Daughter’s wedding was picture-perfect, with wonderful weather after a stormy day and before a cold one. My reception toast channeled “my philosophical muse” on the art of knowing what to overlook. Hope they’ll never overlook the glory of love for a “fellow bird”…

[image or embed]

— Phil Oliver (@osopher.bsky.social) November 9, 2025 at 7:24 AM

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m577en6w5c2f

And then there's the glory of a daughter's gratitude. Just before the ceremony began, she had gifts for Mom and me. Mine was a watch, far more valuable to me than any mere Rolex could ever be. Perfect symbol of the best of times, that seem at once so recent and so remote. So special.

 

She always will be that "impish, playful, high-energy kid" I toasted, and in my mind's eye was always going to be. They both were, and both will. I'll be forever grateful for the truly priceless opportunity I had to be the daily companion of small children, from '95 thru the early '00s. Best job in the world, and so much more.

What a weekend!

"Happy happy"

The big day we've been waiting for, Younger Daughter's wedding, is upon us. My usually-eloquent dad, when he first greeted me on our big day in May '93, was reduced to one (doubled) word: "Happy happy!" And that really sums it up.

I've been granted the happy privilege of participating in the ceremony. I'll read the passage in Wallace Stegner's The Spectator Bird that guests at Sharon's and my wedding received, as a token to commemorate the occasion, on a small scroll. 

“The truest vision of life I know is that bird… that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark… It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle."
–Wallace Stegner, Spectator Bird

And then at the reception I'll deliver a toast, with a humble bit of advice gleaned from (of course) William James's "Reasoning" chapter of Principles of Psychology. "The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." 

Happily married couples learn this. 

Be wise and be happy, kids. Live long and prosper. 🎵Give a little, take a little... 🎵 

Amor Vincit Omnia. 

Back to Brown's

 On May 29, 1993 I hosted a gathering at Brown's Diner in Nashville for the groomsmen in my wedding party. Sharon and I married the next afternoon.

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.

Make America Great Gatsby Again

I've always been inspired by Fitzgerald's "green light" at the end of the dock, but it looks different at Mar-a-Lago.

"Yesterday I wrote that President Donald J. Trump’s celebration of his new marble bathroom in the White House was so tone deaf at a time when federal employees are working without pay, furloughed workers are taking out bank loans to pay their bills, healthcare premiums are skyrocketing, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are at risk, that it seemed likely to make the history books as a symbol of this administration.

But that image got overtaken just hours later by pictures from a Great Gatsby–themed party Trump threw at Mar-a-Lago last night hours before SNAP benefits ended. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby skewered the immoral and meaningless lives of the very wealthy during the Jazz Age who spent their time throwing extravagant parties and laying waste to the lives of the people around them.

Although two federal judges yesterday found that the administration’s refusal to use reserves Congress provided to fund SNAP in an emergency was likely illegal and one ordered the government to use that money, the administration did not immediately do as the judge ordered.

Trump posted on social media that “[o]ur Government lawyers do not think we have the legal authority to pay SNAP,” so he has “instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” Blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, Trump added that “even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out.” His post provided the phone number for Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office, telling people: “If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW!”

“They were careless people,” Fitzgerald wrote, “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”"
...

HCR
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-1-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=20533&post_id=177771625&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=35ogp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Happy Halloween

Phil Oliver (@philoliver)

I’ve now worn a Halloween mask to class twice in my teaching career, the first time many years ago. It was time for a new photo to recycle annually.

substack.com

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m4iclswh5s24

The view from 85

"What's the point of living longer if you're unhappy?"

 

https://youtu.be/sAWnYi4xf5g?si=BZ7VfQyIzB5_V6_Z

The view from 85

Roger did not fall off Peter Attia's "cliff" at 75.

"…In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don't fear winter, and I don't regret spring..." nyt

David Whyte on friendship, love, and heartbreak

"All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/04/29/david-whyte-consolations-words/

SoFest #37

[On Substack]

What a glorious day at the Southern Festival of Books yesterday, the 37th rendition of an event that almost didn't happen due to the pernicious withdrawal of federal funds. But Parnassus and Vandy and lots of individual donors saved it.

The No Kings protesters paraded by, as if on cue, as I waited in line to get my Jimmy Carter book signed.

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...

SoFest + No Kings

Happening today, thanks to Parnassus Books, Vandy, and a legion of devotedly-"efficient" bibliophiles.: www.sofestofbooks.org

—And also happening, next-door at the state capital: No Kings! I'll be getting my steps in this morning.

https://bsky.app/profile/osopher.bsky.social/post/3m3hpooyjyk2s

Saints everywhere

But we’d do it for free anyway

"What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk!
…
It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words."

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3m3fauk4ids2r

The Scene’s Guide to the 37th Southern Festival of Books

In early April, executive director Tim Henderson of nonprofit Humanities Tennessee sent out a memo "with great urgency" saying that the organization's National Endowment for the Humanities grant, worth about $1.2 million annually, had been terminated.

One of the first consequences that many Nashvillians spoke of was the potential loss of the Southern Festival of Books, which has been among the most beloved literary events in Nashville since its inception in 1989. But community support and an expanded partnership with Vanderbilt University secured this year's festival. Now, on Oct. 18 and 19, the 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will visit the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park and its neighboring Tennessee State Museum and Tennessee State Library & Archives. All seems right in the world — at least for a weekend...

https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts_culture/books/2025-southern-festival-of-books/article_6074a87b-1a41-499e-8cfd-04a08b1e2d3f.html

Protest gear

The No Kings protest will be happening next-door to the book festival Saturday, at the capital. I'll take my hardhat.

Hannah Arendt (& John Prine) on forgiveness

On Hannah Arendt's birthday, her timeless meditation on what forgiveness really means…

"The capacity for forgiveness and the enactment of that capacity in the willingness to forgive is what holds the sphere of human experience together — the private sphere as much as the public sphere, for forgiveness is as vital in our deepest personal bonds as it is in the collective experience of public life."

 https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/07/14/hannah-arendt-forgiveness

It means, among other things, that we finite and imperfect beings owe one another the benefit of the doubt. As John Prine sang in Fish & Whistle…

https://youtu.be/WNuuBfWFYvQ

Zero books. HALF of Americans.

…According to a recent report, adult literacy scores leveled off and began to decline across a majority of O.E.C.D. countries in the past decade, with some of the sharpest declines visible among the poorest. Kids also show declining literacy.

Writing in The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. 

Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/opinion/smartphones-literacy-inequality-democracy.html?smid=threads-nytopinion&smtyp=cur

Descending to a post-literate culture

Those who most need to grasp this message will find it too long. They won't read it.

"…For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, "the best that has been thought and said".

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposelessness afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/jmarriott/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Pilgrimage

[On Substack...] Since Jacob's and Avery's reports yesterday in Philosophy of Happiness on Wanderlust, and Gary's mention of his recent trip to his old alma mater, I've been thinking of my own periodic "pilgrimages" to Columbia MO where I was an undergrad in the '70s...

That's the first house I lived in, on Westmount (210 then, 504 now), 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.

Also: the guy I mentioned who recently finished his walk across America for men's mental health: Tim Perreira.

And: MTSU's convocation speaker a few years ago did his own walk across America and wrote about it in Walking to Listen, Andrew Forsthoefel.

==
Is this also "pilgrimage"?:

The Simple Pleasure of a Long Walk and a Fun Meal

Charlotte Ward just wanted to share photos with family and friends, but she has built a community of people documenting their journeys, and the food they eat afterward.

The concept behind Charlotte Ward’s X account is simple. Every day, Ms. Ward, 22, goes for a long walk, usually through the lush woods near her home in Yorkshire, England, before she sits down for dinner. And every night she posts three photos of the scenery from her walk along with a photo of what she ate.

Sometimes she heads to the Yorkshire Dales to hike the highlands, other days she traverses the streets of London, but the result is always the same: three photos of the walk, and one of what she ate. It has been a perfect recipe for her growing audience.

Since starting her @hikingshawty account in April 2024, Ms. Ward has amassed more than 170,000 followers and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 in an X community she created called “today i walked…” Many of the people who come across her posts express their desire to live a quieter life like hers, spending time in nature and baking cakes from scratch.

For Ms. Ward, who originally started her account to share photos of her hikes with friends, the attention has been surprising... (continues)

How to Save a Book Festival

The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville has been one of the highlights of October for me for decades. Trump's & Elon's DOGE tried to kill it. The owner of my favorite bookstore helped save it. It'll be back weekend after next. Thank goodness!

"… a festival where tens of thousands of people come together to celebrate books — books of all kinds, for all ages — tells us something about the power of storytelling. Especially in a time of terrible fear and sorrow and vitriol, stories remind us of who we are and of how we belong to one another.

It's too soon to say how long the public arts and humanities, among so many other facets of the public good that are now in profound peril, will survive. Will people part with enough $20 bills to save them forever? Will philanthropic organizations support endangered cultural assets indefinitely? Will a lawsuit by the Federation of State Humanities Councils restore funding until the federal budgeting process returns to normal?

I don't know the answer to any of these questions. What I do know is that we need the humanities now, perhaps more than we have ever needed them, because we live in a time when so many of us have forgotten this crucial truth: We are a fangless, clawless, furless species, and we survive only in community."
— Margaret Renkl

The 37th annual Southern Festival of Books will be held in Nashville Oct. 18-19. As always, it is free and open to the public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/opinion/how-to-save-a-book-festival.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Last year at the festival: the author and her brother , seated on stage...

This morning

Another dawn. 

All the same, all different. All awake with possibility.

Bernie & AOC on the shutdown

https://www.threads.com/@mike_nellis/post/DPSVPLtiO0t?xmt=AQF0lRwCDr0ifFR5sG3k6V-ulNzss4EQHnVlFjDhfC8X2w&slof=1

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

Worth a listen:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/28/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ta-nehisi-coates.html?context=audio&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

10 minutes of peaceful beach sunrise

https://youtu.be/Pc3gvvfOf00?si=y7aDoIo-Jq58bejm

Dr. Megan Craig, Stony Brook University, at MTSU’s Applied Philosophy Ly...

 

 Middle Tennessee State University-Applied Philosophy Lyceum, Sep 26 2025. “Relation and Rupture at the End of Life”… joined in progress, a few minutes after the beginning (when IT technicians reported technical difficulties with the scheduled recording). https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTSYE66Jg0&feature=shared

UPDATE: Good news, the technical difficulties turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. The full talk is here: 

https://jcbmtsu.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=f4a600a0-37e1-405f-a5e8-b35a012181b6&start=660

The beginning...

 

Stay human

Excellent Lyceum address from Megan Craig, on staying human(e) and present in the face of mortality. #mtsu #AppliedPhilosophyLyceum

https://bsky.app/profile/wjsociety.bsky.social/post/3lzsqwmzue22v

“intimacy and sensible contact with the world”

James, alongside Bergson, recognized the value of non-intellectual sense, urging us to reanimate our capacity for greater intimacy and sensible contact with the world… James encouraged us to access "our earliest, most instinctive, least developed, kind of consciousness." Megan Craig

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-160106283?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

A conversation with Megan Craig

Dr. Megan Craig to speak at MTSU’s Fall Lyceum Sept. 26 – MTSU News...

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.

[On Substack...]

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

Wise pig: love and laughter

Well, the least we can do anyway.

https://www.threads.com/@stephanpastis/post/DO30WE9iVjW?xmt=AQF089AlvWPKFbl1vsGWBBAg_OhsQYMZpB3wcA57rwUxVA&slof=1

John Kaag: “James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that’s for the best.”

NYTimes: Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs.

"The findings of psychedelics wouldn't have surprised Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche and, most certainly, William James," John Kaag, a philosopher at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an expert on James, told me. Only over the past 100 years has the discipline, through an "analytic turn," been "trying to reduce all of human experience to the understandable, to the explicable," he said. "And James says, no, reality always outstrips the descriptions of it — and that's for the best."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/books/review/justin-smith-ruiu-on-drugs-philosophy.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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

MTSU Constitution Day Keynote Speaker featuring David Brooks

 So disturbing to hear that only 30% of our fellow Americans trust their neighbors, let alone their public institutions. No wonder our society is lately so splintered and (in David's word) "rotted" with mutual suspicion and hostility. But, so good to hear him encouraging more questions, more listening, and a greater sense of community.

And so great to see my former students on the panel. Nice job, Sneh and Victoria!

(Starts at around 20 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/live/fQnMDJ7uFm8?si=_MU8BA9gxZZ8uK3h

Philosophy professor Megan Craig to speak on end-of-life care at MTSU’s fall lyceum Sept. 26 – MTSU News

https://mtsunews.com/philosophy-lyceum-2025-megan-craig/

MTSU fires dean following pressure from Marsha Blackburn – MTSU Sidelines

https://mtsusidelines.com/2025/09/10/marsha-blackburn-calls-for-removal-of-mtsu-dean/

A quick (and heavily edited) minute

Happiness in a minute by Phil Oliver

I'd wondered what became of that little commentary I recorded for MTSU News back in June... 

Read on Substack