“Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.” ― William James, Some Problems of Continue Reading …
The Nietzschean Comedian
"Comedians are the new philosophers. That's the responsibility we have now." T.J. Miller I feel very fortunate to live in Denver, a city with a thriving comedy scene. It also happens to be the hometown of comedian T.J. Miller. Miller moved away years ago, honed his improv skills in Chicago for a while and now he has fully embraced Hollywood. Apparently, Hollywood has Continue Reading …
Why Substance Matters
Samuel Johnson's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's immaterialism, which says that matter does not exist, is one of those slightly famous moments in the history of philosophy. As the story goes, Johnson and his friends stood outside a church and complained about "Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter." They did not believe the idea but did not Continue Reading …
Thoreauly Ponderous
Our present relationship to technology can hardly be compared to the situation Thoreau faced in 1854, when Walden was first published. American attitudes toward nature began to shift in his lifetime, as steamboats and railroads appeared on the scene. The advent of such penetrating technologies meant that the ordering force of civilization had gained a powerful new advantage in Continue Reading …
Cavell and Pirsig on Emerson’s Revolution
About an hour into their discussion the PEL guys (minus Seth) briefly grappled with the meaning of Emerson's revolution. This revolution will be wrought, Emerson thought, by a "domestication of Culture" with a capital "C." Should we take "domestication" to mean some kind of taming, or does it mean that "Culture" should be brought home in some sense? This revolution, Emerson Continue Reading …
Emersonian America
If you ever sign up for a class on Pragmatism, there's a good chance you'll find Emerson on the syllabus. In fact, you're likely to find "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance" among the earliest reading assignments. Emerson was a poet and a prophet rather than a philosopher but his vision deeply informed American Pragmatism, particularly the Pragmatism of William James. Continue Reading …
Henri Bergson and William James on Vicious Intellectualism
"If I had not read Bergson," William James wrote in A Pluralistic Universe, "I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately." James had been engaged in a very long philosophical debate with the leading Idealists of his day, F.H. Bradley and Josiah Royce, when Bergson came to the rescue. James thought that Bergson supplied him with the concepts he needed Continue Reading …
Truth Without the Capital “T”
"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. Â . . . The supreme task is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them." -- Continue Reading …
Public Reason
John Rawls certainly has his fair share of critics, but he's also widely considered to be the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. As we heard in the Rawls episode, Rawls's theory of justice is a kind of contract theory wherein he lays out the basic principles of a democratic society. In the same sort of way that his thought experiment asks us to assess Continue Reading …
The Jung and the Restless
...I cannot outline the spiritual problems of modern man without giving emphasis to the yearning for rest that arises in a period of unrest... It is from need and distress that new forms of life take their rise, and not from mere wishes or from the requirements of our ideals." When Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul was first published in 1933 he had already treated Continue Reading …
Zen and the Art of Martin Heidegger?
The partially examined podcasters raised a series of very difficult questions in their recent discussion of Heidegger, particularly during a ten-minute stretch beginning about one hour and ten minutes into the 80th episode. These questions all seemed to pivot around one central problem: what does it mean to get right with Being? Should we take this as a kind of negative Continue Reading …
The Truth (and some lies) About Art
"A bad work of art is an oxymoron," Patrick Doorly says, "like bad skill." He thinks there's no such thing as bad art because the term does not refer to a class of objects or a category of activity. Art simply refers to excellence or to any "high-quality endeavor," a phrase he borrows from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Doorly's new book, The Truth Continue Reading …
The Reincarnation of William James: Eugene Taylor, R.I.P.
Eugene Taylor was only 66 years of age when he passed away on January 30th, 2013. Taylor was a graduate of Southern Methodist University, Harvard Divinity School, and earned his Ph.D. at Boston University. Saybrook University was his academic base but he was also a research historian of psychology at Harvard Medical School, founder of the Cambridge Institute of Psychology and Continue Reading …
Robert Pirsig and Montana State University
Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), will be celebrated at Montana State University in Bozeman on the weekend of December 7th and 8th. On December 15th, during their commencement ceremonies, he will receive an honorary Doctorate from MSU. These events offer some sweet redemption for Pirsig both personally and philosophically. In Continue Reading …
Don’t sell it to Hollywood
"I really would like to have the film rights to this book," Robert Redford said to the book's author. "You've got them," Robert Pirsig replied. "I wouldn't have gotten this involved if I hadn't intended to give it to you." As you may have inferred already, Redford is asking for the film rights to Pirsig's autobiographical novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Continue Reading …
Is Philosophy Better Than Art?
If you believe Plato, then the answer is "yes". If all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then the artists have been subordinated to the philosophers for about 25 centuries. According to Plato's Republic, especially the last section, the artists present a danger to society and to your soul. Two of my favorite thinkers disagree with Plato and Socrates on this point. Friedrich Continue Reading …
Nietzsche, Pragmatism and the Fact-Value Distinction
[From David Buchanan, frequent blog and Facebook contributor and participant in our ZAMM episode. See if that doesn't make sense after reading this.] Richard Rorty opened one of his talks by pointing out that as Europeans see it, Pragmatism is just what the Americans could get out of Nietzsche. This joke suggests that there are many similarities but American Pragmatism Continue Reading …
Deeply Funny?
(Image: Tom Motley when he's all spiffed up.) It is a little known fact, even among our philosophically sophisticated readers, that Heidegger argued for the supremacy of German humor. Because German jokes have the most precise underlying structure, he argued, German humor would rule the earth for a thousand years. (Sorry if you've already heard some version of that old Continue Reading …
Meaning and Context
(Painting by Robert McCall) In his book Wittgenstein and William James,Russell Goodman makes a case that James influenced Wittgenstein's thought and he does so by detailing their shared commitment to concrete experience and actual practice over intellect. (Wittgenstein was also positively influenced by James's view of religion, especially by The Varieties of Religious Continue Reading …
My Own Private Language?
Would it be reasonable to take Wittgenstein's case against private language as his case in favor of public language? Or is that too simple? As I was listening to episode 56, a quote from William James from Pragmatismcame to mind: All human thinking gets discursified; we exchange ideas; we lend and borrow verifications, get them from one another by means of social intercourse. Continue Reading …