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william james on the philippine question: Essays, Comments, and Reviews William James, 1987 This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of his works. The volume includes 25 essays, 44 letters to the editor commenting on sundry topics, and 113 reviews of a wide range of works in English, French, German, and Italian. |
william james on the philippine question: William James Kennan Ferguson, 2007 William James is known today strictly as a philosopher of pragmatism. Williams James: Politics in the Pluriverse challenges this understanding. Kennan Ferguson argues that James should instead be known as the progenitor of pluralism, one of the most influential and durable American political philosophies of the twentieth century. James contended that engagement with the foreign, the difficult, and the uncomfortable makes us who we are. Rather than mitigating differences or attempting to resolve conflicts, he embraced them, wholeheartedly advocating the opportunity to be transformed. Pluralism, in the mind of the thinker who popularized the term, led to a more complex, more contentious, and far more interesting world. Ferguson traces the historical importance and contemporary possibilities of pluralism's original political insight. In this important work he examines the trajectory of pluralism in the United States and England, the mutual influences of turn-of-the-century American and European philosophical traditions, and the relationship between pluralism and James's active anti-imperialism. James's unexpected political concepts and commitments both illuminate political philosophy of the 20th century and challenge contemporary assumptions about the desirability of unanimity. Pluralism, not unity, should be the goal of both politics and philosophy. |
william james on the philippine question: William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic Trygve Throntveit, 2014-12-17 Pragmatist philosopher William James has long been deemed a dubious guide to ethical reasoning. This book overturns such thinking, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to develop a flexible but rigorous framework for individuals and societies seeking freedom, meaning, and justice in a world of interdependence, uncertainty, and change. |
william james on the philippine question: The Letters of William James William James, 1920 |
william james on the philippine question: William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-Imperial Discourse Bernadette M. Baker, 2013-09-30 In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a 'world without frontiers'. In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James provide a window into contemporary debates over principles of toleration, anti-imperial discourse and the nature of ethics. Baker revisits Jamesian approaches to the formation of scientific objects including the child mind, exceptional mental states and the ghost to explore the possibilities and limits of social scientific thought dedicated to mind development and discipline formation around the construct of the West. |
william james on the philippine question: The Writings of William James John J. McDermott, 2013-02-06 A comprehensive collection of writings by the legendary philosopher, whose sweeping body of work influenced our ideas about psychology, religion, free will, and pragmatism. In his introduction to this collection, John McDermott presents James's thinking in all its manifestations, stressing the importance of radical empiricism and placing into perspective the doctrines of pragmatism and the will to believe. The critical periods of James's life are highlighted to illuminate the development of his philosophical and psychological thought. The anthology features representative selections from The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, and The Variety of Religious Experience in addition to the complete Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe. The original 1907 edition of Pragmatism is included, as well as classic selections from all of James's other major works. Of particular significance for James scholarship is the supplemented version of Ralph Barton Perry's Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James. |
william james on the philippine question: The Letters of William James William James, 2008-01-01 American psychologist and philosopher WILLIAM JAMES (1842 1910), brother of novelist Henry James, was a groundbreaking researcher at Harvard University, author of such works as Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), and one of the most influential academics of the 19th century. His collected letters edited by his son, also named HENRY JAMES (1879-1947) here afford us an intimate look into the great thinker s mind: he was a man of delightfully wide-ranging interests and ambitions, and a correspondent of great animation and wit. Originally published in 1920 in two volumes but here presented in one, the letters run the course of James s adult life, and were written to everyone from family to professional colleagues and others, including such luminaries as Hugo M nsterberg, George Santayana, H. G. Wells, John Jay Chapman, Henri Bergson, and John Dewey. Offering provocative insight into James s temperament, biases, instincts, and unique perspectives, this is essential reading for anyone hoping to truly understand his work. |
william james on the philippine question: William James and the Art of Popular Statement Paul Stob, 2013-03-01 At the turn of the twentieth century, no other public intellectual was as celebrated in America as the influential philosopher and psychologist William James. Sought after around the country, James developed his ideas in lecture halls and via essays and books intended for general audiences. Reaching out to and connecting with these audiences was crucial to James—so crucial that in 1903 he identified “popular statement,” or speaking and writing in a way that animated the thought of popular audiences, as the “highest form of art.” Paul Stob’s thought-provoking history traces James’s art of popular statement through pivotal lectures, essays, and books, including his 1878 lectures in Baltimore and Boston, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology,” “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and “Pragmatism.” The book explores James’s unique approach to public address, which involved crafting lectures in science, religion, and philosophy around ordinary people and their experiences. With democratic bravado, James confronted those who had accumulated power through various systems of academic and professional authority, and argued that intellectual power should be returned to the people. Stob argues that James gave those he addressed a central role in the pursuit of knowledge and fostered in them a new intellectual curiosity unlike few scholars before or since. |
william james on the philippine question: Promise and Peril Christopher McKnight Nichols, 2011-04-29 Spreading democracy abroad or taking care of business at home is a tension as current as the war in Afghanistan and as old as America itself. Tracing the history of isolationist and internationalist ideas from the 1890s through the 1930s, Nichols reveals unexpected connections among individuals and groups from across the political spectrum who developed new visions for America’s place in the world. From Henry Cabot Lodge and William James to W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams to Randolph Bourne, William Borah, and Emily Balch, Nichols shows how reformers, thinkers, and politicians confronted the challenges of modern society—and then grappled with urgent pressures to balance domestic priorities and foreign commitments. Each articulated a distinct strain of thought, and each was part of a sprawling national debate over America’s global role. Through these individuals, Nichols conducts us into the larger community as it strove to reconcile America’s founding ideals and ideas about isolation with the realities of the nation’s burgeoning affluence, rising global commerce, and new opportunities for worldwide cultural exchange. The resulting interrelated set of isolationist and internationalist principles provided the basis not just for many foreign policy arguments of the era but also for the vibrant as well as negative connotations that isolationism still possesses. Nichols offers a bold way of understanding the isolationist and internationalist impulses that shaped the heated debates of the early twentieth century and that continue to influence thinking about America in the world today. |
william james on the philippine question: William James Gerald Eugene Myers, 2001-01-01 This magisterial book is the first comprehensive interpretive and critical study of one of America's foremost philosophers and psychologists. Gerald Myers traces James's life and career and then uses this fresh biographical information to illuminate his writings and ideas. |
william james on the philippine question: William James: Writings 1902-1910 (LOA #38) William James, 1988-02-01 Philosopher and psychologist William James was the best known and most influential American thinker of his time. The five books and nineteen essays collected in this Library of America volume represent all his major work from 1902 until his death in 1910. Most were originally written as lectures addressed to general audiences as well as philosophers and were received with great enthusiasm. His writing is clear, energetic, and unpretentious, and is marked by the devotion to literary excellence he shared with his brother, Henry James. In these works William James champions the value of individual experience with an eloquence and enthusiasm that has placed him alongside Emerson and Whitman as a classic exponent of American democratic culture. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) James explores “the very inner citadel of human life” by focusing on intensely religious individuals of different cultures and eras. With insight, compassion, and open-mindedness, he examines and assesses their beliefs, seeking to measure religion’s value by its contributions to individual human lives. In Pragmatism (1907) James suggests that the conflicting metaphysical positions of “tender-minded” rationalism and “tough-minded” empiricism be judged by examining their actual consequences. Philosophy, James argues, should free itself from unexamined principles and closed systems and confront reality with complete openness. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909) James rejects the concept of the absolute and calls on philosophers to respond to “the real concrete sensible flux of life.” Through his discussion of Kant, Hegel, Henri Bergson, and religion, James explores a universe viewed not as an abstract “block” but as a rich “manyness-in-oneness,” full of independent yet connected events. The Meaning of Truth (1909) is a polemical collection of essays asserting that ideas are made true not by inherent qualities but by events. James delights in intellectual combat, stating his positions with vigor while remaining open to opposing ideas. Some Problems of Philosophy (1910) was intended by James to serve both as a historical overview of metaphysics and as a systematic statement of his philosophical beliefs. Though unfinished at his death, it fully demonstrates the psychological insight and literary vividness James brought to philosophy. Among the essays included are the anti-imperialist “Address on the Philippine Question,” “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” a candid personal account of the 1906 California disaster, and “The Moral Equivalent of War,” a call for the redirection of martial energies to peaceful ends, as well as essays on Emerson, the role of university in intellectual life, and psychic research. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries. |
william james on the philippine question: William James at the Boundaries Francesca Bordogna, 2008-12 At Columbia University in 1906, William James gave a highly confrontational speech to the American Philosophical Association (APA). He ignored the technical philosophical questions the audience had gathered to discuss and instead addressed the topic of human energy. Tramping on the rules of academic decorum, James invoked the work of amateurs, read testimonials on the benefits of yoga and alcohol, and concluded by urging his listeners to take up this psychological and physiological problem. What was the goal of this unusual speech? Rather than an oddity, Francesca Bordogna asserts that the APA address was emblematic—it was just one of many gestures that James employed as he plowed through the barriers between academic, popular, and pseudoscience, as well as the newly emergent borders between the study of philosophy, psychology, and the “science of man.” Bordogna reveals that James’s trespassing of boundaries was an essential element of a broader intellectual and social project. By crisscrossing divides, she argues, James imagined a new social configuration of knowledge, a better society, and a new vision of the human self. As the academy moves toward an increasingly interdisciplinary future, William James at the Boundaries reintroduces readers to a seminal influence on the way knowledge is pursued. |
william james on the philippine question: The Heart of William James William James, 2010-08-31 A selection of seventeen essays from the writings of pioneering American psychologist/philosopher William James that provide insight into his thinking on emotion, war, habit, determinism, religion, and other topics. |
william james on the philippine question: William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture Deborah Whitehead, 2016-01-21 “Continues and adds to a rich conversation among American philosophers concerning the origins of pragmatism and its possibilities for the future.” —William Gavin, University of Southern Maine William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in nineteenth-century America. Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture. |
william james on the philippine question: Delphi Complete Works of William James (Illustrated) William James, 2018-11-16 The philosopher and psychologist, William James (brother to the famous novelist Henry James) was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century and one of the most influential American philosophers, regarded by many as the father of American psychology. James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism and is also cited as a founder of functional psychology. Noted for his rich and vivid literary style, James developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism, while his work went on to influence intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. For the first time in digital publishing, this eBook presents James’ complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to James’ life and works * Detailed introductions to the major texts * All the published books by William James, with individual contents tables * Features rare essays appearing for the first time in digital publishing, including the posthumous collection: ‘Collected Essays and Reviews’ * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts, with original footnotes * Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the essays * Easily locate the essays you want to read * Includes James’ letters – spend hours exploring the philosopher’s personal correspondence * Features James’ brother Henry’s seminal biography ‘Notes of a Son and Brother’ * Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and genres Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles CONTENTS: The Books The Principles of Psychology Psychology (Briefer Course) The Will to Believe and Other Essays Human Immortality Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals The Varieties of Religious Experience Pragmatism A Pluralistic Universe The Meaning of Truth Some Problems of Philosophy Memories and Studies Essays in Radical Empiricism Collected Essays and Reviews The Essays List of Essays in Chronological Order List of Essays in Alphabetical Order The Letters The Letters of William James The Biography Notes of a Son and Brother by Henry James Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles or to purchase this eBook as a Parts Edition of individual eBooks |
william james on the philippine question: Power without Victory Trygve Throntveit, 2017-07-15 For decades, Woodrow Wilson has been remembered as either a paternalistic liberal or reactionary conservative at home and as a naïve idealist or cynical imperialist abroad. Historians’ harsh judgments of Wilson are understandable. He won two elections by promising a deliberative democratic process that would ensure justice and political empowerment for all. Yet under Wilson, Jim Crow persisted, interventions in Latin America increased, and a humiliating peace settlement was forced upon Germany. A generation after Wilson, stark inequalities and injustices still plagued the nation, myopic nationalism hindered its responsible engagement in world affairs, and a second vastly destructive global conflict threatened the survival of democracy worldwide—leaving some Americans today to wonder what, exactly, the buildings and programs bearing his name are commemorating. In Power without Victory, Trygve Throntveit argues that there is more to the story of Wilson than these sad truths. Throntveit makes the case that Wilson was not a “Wilsonian,” as that term has come to be understood, but a principled pragmatist in the tradition of William James. He did not seek to stamp American-style democracy on other peoples, but to enable the gradual development of a genuinely global system of governance that would maintain justice and facilitate peaceful change—a goal that, contrary to historical tradition, the American people embraced. In this brilliant intellectual, cultural, and political history, Throntveit gives us a new vision of Wilson, as well as a model of how to think about the complex relationship between the world of ideas and the worlds of policy and diplomacy. |
william james on the philippine question: Doing Theology in the Age of Trump Jeffrey W. Robbins, Clayton Crockett, 2018-11-08 This book is a work of theological resistance. It is not so much about the presidency of Donald Trump as it is about what his popularity and rise to power reveal about the state of Christianity and the moral character of the evangelical Right in the United States today. More specifically, it is about the threat of white Christian nationalism, which is the particular form that the nationalist populist movement of Trumpism has adopted for itself. The contributors are all fellows from the Westar Institute’s academic seminar on God and the Human Future, and include many of the leading figures in theology and Continental philosophy of religion. This volume provides a form of theopolitical resistance based on intersectionality. The authors recognize how the various forms of oppression interrelate to contribute to a vast, dynamic, and seeming impenetrable network of systemic injustice and marginalization. These essays demonstrate that politics need not be played as a zero-sum game with a winner-take-all mentality, and that a critical theology is as urgently needed and as relevant now as ever. |
william james on the philippine question: An Energy Field More Intense Than War Michael True, 1995-11-01 American history abounds with a rich tradition of literature dealing with nonviolence. In a work that spans from the seventeenth century to the present, Michael True brings to light the strong but long-neglected strain in American culture: nonviolence as an active response to conflicts and divisiveness. In identifying writings about action for social change, he distinguishes literary works from peace advocacy and nonviolence and relates them to broad currents of United States history. The Quakers of the 1680s and abolitionists of the 1850s, the sanctuary Movement and Plowshares of the 1980s, novelists (from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer) and poets (from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov) all have written powerful works on nonviolent action. Through this literature, the author explores the beauty of an important theme in American literature. At a time when people face widespread injustice, True reminds us that nonviolence holds a significant place in our country's history. |
william james on the philippine question: Debating American Exceptionalism F. Hilfrich, 2012-07-26 The Spanish-American War focused not only on foreign policy, but also on the nation's very essence and purpose. At the heart of this debate was a consensus on American nationalism. This book explains why the belief in exceptionalism still serves as the basis of American nationalism and foreign policy even in spite of more recent military failures. |
william james on the philippine question: Constituting Americans Priscilla Wald, 1995 Constituting Americans rethinks the way that certain writers of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century contributed to fixing the words precisely of what it means to be an American |
william james on the philippine question: Writing Politics David Bromwich, 2020-10-20 Explore the tradition of the political essay with this brilliant anthology. David Bromwich is one of the most well-informed, cogent, and morally uncompromising political writers on the left today. He is also one of our finest intellectual historians and literary critics. In Writing Politics, Bromwich presents twenty-seven essays by different writers from the beginning of the modern political world in the seventeenth century until recent times, essays that grapple with issues that continue to shape history—revolution and war, racism, women’s rights, the status of the worker, the nature of citizenship, imperialism, violence and nonviolence, among them—and essays that have also been chosen as superlative examples of the power of written English to reshape our thoughts and the world. Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mohandas Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, and Hannah Arendt are here, among others, along with a wide-ranging introduction. |
william james on the philippine question: Wading Through Many Voices Harold Recinos, 2011-04-16 Wading through Many Voices brings together the voices of Latino/a, African American, Asian American, Native American, and Euro-American scholars to produce a dialogue of public theology: how faith-communities, divided by race, class, ethnicity, and gender, can find a common ground for life together. |
william james on the philippine question: E Pluribus Unum W. C. Harris, 2005-04 “Out of many, one.” But how do the many become one without sacrificing difference or autonomy? This problem was critical to both identity formation and state formation in late 18th- and 19th-century America. The premise of this book is that American writers of the time came to view the resolution of this central philosophical problem as no longer the exclusive province of legislative or judicial documents but capable of being addressed by literary texts as well. The project of E Pluribus Unum is twofold. Its first and underlying concern is the general philosophic problem of the one and the many as it came to be understood at the time. W. C. Harris supplies a detailed account of the genealogy of the concept, exploring both its applications and its paradoxes as a basis for state and identity formation. Harris then considers the perilous integration of the one and the many as a motive in the major literary accomplishments of 19th-century U.S. writers. Drawing upon critical as well as historical resources and upon contexts as diverse as cosmology, epistemology, poetics, politics, and Bible translation, he discusses attempts by Poe, Whitman, Melville, and William James to resolve the problems of social construction caused by the paradox of e pluribus unum by writing literary and philosophical texts that supplement the nation’s political founding documents. Poe (Eureka), Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Melville (Billy Budd), and William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience) provide their own distinct, sometimes contradictory resolutions to the conflicting demands of diversity and unity, equality and hierarchy. Each of these texts understands literary and philosophical writing as having the potential to transform-conceptually or actually-the construction of social order. This work will be of great interest to literary and constitutional scholars. |
william james on the philippine question: Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James Ralph Barton Perry, 1920 |
william james on the philippine question: Wittgenstein and William James Russell B. Goodman, 2002-05-16 This 2002 book explores Wittgenstein's long engagement with the work of the pragmatist William James. In contrast to previous discussions Russell Goodman argues that James exerted a distinctive and pervasive positive influence on Wittgenstein's thought. For example, the book shows that the two philosophers share commitments to anti-foundationalism, to the description of the concrete details of human experience, to the priority of practice over intellect, and to the importance of religion in understanding human life. Considering in detail what Wittgenstein learnt from his reading of Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience the author provides considerable evidence for Wittgenstein's claim that he is saying 'something that sounds like pragmatism'. This provocative account of the convergence in the thinking of two major philosophers usually considered as members of discrete traditions will be eagerly sought by students of Wittgenstein, William James, pragmatism and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. |
william james on the philippine question: William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism H. G. Callaway, 2022-06-06 This new critical edition is an examination of William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism in light of the scientific naturalism prominent in James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) and the subsequent development of Darwinian, functional psychology and functionalism in psychology, the philosophy psychology and the philosophy of mind. |
william james on the philippine question: The Pragmatic Empire Paul Alexander Kramer, 1998 |
william james on the philippine question: Washington Rules Andrew Bacevich, 2010-08-03 The bestselling author of The Limits of Power critically examines the Washington consensus on national security and why it must change For the last half century, as administrations have come and gone, the fundamental assumptions about America's military policy have remained unchanged: American security requires the United States (and us alone) to maintain a permanent armed presence around the globe, to prepare our forces for military operations in far-flung regions, and to be ready to intervene anywhere at any time. In the Obama era, just as in the Bush years, these beliefs remain unquestioned gospel. In Washington Rules, a vivid, incisive analysis, Andrew J. Bacevich succinctly presents the origins of this consensus, forged at a moment when American power was at its height. He exposes the preconceptions, biases, and habits that underlie our pervasive faith in military might, especially the notion that overwhelming superiority will oblige others to accommodate America's needs and desires—whether for cheap oil, cheap credit, or cheap consumer goods. And he challenges the usefulness of our militarism as it has become both unaffordable and increasingly dangerous. Though our politicians deny it, American global might is faltering. This is the moment, Bacevich argues, to reconsider the principles which shape American policy in the world—to acknowledge that fixing Afghanistan should not take precedence over fixing Detroit. Replacing this Washington consensus is crucial to America's future, and may yet offer the key to the country's salvation. |
william james on the philippine question: Mobility in the Russian, Central and East European Past Róisín Healy, 2019-03-07 The new mobilities paradigm which emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century has identified mobility as a process intrinsic to the human experience and fundamental to the formation of social and political structures. This volume breaks new ground by demonstrating the role of the journey as a key motor of human development in Russia, central and east Europe in the modern period. It does so by means of twelve case studies that examine different types of movement, both voluntary and involuntary, temporary and permanent, short- and long-distance, into, out of, and around the region. |
william james on the philippine question: William James and the Transatlantic Conversation Martin Halliwell, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, 2014 This volume focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James participated in transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. |
william james on the philippine question: The Other Cheek Cordell Strug, 2019-09-24 Cordell Strug served as a small town pastor in rural Minnesota from 1982-2010. He reflects, “The last decade of my service fell at the beginning of the third Christian millennium, during the increasingly pointless and seemingly endless wars America was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. I might say I wasn't called to analyze, let alone denounce, American society or its government, week by week, but to proclaim the gift and task of the gospel within that society. But there was one time that forced a confrontation with the fact and the force of war: Memorial Day Weekend, especially in the years when the Iraq war was going sour. I thought it might be of some historical interest to gather up a number of the sermons I gave on the Sunday of that weekend over the years, to see what a person like me, with the calling I had, found to say about war and peace in that time. I have added some reflections on growing up as a Christian in America after WWII and through the Vietnam War years, as well as some thoughts on how things seem to me looking back.” |
william james on the philippine question: The Right to Rule Hugh De Santis, 2021-01-06 In The Right to Rule, Hugh De Santis argues that while American exceptionalism has underpinned the nation’s foreign policy since its inception, it has become an anachronism. In the emerging multipolar world order, America will be one of several powers that determine the structure and rules of international politics, rather than the sole arbiter. |
william james on the philippine question: The Religion of Democracy Amy Kittelstrom, 2016-04-05 A history of religion’s role in the American liberal tradition through the eyes of seven transformative thinkers Today we associate liberal thought and politics with secularism. When we argue over whether the nation’s founders meant to keep religion out of politics, the godless side is said to be liberal. But the role of religion in American politics has always been far less simplistic than today’s debates would suggest. In The Religion of Democracy, historian Amy Kittelstrom shows how religion and democracy have worked together as universal ideals in American culture—and as guides to moral action and to the social practice of treating one another as equals who deserve to be free. The first people in the world to call themselves “liberals” were New England Christians in the early republic. Inspired by their religious belief in a God-given freedom of conscience, these Americans enthusiastically embraced the democratic values of equality and liberty, giving shape to the liberal tradition that would remain central to our politics and our way of life. The Religion of Democracy re-creates the liberal conversation from the eighteenth century to the twentieth by tracing the lived connections among seven transformative thinkers through what they read and wrote, where they went, whom they knew, and how they expressed their opinions—from John Adams to William James to Jane Addams; from Boston to Chicago to Berkeley. Sweeping and ambitious, The Religion of Democracy is a lively narrative of quintessentially American ideas as they were forged, debated, and remade across our history. |
william james on the philippine question: The Uses of Variety Carrie Tirado BRAMEN, Carrie Tirado Bramen, 2009-06-30 The turn of the last century, amid the excesses of the Gilded Age, variety became a key notion for Americans'a sign of national progress and development, reassurance that the modern nation would not fall into monotonous dullness or disorderly chaos. Carrie Tirado Bramen pursues this idea through the works of a wide range of regional and cosmopolitan writers, journalists, theologians, and politicians who rewrote the narrative of American exceptionalism through a celebration of variety. Exploring cultural and institutional spheres ranging from intra-urban walking tours in popular magazines to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, she shows how the rhetoric of variety became naturalized and nationalized as quintessentially American and inherently democratic. By focusing on the uses of the term in the work of William James, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hamlin Garland, and Wong Chin Foo, among many others, Bramen reveals how the perceived innocence and goodness of variety were used to construct contradictory and mutually exclusive visions of modern Americanism. Bramen's innovation is to look at the debates of a century ago that established diversity as the distinctive feature of U.S. culture. In the late-nineteenth-century conception, which emphasized the openness of variety while at the same time acknowledging its limits, she finds a useful corrective to the contemporary tendency to celebrate the United States as a postmodern melange or a carnivalesque utopia of hybridity and difference. Table of Contents: Introduction: Americanizing Variety I. The Ideological Formation of Pluralism 1. William James and the Modern Federal Republic 2. Identity Culture and Cosmopolitanism II. The Aesthetics of Diversity 3. The Uneven Development of American Regionalism 4. The Urban Picturesque and Americanization III. Heterogeneous Unions 5. Biracial Fictions and the Mendelist Allegory 6. East Meets West at the World's Parliament of Religions Afterword: In Defense of Partiality Notes Works Cited Acknowledgments Index Reviews of this book: [Bramen] brings dogged research and steady focus to [a] central ambiguity in the American ethos...Her study delivers several powerful messages even plain-talking people can understand. For one, Bramen shows that issues of ethnic diversity and variety, far from being epiphenomena of the last few decades, course through our history and spotlight the ambiguities in what it means to be an American...The Uses of Variety boasts gems...of past cultural history that remind us these are perennial issues...[Bramen's] penetrating expedition through the nuances of America's breast-beating about 'diversity within unity' concentrates the mind. Out of many examples comes an important book: a flinty challenge to intellectual complacency about ourselves. --Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer The Uses of Variety is a significant addition to and revision of a century of American pragmatist thinking about difference. Bramen brings new conceptual tools to bear on the history of multicultural thought and literature and thereby avoids the common pitfalls to produce an important survey and synthesis. --Tom Lutz, author of American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History and editor of These 'Colored' United States: African American Essays from the 1920s Carrie Bramen offers a compelling, intellectually rigorous history of the protean idea of pluralism, a concept that has been embraced heartily by both liberals and conservatives as essential in defining American identity. Situating pluralism in philosophical, psychological, aesthetic, and political contexts, Bramen brings a fresh perspective to illuminating the meaning of the term for late Victorian America and, significantly, its legacy for us today. --Linda Simon, author of Genuine Reality: A Life of William James Taking William James's 'pluralistic universe' as a starting point, The Uses of Variety takes us through regions, ghettos, religious congresses, and a range of theoretical, philosophical, and literary works to explore the multiple and often conflicting constructions of 'variety' in the context of turn-of-the-century U.S. nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Carrie Tirado Bramen brings together a broad spectrum of historical events and cultural theories in which variety variously expressed, contained, and shaped an increasing diversity that was perceived as threatening national coherence. This insightful, thoroughly researched, and timely work will be indispensable for scholars interested in U.S. nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. --Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form |
william james on the philippine question: Damn Great Empires! Alexander Livingston, 2016-08-05 Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass -- his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines -- as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the conventional view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with a transatlantic critique of modernity, as well as with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy. |
william james on the philippine question: William and Henry James William James, Henry James, 1997 This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family. |
william james on the philippine question: Democratic Temperament Joshua I. Miller, 2021-10-08 Nineteenth-century psychologist and pragmatist philosopher William James is rarely considered a political theorist. Renowned as the author of The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience, James is often viewed as a radical individualist with no interest in politics; yet he was a critic of imperialism and absolutism and an advocate of tolerance, and his writing includes a penetrating analysis of political psychology. This first book by a political theorist devoted exclusively to James's theory argues that political concerns were in fact central to his intellectual work. Joshua Miller links James to the contemporary public dialogue by treating him as a theorist of action and exploring the complexities of that theory. He also relates the philosopher's thought to his own political experiences and observations and-by explicating, criticizing, and meditating on James-develops provocative new ideas about issues facing democracy today. At the heart of the book is James's description of the democratic temperament, which comprises a willingness to act, the placing of public good ahead of private comfort, generosity toward one's opponents, and mutual respect among citizens of different viewpoints, races, genders, classes, and religions. Miller sees this temperament as a healthy corrective to the meanspiritedness that characterizes so much current political discourse, which is precisely what makes James's insights so relevant to today's political environment. By revealing how James speaks to the paradoxical condition of modern political existence—withdrawal from public life combined with fanatical action—Miller shows how James's views apply to the possibility and problems of reviving participatory democracy in our era. Scholars who have never considered the political aspects of James's work will find in this study a new way of approaching him and of reconsidering radical democracy, while readers unfamiliar with James will find it a highly accessible introduction to a significant aspect of his thought. Democratic Temperament clearly shows that James deserves to be read not only for his recognized genius but also for his fresh and unexpected insights into the possibilities and paradoxes of American democratic political consciousness. |
william james on the philippine question: Challenging US Foreign Policy B. Sewell, S. Lucas, 2011-10-26 Some categorisations of US power have long governed analyses of American foreign policy - concepts such as 'empire', 'decline', 'superpower', 'the Cold War' and 'the War on Terror' - and have led to a distortion that sees US policy measured by broad labels, rather than on its own terms. This fresh new approach seeks to challenge these terms. |
william james on the philippine question: William James's Hidden Religious Imagination Jeremy Carrette, 2013-05-29 This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’ |
william james on the philippine question: No Middle Ground Erin L. Murphy, 2019-12-17 This book argues the Anti-Imperialist movement, led by the Anti-Imperialist League, followed an evolving path of ethical witnessing where leaders empathically considered the perspective of imperialist violence in the Philippines as expressed by marginalized ant-imperialists. |
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William, Prince of Wales - Wikipedia
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Prince William: Biography, Prince of Wales, British Royal Family
Mar 15, 2024 · Prince William of Wales is the heir apparent to the British throne. Read about his young life, wife Kate Middleton, children, age, military service, and more.
Prince William, Kate Middleton and kids step out at Trooping ...
2 days ago · Queen Camilla, King Charles III, Prince William, Prince Louis, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Princess Catherine, Princess of Wales appear on the balcony during …
William, Prince of Wales - Wikipedia
William, Prince of Wales (William Arthur Philip Louis; born 21 June 1982), is the heir apparent to the British throne. He is the elder son of King Charles III and Diana, Princess of Wales . …
William, prince of Wales | Biography, Wife, Children, & Facts ...
4 days ago · William, prince of Wales, elder son of Charles III and Princess Diana and heir apparent to the British throne. He is married to Catherine, princess of Wales, and has three …
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Jun 4, 2025 · Prince William hands out bacon and sausage rolls to military families during his visit to Wattisham Flying Station, Suffolk, on June 4. 2025. Alamy
Prince William: Biography, Prince of Wales, British Royal Family
Mar 15, 2024 · Prince William of Wales is the heir apparent to the British throne. Read about his young life, wife Kate Middleton, children, age, military service, and more.