Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Some of the readers of this blog may surely be interested in the regime change at the University of Vermont, where campus protests have led to a reconsideration of cutbacks in the humanities.  The incoming President of the University is Suresh Garimella, who is leaving a post as the Provost of Purdue.  There is a petition drive underway to try to persuade Garimella of the importance of restoring to 2015 staffing level.  Here are some more specifics at a blog and a link to the petition. https://classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/university-vermont-classics-department/blog-fighting-future-classics-university-vermont . The petition is here:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wN1GdE5nKzbTeney7Kp3nZCYkFkblKeur8tu-bHFgig/edit#gid=0

John Bishop, a professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, wrote Believing by Faith a few years ago in order to present an updated view of William James' observations on the will to believe. In his honor, I've begun this entry with the coat of arms of that University. Bishop's book is subtitled, An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief, a nod in part to an essay by William Kingdon Clifford, published in 1877, simply titled "The Ethics of Belief." Many people have since written on the cluster of issues on which Clifford and James took contrasting positions back in the 19th century, so Bishop is both returning to the source and replying to a lot of the subsequent cluster of commentary. I won't get into the particulars of what Bishop adds to the debate. I'll only say that Bishop's preface is intriguing. It describes the book he was trying to write before he ended up writing this one. "My initial motive was to ...

The Winter 2013 issue of Cato's Letter (a publication of the Cato Institute) carries a meditation by Charles Murray on the value, or rather on the over-valuation, of the B.A. degree in the U.S. at the present. Indeed, he calls it a "bubble." The word "bubble" is surely inexact. Bubbles in the economic sense involve commodities that are readily transferable. It is because they are transferable that they become over-valued in a very specific way. I can sell you my tulip bulb, or my dot-com company stock, or my mortgage derivatives' portfolio, simply because you are a greater fool than I am. You might buy them in the expectation that you can find someone even more foolish. Thus, we both make use of the ready transferability and the transaction is quickly concluded. This continues until the over-valued commodity is in the hands of the greatest available fool, after which point by definition it can not continue, and the bubble bursts. I  can't give y...