Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

As the old year crawled to an end, we all received a respite from boring campaign news by a reprise of the "affluenza" story. To review: lawyers for Ethan Couch maintain that his parents spoiled him so thoroughly that he cannot tell right from wrong, that is, he is insane. They lost on that point, and he was convicted of drunk driving that resulted in the death of four people. BUT the sentencing judge seems to have concluded that there was a mitigating factor there, because he suspended the sentence of imprisonment. Maybe the judge simply wanted to reward the creation of a clever portmanteau. Anyway, Couch never spent a day in lock up over those four deaths, although as a convicted felon he was required to check in regularly with his probation officer, and to give up alcohol. Apparently, upon the surfacing of a video suggesting that he was violating the latter condition, he violated the former. He has disappeared. So, in two sentences: 1) Couch was thought to have...

On Thursday I wrote here a brief notice of the passing of Jacques Barzun. Since then a fellow admirer of JB has asked me about two points: if I would care to comment on the tie between Jacques Barzun's thought and that of William James; and if I would share some selections from my correspondence with the former. Given the title of this blog, I can hardly reject the first of those invitations ... though I will put it off, perhaps for another week. Today, I will satisfy the second request. Here are four excerpts from Barzun's letters to me, each dated and preceded by some very brief comments by me (in ital) for context only. I won't even try to defend the views of mine that Barzun is criticizing here.  This is about him, not me. October 17, 1986. I had presumptuously made the case for libertarian political philosophy to him, while in the process dissecting what I saw as the faults of other libertarians, especially Robert Nozick. Jacques replied with good humor an...