Reading & the Good Life
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Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
Who is William James?
William James was an original thinker in and between physiology, psychology, and philosophy. His twelve-hundred-page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection. It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. […]
Learn more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/
What is Pragmatism?
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that broadly understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. … Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870 and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who first defined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleague William James (1842–1910), who further developed and ably popularized it. […]
Learn more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/
On Truth and Consequences
Are we sleepwalking through life? As James put it, “Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.” We sleepwalk through life, operating well below our experiential and moral thresholds. Our sleepwalking leads us to miss each moment's subtle changes and uniqueness.
In Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, Kaag explains,
In everyday life, I’m frequently in such a hurry that the transitory nature of the present is largely lost on me. The grass I see in my backyard is exactly the same green that it has always been. I fail to see the blues that drift and pass away around the roots, the purples that coat it in the evening, the off-whites that grace its blades on a dewy morning. ‘We take no heed, as a rule,” James explains, ‘of the different way in which the same things look and sound and smell at different distances and under different circumstances.’
Instead of attending to the pervasive differences between experiences, writes Kaag, we operate under the assumption of identity and similarity: this grass is the same as it was yesterday. And that this person will probably say the same thing she did yesterday. Sometimes life is easier this way. For James, there is something deeply misguided about this rendering of experience. It may be easier, but not better.
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