The document details presentations and discussions from a regional conference on American philosophy, focusing on figures like William James and Richard Rorty. Key themes include the nature of pragmatism, the philosophy of happiness, and the tension between immediacy in perception and abstract intellectualism. The author reflects on their evolving view of Rorty's ideas and the importance of direct experience in philosophical inquiry.

1. James Phil Oliver
Department of Philosophy/RS
Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)
1301 East Main Street,
Murfreesboro, TN 37132-0001
300 James Union Building
(615) 898-2050, 898-2907
Campus Mail Box 73
● Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
● JPOsopher.blogspot.com
● twitter.com/OSOPHER

2. American Philosophical Association
Central Divison Regional Conference
Feb 25, 2022, Chicago-Palmer House
G4P. William James Society
William James
Chair: Tadd Ruetenik (St. Ambrose University)
Speakers:
Josh Fischel (Penn State-Harrisburg), "On the Return of the Preternatural in the
Philosophy of William James"
James Phil Oliver (Middle Tennessee State University), "Promoting Happiness,
Demoting Authority: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn Revisited"
Jacob L. Goodson (Southwestern College), "Cries of the Wounded, Divided Selves,
and Sick Souls: William James and the Consequences of Hearing the Cries of the
Wounded"
APA Central

3. American Philosophical Association
Central Divison Regional Conference
Feb 26, 2022, Chicago-Palmer House
G5L. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP)
Unraveling Modernity Through American Philosophy
Panelists:
Ken Stikkers (SIUC), "Pragmatism and the Early Frankfort School"
James Phil Oliver (MTSU), "Pragmatism and the Pursuit of Hope and Happiness"
Clara Fischer (Queen's University Belfast), "Affect and Emotions in Jane Addams’
Thought"
Deron Boyles (Georgia State University), "Activating Dewey’s Epistemology: Education
as Reflecting and Knowing"
Brian Butler (UNC-Asheville), "Karl Llewellyn, American Legal Pragmatist"

4. It’s good to be back in
Chicago, at the APA, in
person and on the ground at
a live philosophy conference.
Those zoom rectangles just
aren’t the same.
Like many of you I was last
here about a hundred years
ago: in 2020. Just the other
side of the great lockdown. I
reconsidered Royce. This
time I’m here to reconsider
Rorty.

5. My interest in Richard Rorty’s brand of pragmatism
began when I arrived at Vanderbilt to begin grad
school in 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
was a topic of great interest among my profs and
peers. Having and pronouncing a view of Rorty’s
linguistically-turned, metaphor-slashing, meta-
philosophically idiosyncratic iconoclasm seemed de
rigeur. I was new to pragmatism and American
philosophy, and impressionable. I soon latched onto
“Willy James”...

7. My semi-articulated view of Rorty (and
Rorty’s James), once I had one, was
not especially sympathetic. In the
decades since, I’d never had occasion
to revisit or “redescribe” it with fresh
eyes and the possibility of a more-
favorable evaluation. That’s the
occasion I’m here for today. I confess
I’m still working through my
ambivalence, but I also confess I now
think my earlier take was hasty and a
bit harsh.

8. My present revival of
interest in Rorty has been
sparked by a spate of
posthumous publications…

9. Particularly Pragmatism as
Anti-Authoritarianism,
which touches directly on
themes we perennially
engage in two of the
courses I teach in regular
rotation: Philosophy of
Happiness and Atheism
and Philosophy.
“These lectures were the final,
mature version and vision of his
path-breaking pragmatism.”

10. "Pragmatism as
Antiauthoritarianism" Part
1. Richard Rorty's 1996
Girona Lectures, with
discussions.
Ferrater Mora lectures,
University of Girona, 1996.
Discussants: Robert Brandom,
John McDowell, Bjorn Ramberg.
These 10 lectures were
published in 2021 by Harvard
University Press. Parts 1 and 2
together are about 12.5 hours.
Bob Brandom, 11.20.21 Part 1
Part 2

11. Robert Brandom Seminar 2020 “Pragmatism and Expressivism” Lecture 7 Assessing Rorty’s pragmatism
Lecture 7 of 14.
Assessing Rorty’s
pragmatism as
antirepresentationalism.
Handouts, links to readings,
and other documents
available at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~rbran
dom/Courses...
See Brandom website at:
http://www.pitt.edu/~rbran
dom/index.html

12. “…there are aspects of
metaphysics, epistemology,
and metaphilosophy that
preoccupy contemporary
neopragmatists such as
Richard Rorty but that I treat
only lightly and in passing.
Much more waits to be said
on this topic, more than I can
or want to say, and I hope
others will say it. We must all
tell our own
stories…Jamesian
transcendence is in my view
neither an epistemic nor an
escapist impulse, both of
which Rorty criticizes. SPGS
5
So, as Richard Rorty
suggests, "we can, with
James, relish the thought
that our descendants may
face live and forced options
which we shall never
imagine." And if, as Rorty
goes on to say, "James
was not always content to
identify the 'wider self
through which saving
experiences come'" with
some such feeling of human
solidarity through the ages,
he was much more at ease
with this fundamentally
naturalistic orientation to
spiritual life than is
commonly recognized.
SPGS 201

13. James appreciated and sometimes espoused versions of historicism and relativism–relationalism is
a better term for his view–but was no deconstructionist. He was a marvelous writer of accessibly
literary philosophy, but he was at last a philosophical intellectual and not just a kibitzing
conversationalist. Like Dewey and the other "classical American philosophers," he regarded all
intellectual disciplines warily but with a real conviction of purpose. He believed that philosophers
have an important function in our cultural life that is more than just talking, though talk they
must if they are to execute the role assigned them with any competence. The deconstructive
pragmatists follow James in thinking that what we call the world or reality is for us an abstraction
from the totality of our experience. But they depart from him (and Dewey) abruptly and irrevocably
when they fail to distinguish depths from shallows in that totality, and to preserve for philosophers
an explicit responsibility to acknowledge and ply the distinction. Fortunately, says Edward Reed,
"others have picked up the notion from James and Dewey that one can believe in real, thick
experience and still be a philosopher."4 Despite being troubled by its occasional and maddening
descent into trivia, James was unashamed to admit that he "believ[ed] in philosophy myself
devoutly."5 James's emphasis on perceptual immediacy as the touchstone of something "deep" in
our experience, whether trenchant and profound or merely misguided, is one of his most
characteristic and recurrent motifs. It may be possible to be a "pragmatist" while renouncing the
Jamesian depths, but it surely is not possible to do so and still be a Jamesian. But in the Jamesian
spirit of inclusion, I will not here attempt to establish membership requirements for some closed
"Friends of William James" society. SPGS __

14. I simply note the fact that James was painfully aware of difficulties in coming to terms with perceptual experience
philosophically, some of them also Rorty's reasons for renouncing philosophy's traditional problems and
purposes; but still he stuck with them. James's unremitting commitment to the presence of real depths in
experience, which philosophy easily misses and discourse did not invent, is not easily skirted or dismissed by
those who would represent themselves credibly as his lineal intellectual descendants. I dislike deconstructive
pragmatism (by which I mostly have in mind Rorty's creative and deliberate misreading of James and
Dewey, evidently aimed at eliding their distinctive differences from the continental tradition of Heidegger,
Derrida, and others). I think James would dislike it too, for failing to take seriously the subjective experience of
depth beyond words. It would be mean spirited to deny the deconstructionists their insights. Rorty's genius for
"antiphilosophical" narrative and synthesis has raised the profile of American philosophy generally. But
his sweeping attempts to transform the Pragmatists into irrealists of a specific sort are misleading. The
attractiveness of dispensing with the notion of perceptual depths is undeniable: what can we really say about an
experience that begins to lose clarity and vividness precisely when we speak of it? How, indeed, can we be sure
that our talk about experience does not fundamentally alter our recollection of it, or even that any
experience is "immediate" and "perceptual" at all? In other words, do we have grounds for asserting a
phenomenal distinction between deep and shallow experience? James clearly thinks we do, with his admonition
to "take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it
comes."6 This is an intriguing, paradoxical challenge…does he mean that, by directing us away from concepts,
philosophy may succeed in turning us toward reality? Something of this sort is suggested in his defense of
Bergson: "In using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of concepts generally, Bergson . .
. show[s] us to what quarter we must practically turn if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he
denies that they can give."7 SPGS __

15. …F. C. S. Schiller, a contemporary and ally of James's in the philosophical wars of their day, was
also a philosopher of subjectivity; but in important ways Schiller was more "subjective," less a
realist about nature and our experience in and of it, indeed, as its progeny. He may be more
deserving of the lineal recognition that Richard Rorty sometimes hastily confers upon
James. Schiller called himself a "personal idealist," in deliberate contrast to absolute or
transcendental idealists like Green and Bradley. James, on the other hand, bristled at the charge
that his radical empiricism was in any important metaphysical sense "idealistic." Like James,
Schiller defended and celebrated subjectivity; but it is highly misleading to lump him and
James with Rorty, indiscriminately, as antirealists. Of course, James held that human volition,
with purposive intelligence its most useful tool, contributes mightily to the perpetual determination
of a reality that is metaphysically under-determined from the start: there are always more real
possibilities at any moment than the actual facts (minus the undetermined and unexecuted
choices of individuals) can account for. Schiller and Rorty, and the "objective" pragmatists, agree
on this. But James is distinctive in his conjoint emphasis on intractabilities as no less real than the
world's plasticity. It sounds paradoxical, but James is a realist in part because he is so attuned
to the different ways in which personal views and enthusiasms shape very "subjective"
descriptions of the world, which are useful, accurate, and–in pragmatic terms–true. Here he
distinguishes his own brand of realism from what he saw as Santayana's peculiar irrealism…

16. I’ve not, thankfully I think,
retained a copy of the
Rorty paper I stayed up all
night trying to write on
deadline in my first year for
the late great John J.
Compton, who still
epitomizes for me the
iconic Form of the properly
presentable academic. (He
also introduced me to
“Willy James.”) He was
kind enough to give me an
extension, and ultimately a
good grade… for all the
good the extra time
probably didn’t do to refine
my grasp of Rorty’s project.

17. Later, working with John Lachs, I
came to a stronger appreciation of
the vitalizing presence of
“immediacy” in our lives… In his
final 1996 Ferrata Mora lectures at
the University of Girona, Rorty
criticized the uses to which
empiricist philosophers have tried
to put immediacy and perceptual
experience. These criticisms
remain a source of ambivalence
and even consternation for me. And
this is good! Questions and projects
are an invitation to imaginative
redescription. (And also to more
immediacy and perceptual
experience, JL would say.)

18. John Lachs's Practical Philosophy Critical Essays on His Thought with Replies and
Bibliography (Brill, 2018) Immediacy and the Future by Phil Oliver

19. Immediacy and the Future
…A lightbulb went off, inside, and I finally thought I
got it; I began to understand what Lachs meant by
saying that we have it in our power to regard our acts
as so many ends, not just intermediate steps on the
way to some perpetually-postponed future fulfillment.
Oh, I thought, so immediacy isn’t just another
technical notion from the philosophers’ shop. It can
be about mundane personal enthusiasm and simple
delight in everyday experience, too.
That moment nourished several themes that
eventually coalesced in my work. Now I had my
thesis topic and a gestating book theme, eventuating
in William James’s “Springs of Delight” (Vanderbilt,
2001) with its acknowledge- ment of Lachs’s “deft but
unobtrusive direction that enabled me finally to sub-
due the ‘Ph.D. Octopus.’”

20. James cautions that we not abuse the powers of intellect by substituting
pure intellection for rounded perception. Still, it is in the broader sense an
intellectual act to warn against the dangers of intellectualism. We must not
forget that James was one of the first to use the term intellectual in a
positive way, to describe his own activities and his professional as well as
temperamental allegiance to reason, in the sense that is not unfaithful to
the actual experience of individuals. One result of going with the flow of
experience in the way suggested here is that we may begin to free
ourselves from the wearying habit of subordinating all of our acts to
remote futurity, and learn to enjoy and appreciate present experience
now. There is no inherent conflict or final incompatibility between adopting
both the purposive and goal-oriented and the aesthetic attitudes, although
we typically cannot embrace both unreservedly and simultaneously. We
must exercise discretion to know when each attitude is appropriate. But
"normally it is quite within our power to regard our doings as so
many ends. This could render each of our acts self-validating and
joyous" (John Lachs, Intermediate Man [Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing
Company, 1981], 41). 33. SPGS __

21. When one switches from Kant to Hegel, the philosopher whom Sellars described as "the great foe of
immediacy," these metaphors lose much of their appeal… there is no clear need for what McDowell
describes as 'a minimal empiricism': the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating
the way our thinking is answerable to how things are, as it must be if we are to make sense of it as
thinking at all… we are constantly interacting with things as well as with persons, and one of the ways
in which we interact with both is through their effects upon our sensory organs. [We] can be content
with an account of the world as exerting control on our inquiries in a merely causal way, rather than
as exerting what McDowell calls "rational control”... "a merely causal, not rational, linkage between
thinking and independent reality will do, as an interpretation of the idea that empirical content
requires friction against something external to thinking." — Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by
Richard Rorty https://a.co/aKXie3d
To that I say: “friction,” though, the blunt resistance and attraction of nature literally and palpably
under foot, is what we peripatetic empiricists find most immediately salient in our everyday
experience. We suspect a large chunk of the history of western philosophy, the chunk eager to think
without friction, is a result of philosophers’ unhealthy sedentary ways. They need to get out more, to
move about in the open air. They’ll not then be so tempted to doubt in philosophy what they do not
doubt in their hearts or on their feet.

22. Better this…
Solvitur Ambulando
–Solved by walking… –
Gymnasiums of the mind

23. "Sellars and Davidson can be read as saying that
Aristotle's slogan, constantly cited by the empiricists,
"Nothing in the intellect which was not previously in
the senses," was a wildly misleading way of describing
the relation between the objects of knowledge and our
knowledge of them. McDowell, however, though
agreeing that this slogan was misleading, thinks that
we are now in danger of tossing the baby out with
the bath. We need to recapture the insight which
motivated the empiricists. He disagrees with
Brandom's implicit suggestion that we simply forget
about sense-impressions, and other putative mental
contents which cannot be identified with judgments.
The controversy between McDowell and Brandom is
exciting wide interest among Anglophone philosophers
because it is forcing them to ask whether we still
have any use for the notion of "perceptual
experience.". — Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
by Richard Rorty
That’s my baby…

24. "’The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.’3 James
points to the ephemeral, fleeting quality of immediate perceptual experience as the
insuperable barrier to complete human understanding of the real. We cannot compass
all experience, and it is only an ‘intellectualist’ error to suppose that any avenue of
experience can be bypassed on the way to full understanding. We can in some way
hope to ‘extract’ a conceptual translation of it, but concepts are not ‘deep,’ and
discourse about experience is not experience in the primary sense (that is, it is not
immediate or perceptual, though it may still be ‘perceptive’).” SPGS 38
The point is not to invoke perceptual experience in vindication of any particular sentence or
proposition, but to acknowledge that our place in nature and our condition as natural beings
cannot be swept under the armchair. The point is to have perceptual experiences, not just
to think about them. To cut ourselves off from our native place and condition would be the
most wanton self- and species-destruction. It’s why we’d better tread light, in the direction
of Zuck’s metaverse.

25. “Philosophy lives in words, but truth and
fact well up into our lives in ways that
exceed verbal formulation. There is in the
living act of perception always
something that glimmers and twinkles
and will not be caught, and for which
reflection comes too late. No one knows
this as well as the philosopher. He must
fire his volley of new vocables out of his
conceptual shotgun, for his profession
condemns him to this industry; but he
secretly knows the hollowness and
irrelevancy. . . . In the religious sphere, in
particular, belief that formulas are true
can never wholly take the place of
personal experience.” VRE XVIII
WJ would happily have swapped his
standard-issue conceptual shotgun for
one of these.

27. Again, I’m still ambivalent. But I can declare that I’m glad
to have re-entered the Rorty conversation. I do think he
has important things to say, and he says them in
provocative ways that shake the dust out of so many old
academic exercises in ancestral deference. Important
things, that is, beyond the prophetic visions so widely
remarked just after the presidential election of 2016.
…something will crack. The nonsuburban
electorate will decide that the system has
failed and start looking around for a
strongman to vote for — someone willing to
assure them that, once he is elected, the
smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers,
overpaid bond salesmen, and
postmodernist professors will no longer be
calling the shots. …

28. No matter how prophetic Rorty may have been in "Achieving Our Country," even he couldn't have imagined
how absurd it would be to live in the age of post-truth-ranting Trump. His late turn to a greater focus on
politics has been more than vindicated by subsequent developments. But in light of the bizarre fake-
everything style of present public discourse, when neither freedom nor truth seem well cared for, is Rorty’s
really a constructive voice for this moment? Rupert Read thinks so.
A question of real interest and importance to the general public, now, is: how do we remain
solid about politics, true to sentiments on the doorstep, true to a basic sense of our
inhabiting a shared reality, serious about changing the world for the better (or at least:
stopping it from uncontrollably sliding into a worse and worse situation, vis a vis politics,
democracy, inequality, climate, and more)… how do we do all this in a culture where we are
more than ever suspicious that what we are told may be untrue, and more than ever
suspicious about what it means for something to be true. Rorty offers a possible way
forward, vis a vis this crucial question.
The way forward is away from the authoritarian template of anti-humanism, “away from the very
idea of human answerability to the world” (or Reality) and towards one another. “I regard the need
for world-directedness as a relic of the need for authoritative guidance… My candidate for the most
distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people,
and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.”
Pragmatism is a humanism, aspirationally at least.

29. This is quite a remarkable passage In Rorty's Universality and Truth
lecture. Understand it, and you better understand his total weltanschauung.
"The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think
that the entire 'liberal Establishment' is engaged in a
conspiracy…These parents have a point. Their point is that we
liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication
situation when we talk with our fundamentalist students than do
kindergarten teachers with their students…
When we American college teachers encounter religious
fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating
our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the
authority of the Christian Scriptures. Instead, we do our best to
convince these students of the benefits of secularization…” PAA 79

30. "The lectures try to sketch the result of putting
aside the cosmological, epistemological, and moral
versions of the sublime: God as immaterial first
cause, Reality as utterly alien to our epistemic
subjectivity, and moral purity as unreachable by
our inherently sinful empirical selves. I follow
Dewey in suggesting that we build our
philosophical reflections around our political
hopes: around the project of fashioning
institutions and customs which will make human
life, finite and mortal life, more beautiful."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard
Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom:
https://a.co/4F82CR9 xxix

31. Phil Oliver
@OSOPHER
·Feb 22
It's Schopenhauer's birthday,
for whom "happiness is an
illusion, our desires can
never truly be satisfied, and
the only way to attain peace
of mind is by maintaining
very low expectations." He
seems to be popular with
young philosophers these
days. SAD.
Robert Talisse
@RobertTalisse
·22h
It’s Arthur Schopenhauer’s 234th birthday.
Please celebrate by reflecting on the fact
that his own mother closed a letter to him
with these words: “If you were less like you,
you would only be ridiculous, but thus as
you are, you are highly annoying.”
Phil Oliver
@OSOPHER
Replying to @RobertTalisse
And yet, a student in class
this morning said he was
the greatest philosopher of
all time. I think we can do
better.
Unhappy,
unhopeful,
unauthoritative
anti-meliorist

32. "Dewey, like James, was a utilitarian: he thought that in
the end the only moral or epistemological criteria we
have or need is whether performing an action, or
holding a belief, will, in the long run, make for greater
human happiness. He saw progress as produced by
increasing willingness to experiment, to get out from
under the past. So he hoped we should learn to view
current scientific, religious, philosophical, and moral
beliefs with the skepticism with which Bentham viewed
the laws of England: he hoped each new generation
would try to cobble together some more useful
beliefs—beliefs which would help them make human
life richer, fuller, and happier."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism"
https://a.co/2oy8NQv 3
KEYWORD: do

33. "I see the pragmatists’ account of truth, and more
generally their anti-representationalist account of
belief, as a protest against the idea that human
beings must humble themselves before something
non-human, whether the Will of God or the
Intrinsic Nature of Reality. So I shall begin by
developing an analogy which I think was central to
John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between
ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to believe that
Reality has an intrinsic nature."
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard
Rorty: 1

34. With Whom is no Variableness,
Neither Shadow of Turning
It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so:
That, howsoe'er I stray and range,
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change.
I steadier step when I recall
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.
Arthur Hugh Clough
From a pragmatic, humanistic,
melioristic perspective it is not
fortifying to contemplate eternity. One
must do something for humanity in
time.

35. "I now wish that I had spent
somewhat more of my life with
verse. This is not because I fear
having missed out on truths that are
incapable of statement in prose.
There are no such truths; there is
nothing about death that Swinburne
and Landor knew but Epicurus and
Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it
is because I would have lived more
fully if I had been able to rattle off
more old chestnuts – just as I would
have if I had made more close
friends." Richard Rorty, The Fire of
Life - Poetry Magazine
“My mind seems to have become
a kind of machine for grinding
general laws out of large
collections of facts,... if I had to
live my life again, I would have
made a rule to read some
poetry and listen to some
music at least once every
week; for perhaps the parts of
my brain now atrophied would
thus have been kept active
through use. The loss of these
tastes is a loss of happiness,
and may possibly be injurious to
the intellect, and more probably
to the moral character, by
enfeebling the emotional part of
our nature.” Charles Darwin,

36. Wednesday, February 23, 2022
The earth of things
An old post from the Happiness blog, featuring a long-married pair of preeminent poets now both passed,
reminding us why it's so vital that we humans keep moving forward and thinking about a better tomorrow.
That's meliorism, which "treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility,
which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation
become."
"It is clear that pragmatism must incline towards meliorism." Isn't it? Meliorists move forward, ideal by
realized ideal, to see what may be made of our brief and flitting lives and of those still to come.
The poets remind us as well that we mustn't squander what James called the sufficiency of the present
moment. It's in such moments of presence that the "earth of things" speaks most eloquently of the continuity
of all time and the remembrance of things past.

37. I don't think happiness really comes to rocks and rainfall and wineglasses, but the poet
is entitled to her license. I think her point is that it's here amidst the stuff of life, or for
us it's nowhere. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/04/the-things
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away
...
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
--Happiness by Jane Kenyon
Likewise, her husband the Sox fan. She's gone, and his attention has turned to his
things…

39. William James, a poet among philosophers and an excellent philosopher of
happiness, would have approved.
The really vital question for us all is, What is this world going to be? What
is life eventually to make of itself? The center of gravity of philosophy
must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into
shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.
Pragmatism
Happiness on earth must be found on earth. Even those who invest themselves in
dreams of heaven still do their dreaming here.
Such a simple point, but so elusive for so many.
Inspired by @OSOPHER's⭐️post, I push back on James's vital question: "The really vital question..is,
What is this world going to be? What is life
eventually to make of itself?" They're TERRIBLE questions & Pragmatism should help us stop asking
them.
https://ironick.medium.com/retrospective-meliorism-just-try-to-suck-less-aef5f220491b

40. Only a redoubtable life-celebrant and cosmic
optimist would have responded, just weeks
before his own looming extinction in the
summer of 1910, to Henry Adams's dark
musings on the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, the "heat death of the
universe" and so on, with this sort of blue-
sky speculation:
“Though the ULTIMATE state of the
universe may be its . . . extinction, there
is nothing in physics to interfere with the
hypothesis that the PENULTIMATE
state might be . . . a happy and virtuous
consciousness. . . . 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." SPGS __

41. …Imagination is one of our best tools, it enables us to describe and re-describe our lives
and dreams. To dream, perchance to live. If you can think it you can maybe make it, or
not. Either way, a flexible imagination is insurance against the possibility-denying
platonic temptation to lock ourselves into an upper-case Reality without the prospect of
amelioration. And we desperately need amelioration.
While I was out walking and riding in the sunshine yesterday I took Lord Russell with
me. The BBC just brought out his inaugural Reith lectures of 1948, "Authority and the
Individual." Younger Bertie was a platonist--"brief and powerless is Man's life; on him
and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark"--, but he got over it. He
became a meliorist. He grew up, into the understanding that our hopes, “though as yet
they are largely frustrated by our folly,” remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a
stronger democracy, a heritage of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a
possibility… Bertie Russell, meliorist U@d 2.21.22

42. For those of us whose melioristic sympathies are rooted in William James's Pragmatism, the
enlistment of Bertrand Russell as an ally in the moral equivalent of war may sound odd. James
called him an ass ("Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what true knowledge means, in
the absence of any concrete universe surrounding the knower and the known.
Ass!"), he took nasty swipes at WJ and said the "logical outcome" of the Will to Believe when
applied to religion and politics would be carnage. "What is wanted is not the will to believe but the
wish to find out, which is its exact opposite."
Nonetheless, I am struck more by the affinities of James and Russell and Richard Rorty as
hopeful meliorists and humanists, and (though Rorty's general public demeanor was glum
and Eeyore-ish) as philosophers united in their pursuit of happiness. Those affinities far outweigh
any differences as to the best interpretation of the relation between belief and knowledge.
Meliorism, humanism, hope, and happiness are centered in forward-looking action, not
armchair or seminar room contemplation. Rorty, Russell, and James (and let's add Dewey)
share in the former's "protest against the idea that human beings must humble
themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature
of Reality." Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism

43. “William James used to preach the “will to believe.”
For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to
doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at
least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The
methods of increasing the degree of truth in our
beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all
sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts,
controlling our own bias by discussion with people
who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a
readiness to discard any hypothesis which has
proved inadequate.” –1922 Conway Memorial Lecture,
later published as Free Thought and Official Propaganda
“The Will to Doubt: Bertrand Russell on Free Thought and
Our Only Effective Self-Defense Against Propaganda” by
Maria Popova (The Marginalian)

44. James, it's true, defended the right of believers to humble themselves before "whatever
they may consider the divine." But his more characteristic disposition was to exalt the
ways in which beliefs of all sorts could get persons formerly humbled and crippled by the
challenges of living off their knees, up and moving forward.
It's always, for happy hopeful melioristic humanists, a question of what value for life our
respective commitments and projects may deliver. It's always our really vital question:
"What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"
Happy the philosopher whose center of gravity has shifted to this earth of things and finite
humans questing to do their bit to make things just a little better. Going forward.

45. …Who speaks for pragmatism?
A bigger question: What practical
difference does it make?
What significant value for life hinges
on whether we're Jamesians,
Deweyans, Rortians, Humanists,
Natural Pietists, Methodists, Genesis
Creationists...?
And the most important question of
all: Can't we just all just get along?
Those who may come after us will
have been counting on it.
The Human Abode, U@d 2.9.22

46. A larger loyalty, an expanding circle (Singer)-
Could we replace the notion of “justice” with
that of loyalty to [a larger] group—for
example, one’s fellow citizens, or the human
species, or all living things? Would anything
be lost by this replacement? …being rational
and acquiring a larger loyalty are two
descriptions of the same activity. This is
because any unforced agreement between
individuals and groups about what to do
creates a form of community, and will, with
luck, be the initial stage in expanding the
circles of those whom each party to the
agreement had previously taken to be “people
like ourselves.” The opposition between
rational argument and fellow feeling thus
begins to dissolve…RR
And why stop there? A cosmopolitan identity
embraces nothing smaller than the cosmos

47. “The title ‘Hope in Place of Knowledge’ is a way of
suggesting that Plato and Aristotle were wrong in
thinking that humankind’s most distinctive and
praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they
really are—to penetrate behind appearance to
reality. That claim saddles us with the unfortunate
appearance-reality distinction and with
metaphysics: a distinction, and a discipline, which
pragmatism shows us how to do without … My
candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy
human capacity is our ability to trust and to
cooperate with other people, and in particular to
work together so as to improve the future.”
https://a.co/6iEUuAg 196
And that again, of course, is
meliorism. Again, it’s our really vital
question.

48. When Aristotle maligns the life of practical virtue, he
illustrates its flaws by imagining the gods, who have
no need to ameliorate anything. “We assume the
gods to be above all other beings blessed and
happy…”
Your life may be more or less consumed by
amelioration, more or less awash with needs. There
may be pockets of leisure in which to breathe…
Kieran Setiya (whose podcast Five Questions is
excellent, btw) has spoken of amelioration as
more chore than joy, a merely-negative struggle
to put out fires that stands between ourselves and
our happiness. But happy pragmatic meliorists
do not agree.

49. ...there are unhappy men who think the
salvation of the world impossible. Theirs
is the doctrine known as pessimism.
Optimism in turn would be the doctrine
that thinks the world's salvation
inevitable. Midway between the two
there stands what may be called the
doctrine of meliorism...
Meliorism treats salvation as neither
inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a
possibility, which becomes more and
more of a probability the more
numerous the actual conditions of
salvation become. It is clear that
pragmatism must incline towards
meliorism... Pragmatism: A New Name
for an Old Way of Thinking...

50. (If you’d like to
display your own
meliorist
sympathies I’ve
been authorized to
distribute a few of
these.)

51. It is also clear
that
pragmatism
must incline
towards
humanism…

52. “Some humans ain’t human”... or humane. The problem with appealing to non-
human authority is that it too frequently is expressed in ways that assault humane
decency.

53. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says,
"Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!"
merely shows his own preponderant private horror of
becoming a dupe…I can believe that worse things
than being duped may happen to a man in this world:
so Clifford's exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly
fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his
soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever
than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either
over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are
surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world
where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our
caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At
any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist
philosopher. WB VII
And pragmatism must incline
towards fallibilism.

54. The Reith Lectures began
in 1949, with Bertrand
Russell's six-part talk on
'authority and the
individual'. Every single
lecture - with transcripts -
is on @BBCSounds now.
* Tw @Osopher
Timely and helpful! An
ironic concluding appeal to
Lord Russell's authority will
now punctuate my remarks
on "Pragmatism as Anti-
Authoritarianism" at the
Chicago APA next
weekend. Thanks,
@BBCRadio4. *

55. Bertrand Russell -
Authority and the
Individual
The Reith Lectures
The philosopher, mathematician and
social reformer Bertrand Russell gives the
inaugural Reith lecture series on the
subject of Authority and the Individual.
bbc4 …transcripts
Reith 1948 -
Bertrand Russell:
Authority and the
Individual
● 1. Social Cohesion and
Human Nature
● 2. Social Cohesion and
Government
● 3. The Role of Individuality
● 4. The Conflict of Technique
and Human Nature
● 5. Control and Initiative:
Their Respective Spheres
● 6. Individual and Social
Ethics

56. REITH LECTURES 1948: Authority and the Individual Bertrand
Russell
…Our emancipation from bondage to external nature has made
possible a greater degree of human well-being than has ever hitherto
existed. But if this possibility is to be realised, there must be freedom
of initiative in all ways not positively harmful, and encouragement
of those forms of initiative that enrich the life of Man. We shall not
create a good world by trying to make men tame and timid, but by
encouraging them to be bold and adventurous and fearless, except in
inflicting injuries upon their fellowmen. In the world in which we find
ourselves, the possibilities of good are almost limitless, and the
possibilities of evil no less so…

57. Our present predicament is due more than anything else to the fact
that we have learnt to understand and control to a terrifying extent
the forces of nature outside us, but not those that are embodied in
ourselves. Self-control has always been a watchword of the
moralist, but in the past it has been a control without understanding.
In these lectures I have sought for a wider understanding of
human needs than is assumed by most politicians and
economists, for it is only through such an understanding that we
can find our way to the realisation of those hopes which, though as
yet they are largely frustrated by our folly, our skill has placed
within our reach.
Lecture 6: Individual and Social Ethics TRANSMISSION: 30
January 1949 - Home Service

58. If I thought the universe was capable of communicating, or caring to, I might have
taken that tweet from BBC4 last Sunday morning as a mysterious message to
stop scrolling and get back to work. But of course the universe doesn't care what I
say here today in Chicago – except insofar as I do. And maybe one or two others.
So what I most want to say, in conclusion, is that Russell was right: “there must be
freedom of initiative in all ways not positively harmful”... and this means Rorty must
also have been right to insist on our anti-authoritarian freedom to initiate ever-
flowing founts of imaginative redescription, to ameliorate our lives and sustain our
dreams. He may just have been right, too: “take care of freedom and truth will take
care of itself.”
Russell was also right to end his Reith lectures with the vision of a future in
which our hopes, “though as yet they are largely frustrated by our folly,”
remain “within our reach.” A better politics, a stronger democracy , a heritage
of values still worthy to transmit to our heirs, remains a possibility.
Keep hope alive.

61. Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: 'true for me but
not for you' and 'true in my culture but not in yours' are weird, pointless
locutions. So is 'true then but not now.'--Richard Rorty

62. …with obvious approval, WJ quotes James
Henry Leuba as saying, “God is not known, he is
not understood, he is used—sometimes as
meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support,
sometimes as friend, sometime as an object of
love. If he proves himself useful, the religious
consciousness can ask no more than that. Does
God really exist? How does he exist? What is
he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God,
but life, more life, a larger, richer, more
satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of
religion.” (VRE, 398)"
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo
Mendieta, Robert B. Brandom:

63. REITH LECTURES 1948: Authority and the Individual Bertrand Russell Lecture 6: Individual
and Social Ethics TRANSMISSION: 30 January 1949 - Home Service
But liberty is not merely a cultural matter. No man is wholly free, and no man is wholly a slave.
To the extent to which a man has freedom, he needs a personal morality to guide his conduct.
There are some who would say that a man need only obey the accepted moral code of his
community. But I do not think any student of anthropology could be content with this answer.
Such practices as cannibalism, human sacrifice, and head-hunting have died out as a result of
moral protests against conventional moral opinion. If a man seriously desires to live the best life
that is open to him, he must learn to be critical of the tribal customs and tribal beliefs that
are generally accepted among his neighbours.
Ethics, however, is not concerned solely with duty to my neighbour, however rightly such duty
may be conceived. The performance of public duty is not the whole of what makes a good life;
there is also the pursuit of private excellence. For man, though partly social, is not wholly so.
He has thoughts and feelings and impulses which may be wise or foolish, noble or base, filled
with love or inspired by hate. And for the better of these thoughts and feelings and impulses, if
his life is to be tolerable, there must be scope. For although a few men can be happy in
solitude, still fewer can be happy in a community which allows no freedom of individual
action….

64. …A question of real interest and importance to the general public, now, is: how do we remain solid about
politics, true to sentiments on the doorstep, true to a basic sense of our inhabiting a shared reality, serious
about changing the world for the better (or at least: stopping it from uncontrollably sliding into a worse and
worse situation, vis a vis politics, democracy, inequality, climate, and more)… how do we do all this in a
culture where we are more than ever suspicious that what we are told may be untrue, and more than ever
suspicious about what it means for something to be true. Rorty offers a possible way forward, vis a vis this
crucial question.
I once asked Dick Rorty whether he would contemplate going into electoral politics himself. He answered
strongly in the negative. It wasn't his role at all, it wasn't his forte, he said to me. His role was that of the
public intellectual, trying to get people who were willing to think about politics to think about how the aim
of politics needed to change, and how it needed to stay the same. Perhaps if there had been just a little
more such thinking, the 'Free World' wouldn't now be 'led' by a man whose 'post-truth' rantings should
make some postmodernists more than a little ashamed of themselves.
Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He also chairs Green House.
Follow him on Twitter: @RupertRead
https://t.co/x9EMje4hxb

65. The project of following James's resolve to take subjective experience seriously in the only way any
of us can, from his or her own angle of vision, has the necessary effect of "circumscribing the topic"
and neglecting areas others might prefer to pursue. A circumscription is really a partial transcription of
one's own inner life. In particular, there are aspects of metaphysics, epistemology, and
metaphilosophy that preoccupy contemporary neopragmatists such as Richard Rorty13 but
that I treat only lightly and in passing. Much more waits to be said on this topic, more than I can or
want to say, and I hope others will say it. We must all tell our own stories. So here are some
disclaimers: My interest in Jamesian transcendence is not motivated by a futile quest for some
standpoint outside both "reality as a whole" (whatever that might mean) and our statements about it. I
am not attempting to draw a reliable map to all possible senses of "transcendence." I do mention
several prominent vehicles and destinations in order to orient the reader who wonders what on earth
transcendence might mean, but I have left others out. That is as much a reflection of my own
subjectivity as a statement about important meanings. Jamesian transcendence is in my view
neither an epistemic nor an escapist impulse, both of which Rorty criticizes. True, James's
radical empiricist commitment to personal experience does make him more hospitable to talk about
transcendent entities and phenomena than traditional empiricists, but hospitable, we will see, within a
naturalistic context and as a humane expression of his pluralism. He denies no important truths about
the history and contingency of human convention and belief, or about human limits. SPGS 5

66. "’The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience.’3 James
points to the ephemeral, fleeting quality of immediate perceptual experience as the
insuperable barrier to complete human understanding of the real. We cannot compass all
experience, and it is only an ‘intellectualist’ error to suppose that any avenue of experience
can be bypassed on the way to full understanding. We can in some way hope to ‘extract’ a
conceptual translation of it, but concepts are not ‘deep,’ and discourse about experience is
not experience in the primary sense (that is, it is not immediate or perceptual, though it may
still be ‘perceptive’). Some sympathetic modern readers of James, particularly impressed
by this last point, think he anticipated certain late trends imported from the European
continent (especially France) and meant not only to deny that the world beyond our words
sanctions those ideas and conversations that ‘agree’ with it, but to detach language from
the world. Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism seems to hold something like this view. Its
least circumspect defenders typically reside in university departments of literature;
philosophers who defend it usually describe their orientation as defiantly literary and
historical rather than philosophical, reserving that term for the opprobrious censure of
unreconstructed realists, antirelativists, and other reactionaries who do not concede the
wisdom of a radically historicist and deconstructivist approach to intellectual life.” SPGS 38

67. The common core of religious feeling for James, we must remind ourselves, is not
about God. Love of life is religion's spring. If we do not bungle our watch, we may
aspire to transmit a richer inheritance of life than we have received. In that
aspiration resides the possibility of one kind of transcendence in the direction of
"something larger than ourselves" but possibly not larger than the collectivity of
selves past and future whose tangential link is our present. This is transcendence
with an irrepressible forward momentum, probing for the "next step" of our
evolutionary epic and the chance to endure. So, as Richard Rorty suggests, "we
can, with James, relish the thought that our descendants may face live and forced
options which we shall never imagine." And if, as Rorty goes on to say, "James
was not always content to identify the 'wider self through which saving experiences
come'"93 with some such feeling of human solidarity through the ages, he was
much more at ease with this fundamentally naturalistic orien- tation to spiritual life
than is commonly recognized. And if, as A.N. Wilson suggests, such a conception
strikes some believers as not Godly enough, that is merely a reflection of their own
religious assumptions and not a legitimate objection to James's. SPGS 201

68. …with obvious approval, WJ quotes James Henry Leuba as saying, “God is
not known, he is not understood, he is used—sometimes as meat-
purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometime as
an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness
can ask no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What
is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a
larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of
religion.” (VRE, 398)"
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism" by Richard Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta,
Robert B. Brandom: https://a.co/f3uRbVW