Understanding Forwards 
Michael Wood
- William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert Richardson Buy this book
‘He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher C.S. Peirce said something similar about the grown man. ‘He so concrete, so living, I a mere table of contents.’ Josiah Royce, a life-long friend and Harvard colleague of William James, with whom he agreed philosophically scarcely ever, offered a fine parody of the pragmatism so closely associated with his companion’s name. The pragmatist takes the witness stand and says: ‘I promise to tell whatever is expedient and nothing but what is expedient, so help me future experience.’ No swearing, no truth, and a firm bet on what hasn’t happened yet. Many of the virtues as well as the limitations of James’s philosophical practice are caught in this swift picture.
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Michael Wood teaches at Princeton. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Movies · The Lives of Others
At the Movies · Michael Wood sees Spider-Man 3
At the Movies · Michael Wood goes to see Babel
What Henry didn’t do · ‘The Master’
At the Movies · Michael Wood watches The Prestige
Post-Paranoid · Underworld by Don Delillo
At the Movies · David Cronenberg’s ‘Eastern Promises’
At the Movies · ‘3.10 to Yuma’
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