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William James Society

@wjsociety.bsky.social
359 followers 754 following 167 posts

Encouraging the discussion and application of the pragmatic, pluralistic philosophy of William James (1842-1910).

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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
It’s Lyceum day at MTSU with John Kaag. He’ll shed light on our “digital cave”— So it’s a good day, too, to start Jill Lepore’s new book… The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
mtsunews.com/2026/09/22/m...
mtsunews.com
MTSU Applied Philosophy Lyceum to explore ‘Digital Cave’ of algorithms – MTSU News
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Coming to Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)-
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Mick Jagger: I find philosophy a hard subject to educate myself into. I’ve recently read a couple of books, and I’m really finding it hard. They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing… www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/m...
nytimes.com
Mick Jagger Knows He May Have Played His Last Rolling Stones Show
The legendary rock star, now 82, on how fame, touring and aging have changed him.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors “A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...
nytimes.com
The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
WJ at Chocorua
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?-“if anomalous videos don’t yield anything except more hearsay they’ll let us hand the God-and-aliens debate back to Steven Spielberg and William James.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
A plug for WJ’s Varieties in Part 2 of the show (and for Carl Sagan’s in Part 1) www.newschannel5.com/plus/issues-...
newschannel5.com
Is Life from the Universe God's Plan?
With recent UAP videos and documents released by the federal government, religious organizations are contemplating what this means to the Christian belief system and the Bible.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
The UAP-haunted world. Two Gifford lecturers would tell us we have nothing to fear open.substack.com/pub/philoliv...
open.substack.com
An anomalous interview
Their god isn't big enough.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
“I admire the Pragmatists’ courage in believing that it is still possible to make a difference, however slight.” american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-amer...
american-philosophy.org
I Am An American Philosopher: Roberta Dreon
I Am An American Philosopher: Roberta Dreon -An Interview Series with John Capps- “As a European philosopher belonging to a tradition that has developed refined forms of disenchantment toward…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 08/06/2026
“in the very gap between perceiving meaning everywhere and feeling it for yourself, you discover… a renewed consciousness of your own felt life, sharpened precisely because you have just seen how much of the world’s meaning you can recognize but not inhabit…” open.substack.com/pub/nyphilos...
open.substack.com
What William James Left Unsaid
By Grace Theodoly | A Reading of “What Makes a Life Significant”
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Past WJS officer Paul Stob’s new book reviewed: Was Phrenology Real? Ask the Lump on Your Forehead. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/b...
nytimes.com
Was Phrenology Real? Ask the Lump on Your Forehead.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
William James Society newsletter, spring/summer 2026 wjsociety.org/news/
wjsociety.org
Newsletter – William James Society
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) would like to announce that it will be offering its annual WJS YOUNG SCHOLAR PRIZE to the young scholar (within five years of the Ph.D.) who submits the essay that best explores the thought of James.The prize will include:
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Psychology is about amassing the vital conditions for living well… Philip Davis, William James (in the My Reading series, Oxford University Press, 2022)
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my "professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being awalking encyclopedia of erudition…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
A meliorist’s acknowledgements: “I’m grateful to everyone who refused to surrender in advance. To those who persevered when the future seemed dark…
a.co
Amazon Sign-In
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
mtsunews.com/applied-phil...
mtsunews.com
Author, professor Vanessa Wills to speak on modern loneliness at MTSU’s Applied Philosophy Lyceum on April 24
Vanessa Wills, associate professor of philosophy at George Washington, will delve into the roots of modern loneliness and the importance of friendships at Middle Tennessee State University’s spring…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
Dr. Dianda’s Lyceum address was excellent, effectively making the Jamesian point that a complex and multi-relational self is rarely “fractured” beyond repair.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 17/04/2026
jposopher.blogspot.com/2026/04/intr...
jposopher.blogspot.com
Introducing Dr. Dianda
(As I'll do later this afternoon.) Welcome to our Applied Philosophy Lyceum, which we’ve been hosting for 34 years now. Thanks to Dean Lyons...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 08/04/2026
MTSU Applied Philosophy Lyceum
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/b...
nytimes.com
Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-amer...
american-philosophy.org
I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver
I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver -An Interview Series with John Capps- “[American Philosophy] is pragmatic, pluralistic, melioristic, impatient with scholastic obfuscation, eager alw…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
“William James’s gift for describing subjective experience might explain why his work is today regarded more as philosophy than science, which tends to denigrate description and elevate abstraction and experiment. — A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan a.co/05t0oDau
a.co
Amazon Sign-In
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
CALL FOR FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS Applications are being considered by the Fellowship Program for Humanist Thought, an American Humanist Association and Institute for Humanist Studies program, new in 2026.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
“…the warmth and vibrancy of his personality floods the pages, so that you feel his living presence still… more than a century after his death.” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
Global pragmatism www.facebook.com/share/p/1AGw...
facebook.com
Redirecting...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
CALL FOR PAPERS William James Studies — Spring 2026 Issue William James Studies (WJS) invites submissions of original and article-length manuscripts to us for our next issue in Spring 2026… substack.com/@philoliver/...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Kaag on mattering www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...
theatlantic.com
A New Understanding of Human Beings’ Most Basic Desire
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that a good life is one that seeks to create order out of a natural state of chaos.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Spring 2026 Newsletter President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver ‘Tis the season of William James’s birth, in 1842. By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife’s birthday. So it’s a date I cannot and dare not ever forget… wjsociety.org/news/
wjsociety.org
WJS Newsletter – William James Society
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “stream of consciousness” and who said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” (1842)… www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-th...
garrisonkeillor.com
The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, January 11, 2022 - Garrison Keillor
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook" — psychologist and philosopher William James, born on this day 1842.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue of truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Our University inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month…
a.co
The Letters of William James, Vol. II
Quote shared via Kindle: "Our University moreover inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, [10] so that during term-time one can do no con...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
WJ may never have delivered a commencement speech, but plenty of addresses have been delivered in his name. Here’s one. www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/1/...
hds.harvard.edu
William James and a Life Worth Living | Harvard Divinity School
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: “ I am so happy I can stand it no longer!”
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
Good for Sebastian Castillo, for tackling difficult books— particularly Spinoza's Ethics— with a little help from his book club friends (NYT Magazine, Nov.23). But I resist the insinuation that philosophy must be difficult, If it is to offer "genuine consolation" or "salvation"…
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
“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)
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Congratulations to newly-elected executive board officers Alexis Dianda (Xavier) and John Snarey (Emory)! And thanks to all who’ve offered to serve.
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
www.threads.com/@theatlantic...
threads.com
The Atlantic (@theatlantic) on Threads
The writer Peter Matthiessen traveled the world looking for elusive snow leopards and rare cranes. But a new biography shows that the genuine self he was really seeking would be much harder to find, w...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Autumn 2025 Newsletter President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver 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… wjsociety.org/news/
wjsociety.org
WJS Newsletter (NEW!) – William James Society
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 01/10/2025
Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage…
courage.no
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
Bertrand Russell was famously critical of American philosophers like William James and their radical theories of truth. But Russell’s attack rests on a caricature, argues philosopher John Kaag… iai.tv/articles/rus... www.facebook.com/share/p/1JRH...
facebook.com
Redirecting...
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William James Society @wjsociety.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
Kaag on Russell on James www.facebook.com/share/p/1JRH...
facebook.com
Redirecting...
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