One of his lectures presents “the stream of thought.” It opens with these bracing words: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.”
27.02.2026 11:43
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One of his lectures presents “the stream of thought.” It opens with these bracing words: “We now begin our study of the mind from within.”
“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
It makes no difference what the PRINCIPLE of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life's purposes. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.
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.
Fellows are researchers having an academic standing who work with Dr. John Shook, Dr. Anthony Pinn, and the project’s council of mentors. DEADLINE is March 20, 2026. Primary contact is Dr. John Shook at johnshook16@gmail.com
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.
“…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
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/...
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.
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/
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...
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
Of course. Life is built in doing, suffering, and creating.
Literary fiction can be true in the pragmatic sense, definitely. But unlike my shallower younger brother the novelist, I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts. We pragmatists do not deny reality. We do sometimes attempt to defy it.
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.
It is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason. But as difficult as such a revolution is, there is no other way, I believe, to the possession of reality.
During the past month I have only read Tolstoy's two great novels… I don't like his fatalism and semi-pessimism, but for infallible veracity concerning human nature, and absolute simplicity of method, he makes all the other writers of novels and plays seem like children.
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…
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/...
You don't believe this and I don't say I do. But I can find nothing in "Energetik" to conflict with its possibility.
a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness would be the only result. In short, the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer."
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…
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!”
as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the Kosmos.
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…
May I suggest that Mr. Castillo's club consider picking up William James; or at least his excellent expositor John Kaag's Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life… substack.com/@philoliver/...
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"…
“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)
