Oxford

Last stop on our magical mystery tour of England is Oxford. William James delivered the Hibbert Lectures there in 1908-09. He began,

...Oxford, long the seed-bed, for the english world, of the idealism inspired by Kant and Hegel, has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking. Even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism. It looks a little as if the ancient english empirism, so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding germanic formulas, might be repluming itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever. It looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh.

Those lectures became A Pluralistic Universe, in which he also wrote: “Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.”

And,

The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion. The vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened, and the rising tide of social democratic ideals, have changed the type of our imagination, and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or obsolescent. The place of the divine in the world must be more organic and intimate.

As Richardson summarizes, "Pragmatism derives directly from Darwin. Variations that confer a benefit — an adaptive advantage — survive. A variation is judged entirely by its results; how it originates doesn't matter. Pragmatism is the recognition that activity and the consequence of activity are what matter."

While in England for the Hibbert Lectures William visited Henry at Lamb House. That's when he scandalized his Anglicized brother by indecorously climbing the wall to get a glimpse of G.K. Chesteron, despite Henry's insistence that such things just weren't done.

But Henry had nice things to say about the new book, which he said he read "with a more thrilled interest than I can say, with enchantment, with pride, and almost with comprehension. It may sustain and inspire you a little to know that I'm with you, all along the line — and conceive of no sense in any philosophy that is not yours."


in the garden at Lamb House,
Henry James's home in England
July 1908.

UPDATE, Jy 19-For Don:

It’s the anniversary of the first women’s rights conference in history, organized in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friend Lucretia Mott. They had been getting together frequently to talk about the abuses they suffered as women, and they finally decided to have a public meeting to discuss the status of women in society. At the meeting, on this day in 1848, they drew up a declaration, which said in part, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton read the declaration and then made a radical suggestion that the document should also demand a woman’s right to vote. At that time, no women were allowed to vote anywhere on the planet. And many of the other women there objected to the idea. They thought it was impossible. WA
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Darwin and women. Publicly dismissive of the female intellect, in private he was completely dependent on it... more »
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We can't leave Oxford without mentioning one F.C.S. Schiller, resident of Balliol College and ardent defender of William James and Pragmatism (though he preferred the term "Humanism"). Schiller was a punster and polemical pugilist. He loved verbal sparring with the metaphysical idealists who opposed Jamesian pragmatism, especially his Oxford colleagues Bradley and Green. James's letters are full of pleas to Schiller to tone it down and stop picking gratuitous fights. Mark Porrovecchio of Oregon State has written a book about Schiller.

Pragmatism with Schiller more honest & useful

Mark Porrovecchio
PDF: 2009 Spring Newsletter

Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.Protagoras, ca. 490– 420 BC

Pragmatism: an American movement in philosophy founded by C. S. Peirce and William James and marked by the doctrines that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is to guide action, and that truth is preeminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. Merriam-Webster Dictionary

In the mid-1890s, F.C.S. Schiller failed his doctoral orals at Cornell University and returned to England to take a position at Oxford. Within a year, William James published several books of philosophy that set off a blaze of debate between the defenders of Absolute Idealism and advocates of the new, ethical “practicalism.”

The two men had begun a relationship while Schiller was at Cornell and James at Harvard, carrying on a correspondence that would be of enduring value to both philosophers.

“By the time pragmatism was introduced to the British philosophical public in 1900, Schiller was already well on his way to articulating and defending pragmatism to his peers,” said Mark Porrovecchio, a Center Research Fellow, forensics director, and assistant professor of speech communication at OSU.

Porrovecchio is working on what he describes as a rhetorical biography and intellectual history of Schiller (1864-1937), the foremost proponent of pragmatism at the turn of the century. “This project analyzes, in chronological order, the most substantial and often contested arguments that Schiller engaged in so as to promote, first, Jamesian pragmatism and, secondly, his own pragmatic humanism,” Porrovecchio wrote in his research proposal.

As an early defender of pragmatism, Schiller’s style of argument—repeating key themes, engaging in vigorous and often humorous polemic—was crucial.

“Without it, pragmatism arguably might not have gained the foothold it did against the idealistic strains of philosophy dominant at the time. But that same bold, insistent style proved an irritant to pragmatism’s reputation in the years preceding World War II, and led pragmatists themselves to reject and downplay Schiller’s influence.”

As pragmatism fell on hard times during the 1940s and 1950s, Schiller’s reputation also sank, and even when it was resurrected several decades later, his contri-butions were relegated to a footnote.

Schiller’s pragmatism was of a very specific sort, said Porrovecchio. His humanism traces back to James’s “subjective-centered handling of the objective world,” and points toward what James called “radical empiricism,” that is, to the role individuals play in compre-hending and interpreting the world as they conceive it.

“Having sided with pragmatism, and then with the more expansivehumanism, Schiller set out to demonstrate that the former leads into the latter. To do so, he adopts the exemplar Protagoras and, with him, the dictum ‘man is the measure.’ . . . If James’s psychology provides the mechanism by which to understand the human consciousness, then pragmatic humanism provides the method by which to organize and control its functions.”

James’s death in 1910 forced Schiller to defend the philosopher’s views against competing interpret-ations, plus he was generally marginalized and considered out of touch with current developments. Following World War I, said Porrovechio, Schiller’s “studies in humanism have been translated into problems, not just of contingency but of belief. This is a seemingly Jamesian question of the will and what it can accom-plish, but there is now an edge to such queries of accomplishment.”
In Tantalus, or The Future of Man (1924) and Cassandra, or The Future of the British Empire (1926) “the pragmatic under-pinnings have grown tinny. Humanity’s abilities and the individual’s will are now in doubt. . . Absent the resolve to put forth the potential, or weakened by the shocks of a world in turmoil, the measure of Protagoras is being replaced with the philosopher king of Plato.”

Schiller died in 1937 and soon all but disappeared from the pages of philosophy. “When mentioned at all, he is curtly framed as one who misunderstood pragmatism. When completely ignored, his absence paves the way for a story of pragmatism that is distinctly American and predominantly realist in nature. Both instincts are historically inaccurate even as they have been rhetorically effective.”

Porrovecchio hopes to correct the historical narrative about pragmatism that developed from 1940 through the 1970s by arguing for what Schiller can add if reintroduced to the fold.

“Pragmatism without Schiller has proven, till now, to be a convenient fiction. Pragmatism with Schiller is more honest, more exciting, and more useful.”

 Studies in Humanism... Riddles of the Sphinx