Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

In a recent post, in order to make the case that the period 1880-1920 was a golden age for western philosophy, I offered you a list of works of that period, which I arbitrarily organized as two works per year.  It makes, I think, an impressive list.  But it will naturally raise questions.... 1. What number of these 82 works constitute "philosophy" in a fairly narrow sense of the term? All such borders are permeable, but my best answer is 36.  Or, less than half. I am counting only non-fiction works among those 36. If I add to that number the heavily philosophical novels and plays on the list (Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Bellamy, Shaw and Joyce) I get that number up to 41, or just one-half of the whole.  2. What are the chief subjects of those that I think are philosophy but only in an acceptable broadened sense?  This was a very active time for philosophically inclined thought within the adjacent fields of biology, psychology, economics, and history (where any of those ...

Gilles Deleuze, interpreting a passage in Arnold Toynbee, says that Toynbee "shows that nomads in the strict, geographical sense are neither migrants nor travelers, but on the contrary, those who do not move, those who cling on to the steppe, who are immobile with big strides, following a line of flight on the spot, the greatest inventors of new weapons. But history has never begun to understand nomads, who have neither past nor future." I like the literary (not a logical) paradox there. Yes, if we think of an American "snow bird," travelling every November from New York to Florida, traveling every April back to New York, then we can think of him changing his habitat and remaining constant in his habit. Year after year this comes to look less like travel than like immobility with big steps.  Toynbee was all about challenge and response. The Big Picture in his writings is that a civilization faces some crisis and either responds creatively or fails. If its ...