Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  One of the  perennial positions in the philosophy of education is perennialism. "Perennialism" is a valuable word for identifying the ideas behind, say, the Great Books curriculum conspicuously offered by St John's College at Annapolis.  The underlying idea is that the best idea are the ones that have lasted over centuries, because time is the  great editor.  Perennialists typically set students to work reading and analyzing the works by history's finest thinkers and writers.  AT its best, this is of course very different from rote learning.  One is not expected to learn medicine by memorizing the thoughts of Hippocrates and Galen. But one might well be expected to learn something valuable about science by analyzing what Hippocrates and Galen wrote, why they wrote it, what their concerns were, and so forth.   Perennialism is neither all right nor all wrong. I thought I should mention it today because I was writing about Hutchins here, yeste...

Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present. My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y. Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner.  The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical invest...

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...

One critical fact about the philosophy of William James is that it is a good deal more subtle than many newcomers to philosophy expect it to be. The crude use of the word "pragmatism" to mean "unprincipled" or "opportunistic" has contributed to the false impression that there isn't a lot of intellectual/philosophical substance to it. Also, the  fact that much of what James wrote on the subject was written with a wider audience in mind than his fellow academics, has had the unfortunate  side effect of giving it a reputation in some quarters as the philosophy for those without the patience, or perhaps the intellectual heft, to read real philosophy. Barzun, in A Stroll with William James, devoted his own considerable gifts to clearing up such misconceptions. I won't retread that ground here but will move to a related problem: we associate pragmatism as much with Dewey as with James, and through Dewey it has come to have a close connection wit...