Category Archives: William James

Pragmatic Turning

Posted on March 2, 2016 by

On February 13, 2013, Richard J. Bernstein, the 2013 Selzer Visiting Philosopher gave this lecture at Beloit College. Dr. Bernstein is the Vera List Professor of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. The standard philosophical conventions that divide … Continue reading →

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What Is Your Personal Culture?

Posted on April 3, 2015 by

One view of the reduction to practice, or to application. In the fall of 1968 I entered ninth grade. I was, up to ninth grade, a lackadaisical student. What was at the time termed social studies, and english, were my … Continue reading →

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A Round, A Hole

Posted on February 20, 2015 by

Some years ago, being with a camping party in the mountains, I returned from a solitary ramble to find everyone engaged in a ferocious metaphysical dispute, The corpus of the dispute was a squirrel -a live squirrel supposed to be … Continue reading →

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By Nothingness to Nirvana, Beyond Contrivance

Posted on August 29, 2014 by

I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, … Continue reading →

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Meta Plus Recursion (and a topos for truthiness)

Posted on July 26, 2014 by

The idea of a universally shared source of truth called ‘reason’ or ‘human nature’ is, for us pragmatists, just the idea that such discussion ought to be capable of being made conclusive. We see this idea as a misleading way … Continue reading →

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Empiricism

Posted on May 20, 2014 by

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff pure experience, then knowing can … Continue reading →

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Rabbit Holes

Posted on May 12, 2014 by

I’ve been reviewing current so-called Integral literature over the last few weeks, but it was Ken who had much earlier got me going back toward that development dynamic when I toppled over ‘into it’ in the intellectual sense from our … Continue reading →

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Bergson & James

Posted on April 24, 2014 by

 “The essential contribution of Bergson to philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism. In my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery. I don’t see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing role of … Continue reading →

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Commit it then to the flames

Posted on May 7, 2011 by

David Hume, 300th birthday today. We may observe in human nature a principle which, if strictly examined, will be found to diminish extremely the assurance, which we might, from human testimony, have, in any kind of prodigy. The maxim, by … Continue reading →

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