What Book Are You Currently Reading?

[Groenewolf]

Finished it today.

[Aemma]

That book is actually seen as one of the founding works of multiculturalism. Those in the pragmatism stream like James, the Jew Horace Kallen, the blacks W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, and somewhat strangely, the conservative George Santayana (among others) are seen as pioneers in this area.

Ironically, James' brother, the author Henry James is lampooned in academic texts on racism for representing a debonair form of racial prejudice.

Multiculturalism, in the descriptive or normative meaning of the word?


On this difference:

When criticising multiculturalism, it is important to first define the term. Andrew Heywood distinguishes between two overall forms of multiculturalism: descriptive and normative. "The term ‘multiculturalism’ has been used in a variety of ways, both descriptive and normative. As a descriptive term, it has been taken to refer to cultural diversity … As a normative term, multiculturalism implies a positive endorsement, even celebration, of communal diversity, typically based on either the right of different groups to respect and recognition, or to the alleged benefits to the larger society of moral and cultural diversity”.[3]

When I read this bit below on James' book, it struck me that his might be more in the vein of the descriptive as opposed to the normative. But then again I've not read the book...yet.

A Pluralistic Universe (1909)

Originally delivered in Oxford as a set of lectures “On the Present Situation in Philosophy,” James begins his book, as he had begun Pragmatism, with a discussion of the temperamental determination of philosophical theories, which, James states, “are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push … forced on one by one's total character and experience, and on the whole preferred — there is no other truthful word — as one's best working attitude” (PU 15). Maintaining that a philosopher's “vision” is “the important thing” about him (PU 3), James condemns the “over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our American universities…” (PU 13).

James passes from critical discussions of Josiah Royce's idealism and the “vicious intellectualism” of Hegel to philosophers whose visions he admires: Gustav Fechner and Henri Bergson. He praises Fechner for holding that “the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and developments, is everywhere alive and conscious” (PU, 70), and he seeks to refine and justify Fechner's idea that separate human, animal and vegetable consciousnesses meet or merge in a “consciousness of still wider scope” (72). James employs Henri Bergson's critique of “intellectualism” to argue that the “concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes are confined by. They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate” (PU 127). James concludes by embracing a position that he had more tentatively set forth in The Varieties of Religious Experience: that religious experiences “point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential man (who is the only man that scientific psychology, so called, takes cognizance of) is shut off” (PU, 135). Whereas in Pragmatism James subsumes the religious within the pragmatic (as yet another way of successfully making one's way through the world), in A Pluralistic Universe he suggests that the religious offers a superior relation to the universe.

Source

[Joe McCarthy]

Multiculturalism, in the descriptive or normative meaning of the word?

Normative. James was actually affirming the desirability of the 'plural society'. He regarded pluralism as being necessary to the formation of social and philosophical humanism and the creation of a more egalitarian society.

[Beorn]

And there is a film to watch afterwards! Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman no less!

What a great book. What a life. What a man.

[Gamera]

[Psychonaut]

That book is actually seen as one of the founding works of multiculturalism. Those in the pragmatism stream like James, the Jew Horace Kallen, the blacks W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, and somewhat strangely, the conservative George Santayana (among others) are seen as pioneers in this area.

Ironically, James' brother, the author Henry James is lampooned in academic texts on racism for representing a debonair form of racial prejudice.

I find it very strange that of all James' works this book, which is by and large a critique of Continental rationalism and monistic idealism (à la Hegel), would have had such influence. I don't really recall him extrapolating his theories outside of epistemology and metaphysics into the social sphere anywhere in the book.

[Don]

This thread.

[The Ripper]

And there is a film to watch afterwards! Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman no less!

What a great book. What a life. What a man.

I read that as a teen. I thought the guy was a typically pompous Frenchman back then when I read it.

[Turkophagos]

[ikki]

Ia Yog-sothoth!