WJSpresidentialaddress.March15.2025.pptx

William James Society presidential address, March 15 2025. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. Howard University.

1. 2025 Presidential Address, William James Society: Finding Delight in Dark Times: Jamesian Meliorism Now Invited session, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) annual meeting Washington DC, Howard University - March 15, 2025. 8 a.m.

2. Phil Oliver, Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) President, William James Society 2025-26 [email protected]

3. Good morning. Thank you for rousing yourselves so early for this event. It’s no great sacrifice for me, long a habitue’ of the pre-dawn. Ignore the clock and embrace the hour, I say with Thoreau, “morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me … To be awake is to be alive.” Etc. I do recognize the temperamental element involved in the varieties of auroral experience. If you’re not a morning person, your presence here is all the more gratifying. And if you flew to DC it may even be heroic, these days. Just being here at all is frankly a bit unsettling, tasked as we are with trying to cast a little Jamesian light in the shadow of so benighted a national presidency (albeit one that makes all before it, less one, shine brighter in retrospect)... ( continues ) ( AUDIO )

4. Vandy mentors John Compton, Johin Lachs, John Post, Michael Hodges… WJS colleagues John Kaag, John Shook

5. If one's example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to succeed. Become the imitable thing , and you may then discharge your minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature will take care of that result. – “ The Gospel of Relaxation ” (in Talks to Teachers, 1899) Edward B. Craig IV

6. Meliorists, working to make a better world

7. The future is (as ever) uncertain but, we Jamesians believe, is also malleable and at least partly, potentially responsive to our most thoughtful and committed exertions in the present. “The really vital question for us all,” WJ said, “is What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? ”

8. "The pluralistic form [of philosophy] takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'..."

9. “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

10. “It's so much easier to be negative and cynical and predict doom for the world than it is to try and figure out how to make things better. We have an obligation to do the latter.”

11. Hopes aren’t wishes, ours is not a wishing-cap world “ where every desire is fulfilled instanter ” (Prag VIII). Too many of our dearest wishes are destined to go ungranted. But as WJ wrote to entropically-depressed Henry Adams in the summer of 1910, as his own personal extinction loomed, on this side of the ultimately projected heat-death of the universe: “there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be… a maximum of happy and virtuous consciousness… the last expiring pulsation of the universe's life might be, "I am so happy and perfect that I can stand it no longer." There is hope, for Jamesians, that we may contribute to the expansion of the requisite conditions of a happy and virtuous consciousness for ever more of our confreres. Delight may survive, even as ultimate shadows fall. Our expiring pulsation would then be one of literally unsurpassable delight.

12. Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon, for instance, as freshly as in the first morning of creation; and the hour is just as fit as any hour that ever was for a new gospel of cheer to be preached. I am sure that one can, by merely thinking of these matters of fact, limit the power of one's evil moods over one's way of looking at the cosmos. And that, coupled with walking the dogs, still sums up the smartest approach to finding delight in dark times that I’ve yet found...