MTSU Applied Philosophy Lyceum

Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/b...

“William James’s gift for describing subjective experience might explain why his work is today regarded more as philosophy than science, which tends to denigrate description and elevate abstraction and experiment. — A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan a.co/05t0oDau

To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter COULD have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.

CALL FOR FELLOWSHIP APPLICATIONS Applications are being considered by the Fellowship Program for Humanist Thought, an American Humanist Association and Institute for Humanist Studies program, new in 2026.

“…the warmth and vibrancy of his personality floods the pages, so that you feel his living presence still… more than a century after his death.” Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct

Global pragmatism www.facebook.com/share/p/1AGw...

CALL FOR PAPERS William James Studies — Spring 2026 Issue William James Studies (WJS) invites submissions of original and article-length manuscripts to us for our next issue in Spring 2026… substack.com/@philoliver/...

If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Kaag on mattering www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

Spring 2026 Newsletter President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver ‘Tis the season of William James’s birth, in 1842. By an odd twist of coincidence, January 11 happens also to be my wife’s birthday. So it’s a date I cannot and dare not ever forget… wjsociety.org/news/

It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “stream of consciousness” and who said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” (1842)… www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-th...

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

We are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue of truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard.

Our University inflicts a monstrous amount of routine business on one, faculty meetings and committees of every sort, so that during term-time one can do no continuous reading at all—reading of books, I mean. When vacation comes, my brain is so tired that I can read nothing serious for a month…

WJ may never have delivered a commencement speech, but plenty of addresses have been delivered in his name. Here’s one. www.hds.harvard.edu/news/2023/1/...

Though the ultimate state of the universe may be its vital and psychical extinction, there is nothing in physics to interfere with the hypothesis that the penultimate state might be the millennium…

What a lovely end-of-semester gift from a student in Philosophy of Happiness. Volume II includes the transcendent 1910 letter to Henry Adams I sent them off with: “ I am so happy I can stand it no longer!”

Remember when old December's darkness is everywhere about you, that the world is really in every minutest point as full of life as in the most joyous morning you ever lived through; that the sun is whanging down, and the waves dancing, and the gulls skimming down at the mouth of the Amazon…

Good for Sebastian Castillo, for tackling difficult books— particularly Spinoza's Ethics— with a little help from his book club friends (NYT Magazine, Nov.23). But I resist the insinuation that philosophy must be difficult, If it is to offer "genuine consolation" or "salvation"…

“You can get up. William James reminds us of the real difficulty of that first step…But… your mind will follow your body…” —Megan Craig & Ed Casey, Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion (Columbia University Press, 2025)

As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Congratulations to newly-elected executive board officers Alexis Dianda (Xavier) and John Snarey (Emory)! And thanks to all who’ve offered to serve.

What an awful trade that of professor is--paid to talk, talk, talk! I have seen artists growing pale and sick whilst I talked to them without being able to stop. And I loved them for not being able to love me any better...

Autumn 2025 Newsletter President’s Message from Dr. Phil Oliver Autumnal season’s greetings, fellow friends of William James. I first began to think of WJ in casually-friendly terms back in the Fall of my first year of grad school at Vanderbilt in the ’80s… wjsociety.org/news/

Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It 'bakes no bread,' as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage…

Bertrand Russell was famously critical of American philosophers like William James and their radical theories of truth. But Russell’s attack rests on a caricature, argues philosopher John Kaag… iai.tv/articles/rus... www.facebook.com/share/p/1JRH...

Kaag on Russell on James www.facebook.com/share/p/1JRH...

Excellent Lyceum address from Megan Craig, on staying human(e) and present in the face of mortality. #mtsu #AppliedPhilosophyLyceum

James, alongside Bergson, recognized the value of non-intellectual sense, urging us to reanimate our capacity for greater intimacy and sensible contact with the world… James encouraged us to access “our earliest, most instinctive, least developed, kind of consciousness.” Megan Craig

Megan Craig (Stony Brook University) is MTSU's upcoming Applied Philosophy Lyceum speaker... RELATION AND RUPTURE AT THE END OF LIFE Friday, September 26, 2025 • 5 p.m. College of Education, Room 164 philoshap2.blogspot.com/2025/09/a-co...

Psychedelics Blew His Mind. He Wants Other Philosophers to Open Theirs. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/b...

Few of us are tender-foot Bostonians pure and simple, and few are typical Rocky Mountain toughs, in philosophy. Most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line. Facts are good, of course—give us lots of facts. Principles are good—give us plenty of principles.

The antagonism between intensely tough and tender temperaments has formed in all ages a part of the philosophic atmosphere of the time. It forms a part of the philosophic atmosphere today. The tough think of the tender as sentimentalists and soft-heads.

Tender-minded and tough-minded people, characterized as I have written them down, do both exist. Each of you probably knows some well-marked example of each type, and you know what each example thinks of the example on the other side of the line. They have a low opinion of each other.

I hope summer has glided away as happily for you as it has for us. Now it begins to fade towards the horizon over which so many summers have slipped, and our household is on the point of "breaking up" just when the season invites one most imperiously to stay. Dang all schools and colleges, say I.

My dear Howison,—How you have misunderstood the application of my word "trivial" as being discriminatively applied to your pluralistic idealism! Quite the reverse—if there be a philosophy that I believe in, it's that.

This is exciting (if you're a Jamesian): William James Society board member and (with his Pragmatism Cybrary) master archivist of American Philosophy John Shook has recovered the earliest society publications… jposopher.blogspot.com/2025/08/in-b...

I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream. The practical problem is "how to get at them." Most never do.

The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical and open to discussion. I will write these traits down in two columns… 'tender-minded' and 'tough-minded' respectively.

James also thinks inquiry needs to be conducted in a scientific fashion, but especially in philosophical inquiry, he doesn't think this should be done using jargon, in a technical fashion. James's outlook here is evolutionary… amphilos.blogspot.com/2025/07/an-i...

Rationalism is more religious than empiricism when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard-headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist—I use the terms most popularly current.

Rationalism usually considers itself more religious than empiricism, but there is much to say about this claim, so I merely mention it. It is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a person of feeling.

Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection-is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.

Empiricists, in contrast to Rationalists, are not uncommonly materialistic rather than idealistic; and their optimism is apt to be decidedly conditional and tremulous.