Hi all,
I guess everyone here knows me at least a little. After seven years in Boston, I'm back in Hyde Park for this year; where I am next year depends on the vagaries of the academic job market. I'm finishing up a Ph.D. in English, and my thesis focuses on the relationship between literature and education reform around the turn of the twentieth century. John Dewey, a pragmatist who comes after James, is sort of my project's presiding spirit. While I've thought and written a lot about Dewey, our group will be my first really sustained engagement with James -- certainly my first attempt to "teach" him. I couldn't imagine a better way to get my feet wet!
As I'll explain a little in this week's thinksheet and introductory "lecture," I think James lends himself particularly well to extra-academic discussion. He resists the disciplinary constraints that make most philosophy unreadable to non-specialists. He is also one of America's finest prose stylists -- second only to Emerson, if you ask me. Aside from the intellectual illumination he offers, I also believe that immersion in James's prose permanently improves one's writing style.
I'm already having a blast doing the reading and preparing my comments. I hope you will too!
- Jesse
On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 1:24 PM, Wang D damonwang@uchicago.edu wrote:
Oh, no. I just realized everybody on this list knows me from Chicago. So my name is Damon and I live in New Jersey near New York City. Sorry for the confusion.
Wang
2013/12/8 Wang D damonwang@uchicago.edu:
Hi, my name is Wang and I live in Fort Lee. I studied sciences and then went to EMT school, so my academic background is pretty irrelevant. I'm generally interested in categorizing things and studying different variations of the same phenomenon because that often distinguishes the fundamentals from the incidentals.
Wang
2013/12/8 Steven Lucy slucy@moomers.org:
Hi everyone,
I spent my academic career waffling between social sciences and hard
sciences
before saying fuck it all to start a produce store. I'm looking
forward to
this group because (spoiler alert) my new year's resolution is to read
more
books. It's amazing how easy it is to fall off the intellectual
reading wagon
once you exit academia.
I live in Chicago and have for a long time, but I've also lived a lot
of other
places.
Steven _______________________________________________ WilliamJames mailing list WilliamJames@moomers.org http://mailman.moomers.org/mailman/listinfo/williamjames
WilliamJames mailing list WilliamJames@moomers.org http://mailman.moomers.org/mailman/listinfo/williamjames