Reviews for Space of Love and Garbage: And Other Essays from the Harvard Review of Philosophy

The average rating for Space of Love and Garbage: And Other Essays from the Harvard Review of Philosophy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-08-20 00:00:00 Steven Heanly Canadians of a certain age may recall a brilliant series of commercials put out by Carlsberg years ago. Aimed at thirty-something men, they cleverly extolled the joys of adulthood. A typical spot showed a horny couple sharing a pre-coital embrace in a motel room. The voiceover narrator explains: "A friend of mine once tried to tell me that the best sex I'd ever have would be with my wife." Pause. "He was right." And then the slogan: "Welcome to your Carlsberg years." (Youtube is pretending not to know what commercial I'm talking about, and keeps recommending instead this cruelly hilarious clip of a shitfaced Orson Welles - at once the saddest and funniest thing ever.) Well, I've decided that pragmatism is a philosophy for people in their Carlsberg years. It has a sort of adult-contemporary vibe to it. By design, it's very middle of the road. This sounds like a dig, but it's really not. The fact is, I kinda like Wilco - and I kinda like William James. Warmed-over Nietzscheanism, a rakish dash of critical theory, a bit of Bataille when you're feeling frisky: that's all very well for your twenties, but sooner or later you settle down, buy a Suzuki Swift and start wondering how you're going to get rid of that tribal tattoo on your arm. Nothing tragic about that. I won't bore you with a detailed summary of pragmatism'that's what Wikipedia's for'but I'd just suggest that, if you're reading this, you're most likely, in some corner of your harried soul, a pragmatist already. Pragmatism'of the unofficial, half-assed variety'has become the default mode for most (secular) Westerners. This isn't James' doing, exactly. He just gave a local habitation and a name to something that was floating around in the zeitgeist. If you're interested in pragmatism itself, you should probably just go straight to Richard Rorty for the modern-dress version. The only reason to read James is for the beauty of his prose'and for the particular tang of his humour and sanity. Even when he's discussing the most dry-as-dust concepts, he can't help being earthy and vivid: Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one 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 from, ought to make matter sacred ever after...That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities. When you remember that James himself lost a child, you start to realize just how much passion and seriousness went into the man's writing. Already in the 19th century, there was a joke going around that William James was a novelist disguised as a psychologist, while his brother Henry was a psychologist trying to write novels. At this point in my life, William suddenly seems a lot more interesting and relevant than Henry, but that's probably just another sign that I've entered my Carlsberg years.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-18 00:00:00 Jean-sebastien Vey I read this as I have read it before for a grad course I am teaching on Language, Literacy and Democracy. And Pragmatism. This book is a series of lectures James gave more than a hundred years ago to help explain pragmatism as a method, not as just yet another philosophical position. It's a method of approaching truth as against abstract theory. Seeing truth not as Truth and the self as something clear and solid we need to discover but multiple, social, shifting, flexible, continually constructed in engagement with experience. Which makes it sound like a lot of contemporary postmodern philosophy. Right, the ideas have been around for centuries, nothing new, James says, and these skeptical "show me" ideas continued through the work of contemporary pragmatist practitioners such as Richard Rorty. Anti-"isms," which can be single theoretical explanations of the world, like Marxism, Feminism, anti-racism. Single bullet explanations that are fixed and a-contextual. Grand Theories that claim to explain How the World Works. Bull hockey to that, James says. The central idea here is that the meaning (or truth) of any idea ' philosophical, political, social, or otherwise ' has validity only in terms of its experiential and practical consequences. In other words, you think this, you believe this. . . so what? What difference does it make in the world? What good is to believe that? James and pragmatism HATE abstractions and the emptiest most ethereal reaches of philosophizing. They're anti-dogma. As one raised to believe in a Calvinist brand of religion, I have some history that leads me to say amen to James and draw closer to anarchy (against a fixed system of rules) than fascism, let's just say. James is also responding to Darwin, who was of course all the rage in the late nineteenth century. Darwin says, among other things, that we are mostly determined by our biology, by genetics. He shows us this true through scientific experiment. And he has a point. But James says nope, anything that claims you are completely determined by any one thing in particular ways is just plain limited. You are changing and always will be. Not fixed by experience but open because of it. James and the pragmatists say that you in part make yourself and your world. A hopeful view, perhaps a little naive, you say, you cynic, but as a teacher, I have to believe in possibilities for learning and life, and James helps me not be so. . . hopeless about the world and its future. He helps, at least. And as someone in academia, I hitting it helps to be less certain than too damned cocksure of oneself. James, the brother of novelist Henry, was one of the great thinkers of his time. He wrote Principles of Psychology to help found that field, he wrote Varieties of Religious Experience to examine people's experience with belief/religion/psychic phenomena, in various cultures. He's a little stuffy and not all of what he cared about then matters to me, but I still like his contribution to thinking about thinking.