William James Society
@wjsociety.bsky.social
Encouraging the discussion and application of the pragmatic, pluralistic philosophy of William James (1842-1910).
Mick Jagger: I find philosophy a hard subject to educate myself into. I’ve recently read a couple of books, and I’m really finding it hard. They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing… www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/m...
Mick Jagger Knows He May Have Played His Last Rolling Stones Show
The legendary rock star, now 82, on how fame, touring and aging have changed him.
nytimes.com
The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors “A.I. labs, and the related nonprofits around them, have been recruiting workers as versed in Consequentialism and John Stuart Mill as in neural networks and reinforcement learning.” www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...
The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors
nytimes.com
Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?-“if anomalous videos don’t yield anything except more hearsay they’ll let us hand the God-and-aliens debate back to Steven Spielberg and William James.” www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/o...
Opinion | Does U.F.O. Disclosure Threaten Faith?
nytimes.com
A plug for WJ’s Varieties in Part 2 of the show (and for Carl Sagan’s in Part 1) www.newschannel5.com/plus/issues-...
Is Life from the Universe God's Plan?
With recent UAP videos and documents released by the federal government, religious organizations are contemplating what this means to the Christian belief system and the Bible.
newschannel5.com
The UAP-haunted world. Two Gifford lecturers would tell us we have nothing to fear open.substack.com/pub/philoliv...
An anomalous interview
Their god isn't big enough.
open.substack.com
“I admire the Pragmatists’ courage in believing that it is still possible to make a difference, however slight.” american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-amer...
I Am An American Philosopher: Roberta Dreon
I Am An American Philosopher: Roberta Dreon -An Interview Series with John Capps- “As a European philosopher belonging to a tradition that has developed refined forms of disenchantment toward…
american-philosophy.org
“in the very gap between perceiving meaning everywhere and feeling it for yourself, you discover… a renewed consciousness of your own felt life, sharpened precisely because you have just seen how much of the world’s meaning you can recognize but not inhabit…” open.substack.com/pub/nyphilos...
What William James Left Unsaid
By Grace Theodoly | A Reading of “What Makes a Life Significant”
open.substack.com
Past WJS officer Paul Stob’s new book reviewed: Was Phrenology Real? Ask the Lump on Your Forehead. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/11/b...
Was Phrenology Real? Ask the Lump on Your Forehead.
nytimes.com
William James Society newsletter, spring/summer 2026 wjsociety.org/news/
Newsletter – William James Society
wjsociety.org
The WILLIAM JAMES SOCIETY (WJS) would like to announce that it will be offering its annual WJS YOUNG SCHOLAR PRIZE to the young scholar (within five years of the Ph.D.) who submits the essay that best explores the thought of James.The prize will include:
Psychology is about amassing the vital conditions for living well… Philip Davis, William James (in the My Reading series, Oxford University Press, 2022)
You can't tell how happy I am at having thrown off the nightmare of my "professorship." As a "professor" I always felt myself a sham, with its chief duties of being awalking encyclopedia of erudition…
A meliorist’s acknowledgements: “I’m grateful to everyone who refused to surrender in advance. To those who persevered when the future seemed dark…
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Dr. Dianda’s Lyceum address was excellent, effectively making the Jamesian point that a complex and multi-relational self is rarely “fractured” beyond repair.
Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/b...
Rethinking Thoreau: We’ve Been Mispronouncing His Name for Centuries
nytimes.com
“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
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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
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.
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/
WJS Newsletter – William James Society
wjsociety.org
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...
The Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, January 11, 2022 - Garrison Keillor
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook" — psychologist and philosopher William James, born on this day 1842.
garrisonkeillor.com
