Thanks for asking, Dave It helps to segue into a fascinating topic of discussion.
William James, Characterizing his philosophy as a whole, in the 1903-04 course "A Pluralistic Description of the World," in the --The Works of William James: manuscript Lectures--, ed. Ignas Skrupskelis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 311. > "It means individualism, personalism: that the prototype of reality is the > here and now; that there is genuine novelty; that order is being won > --incidentally reaped. That the more universal is the more abstract; that > the smaller & more intimate is the truer. The man more than the home, the > home more than the state or the church. Anti-slavery. It means tolerance > and respect." > > > > dmb says: > > That's a statement from James? Jc: yes. Note the quote marks. Sorry I didn't provide the source earlier, but the nice thing about this casual style is that any questions can be clarified easily upon request. dmb: It didn't sound like James to me Jc: That's because your mental picture of James is skewered toward your personal prejudices and you think Pirsig's MoQ frees you from the obligation to be "objective" about intellectual matters. It's a shame, really. dmb: >and I didn't > recall his using of the term "Personalism," so I looked it up in the > Stanford Encyclopedia. Jc: And yet you consider yourself a James scholar. dmb: Not sure what game John is playing here Jc: It's a game called "philosophy", Dave. Or dabbling in the world of the intellectual - where we follow the rules of logical argumentation and adhere to ideals like consistency and non-contradiction and eschew fallacies. It's would be delightful if you would play too, but you seem rather attached to the game of supercilious authoritarianism. A much simpler game, I'm sure but in the end, much less satisfying. dmb: >but > Personalism is a form of idealism, the kind that goes with theism and > theology. James' work may have displayed some elements of "Personalism" but > it's basically a modification of Hegel's idealism, whereas James was a > pragmatists and more than a little bit opposed to idealism. To the extent > that Hegel's Absolute was dropped in favor of more concrete particulars, > James would applaud. But he still thought idealists were a bunch of smug, > stuffed shirts. > Jc: Instead of SEP, try something a bit more serious - Jan Olaf Bengtsson's The Worldview of Personalism Origins and Early Development and/or Rufus Burrow Jr., Personalism: A Critical Introduction. "There was a long-standing claim in the literature that Bowne had actually gotten the term "personalism" from James, who had gotten it from Charles Renouvier, but later scholarship has put this in doubt. On the basis of Bengtsson's research, it seems more plausible that Bowne knew the term from his years studying with Lotze and Ulrici." and "the worldview of personalism was well defined in the early decades of the nineteenth century". Auxier, Time Will and Purpose. Page 378 dmb: > Speculative theism may be of interest to some people but the MOQ isn't > theistic nor idealistic. Doesn't even think the "self" is a real thing. Jc: Here is the interesting thing, Dave - Personalism is not about the self. "... from Principles of Psychology forward, the idea of "person" in James's writings and thinking is sharply distinguished from the substantialist idea of "self," ... James treats 'person' as a mode of ontological relation from the very start; he never saw 'person' as a substance in the Cartesian sense." ibid. James, In a letter to Bowne in 1908, after reading Bowne's Personalism. "It seemed to me a very weighty pronouncement, and form a matter taken together a splendid addition to American Philosophy.... it seems to me that you and I are now aiming at exactly the same end, although, owing to our different past, from which each retains special verbal habits, we often express ourselves so differently. It seemed to me over and over again that you were placing your feet identically in footprints which my feet were accustomed to--quite independently, of course, of my example, which has made the coincidence so gratifying. The common enemy for of us both is the dogmatist-rationalist-abstractionist. Our common desire is to redeem the concrete personal life which wells up in us from moment to moment, from fastidious (and really preposterous) dialectical contradictions, impossibilities and vetoes, but whereas your "transcendental empiricism" assumes that the essential discontinuity of the sensible flux has to be overcome by high intellectual operations on it, my "radical " empiricism denies the flu's discontinuity, making conjunctive relations essential members of it as given... but the essential thing is not these differences, it is that our emphatic footsteps fall on the same spot. You, starting near the rationalist pole and boxing the compass and I traversing the diameter from the empiricist pole, reach practically very similar positions and attitudes." McConnel, Borden Parker Bowne, 277-78 dmb: > My point? One ought not take John's views seriously. He's just covertly > thumping his bible again. Sigh. > What you ought to take seriously Dave, is the integrity of your own profession and to "play the game" well. John > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
