Roots pp

Info on studying abroad in England next July

For those who may be interested in my summer 2017 "American Philosophy, British Roots" study abroad course [more info here]: there will be an informational meeting on Wednesday October 26, 6 pm in LRC 221... or you can visit our booth at the Study Abroad Fair November 9, 10 am - 2 pm.

If you're ready to apply for pre-approval, you can do that here.

And you can look into scholarship opportunities etc. at the Education Abroad office, [email protected], Peck Hall 207 - (615)898-5179.

Itinerary July 2017

Created by Horace Walpole in the 18th century, Strawberry Hill is internationally famous as Britain’s finest example of Georgian Gothic revival architecture. It also inspired the first gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

Strawberry Hill

Welcome to 48 Doughty Street, the London home of Charles DickensThe Charles Dickens Museum in Bloomsbury is the only remaining London home of Charles Dickens and today, his beautiful Georgian terraced house attracts visitors from around the world. As a Museum, it holds the world’s most important collection relating to Dickens, who was not only a great novelist but also a tireless social campaigner… Dickens House

According to the biographer John Forster, the novelist Charles Dickens, who lived nearby, used Restoration House as a model for Miss Havisham's Satis House in Great Expectations;[10] the name "Satis House" belongs to the house where Rochester MP, Sir Richard Watts, entertained Queen Elizabeth I - it is now the administrative office of King's School, Rochester. Restoration House

Founded in 1893, and one of the world's oldest, most respected literary societies, the Brontë Society is still preserving Brontë items today, growing the collection and teaching visitors about the lives and works of the three famous sisters. Bronte Museum, Moors Walk

William Shakespeare was born in this house and lived here until he was old enough to marry and spend the first five years of family life here with his new wife, Anne Hathaway.

For millions of Shakespeare enthusiasts worldwide, this house is a shrine. Here you will discover the world that shaped the man and find out what other famous writers thought when they visited here. Follow in the footsteps of not only Shakespeare, but other well-known visitors such as Charles Dickens, John Keats, Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy. Shakespeare’s Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon

One of England’s greatest treasures Highgate Cemetery has some of the finest funerary architecture in the country. It is a place of peace and contemplation where a romantic profusion of trees, memorials and wildlife flourishHighgate Cemetery

Displayed through a chain of beautiful rooms, the collection contains a great many treasures and curiosities associated with the lives and works of the Romantic poets, as well as one of the finest libraries of Romantic literature in the world; now numbering more than 8,000 volumes. Keats-Shelley House

The Freud Museum, at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, was the home of Sigmund Freud and his family when they escaped Austria following the Nazi annexation in 1938. It remained the family home until Anna Freud, the youngest daughter, died in 1982. The centrepiece of the museum is Freud's study, preserved just as it was during his lifetime.It contains Freud's remarkable collection of antiquities: Egyptian; Greek; Roman and Oriental. Almost 2,000 items fill cabinets and are arranged on every surface. There are rows of ancient figures on the desk where Freud wrote until the early hours of the morning. The walls are lined with shelves containing Freud's large library. Freud House

Henry James entertained many eminent figures of the day at Lamb House, among them H.G. Wells, A.C.and E.F. Benson, Max Beerbohm. Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Maddox Ford, Edmund Gosse, Rudyard Kipling, Hugh Walpole and Edith Wharton. Lamb House

...if one listens closely, if one ducks through stone arches, opens creaky

oaken doors, and descends to quiet riverside paths, one can still find the

Oxford of Charles Dodgson and Alice [at Christ Church College]… “

Finding Alice’s Wonderland at Oxford”

John Locke, born on August 29, 1632, in Wrington, Somerset, England, went to Westminster school and then Christ Church, University of Oxford. At Oxford he studied medicine, which would play a central role in his life. He became a highly influential philosopher, writing about such topics as political philosophy, epistemology, and education. Locke's writings helped found modern Western philosophy. Biography… IEP… History of Philosophy at Oxford… famous Oxonians...

FCS (Ferdinand Canning Scott) Schiller… cybrary

Pragmatism: an American

movement in philosophy founded

by C. S. Peirce and William James

and marked by the doctrines that

the meaning of conceptions is to be

sought in their practical bearings,

that the function of thought is to

guide action, and that truth is

preeminently to be tested by the

practical consequences of belief.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The two men had begun a relationship

while Schiller was at Cornell and

James at Harvard, carrying on a

correspondence that would be of

enduring value to both philosophers.

“By the time pragmatism was

introduced to the British philosophical

public in 1900, Schiller was already

well on his way to articulating and

defending pragmatism to his peers,”

Mark Porrovecchio, FCS Schiller and the Dawn of Pragmatism

In the mid-1890s, F.C.S.

Schiller failed his doctoral

orals at Cornell University

and returned to England to

take a position at Oxford.

Within a year, William James

published several books of

philosophy that set off a

blaze of debate between the

defenders of Absolute

Idealism and advocates of

the new, ethical

“practicalism.”

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

Francis Herbert Bradley, 1846-1924 Appearance and Reality. Clapham, London

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

The 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science opened in Oxford in late June. It was the first gathering of the BAAS since the publication of Charles Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species the previous November…

As he closed his remarks, Wilberforce turned to Huxley and sneeringly asked him if it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from apes. The audience cheered. Huxley turned to the man seated next to him and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.” Rising to his feet, Huxley responded that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop who distorted the truth… Huxley-Wilberforce debate

Philosophers who either worked or studied in Cambridge

include:

Desiderius Erasmus

Francis Bacon

The Cambridge Platonists

William Whewell

John Grote

Henry Sidgwick

John Neville Keynes

George Frederick Stout

James Ward

J. M. E. McTaggart

Bertrand Russell

G. E. Moore

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Alice Ambrose

Helen Knight

Margaret MacDonald (philosopher)

Margaret Masterman

C. D. Broad

Richard Braithwaite

A.C. Ewing

Frank P. Ramsey

Georg Henrik von Wright

Susan Stebbing

Casimir Lewy

Jonathan Lear

Susan James

Bernard Williams

Amartya Sen

Jonathan Bennett

Judith Jarvis Thomson

Ian Hacking

Roger Scruton

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Alain de Botton

Quassim Cassam

Alfred North Whitehea

Iris Murdoch

John Wisdom

Elizabeth Anscombe

Trinity CollegeCambridge

During his first three years at Cambridge, Newton was taught the standard curriculum but was fascinated with the more advanced science. All his spare time was spent reading from the modern philosophers. The result was a less-than-stellar performance, but one that is understandable, given his dual course of study. It was during this time that Newton kept a second set of notes, entitled "Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae" ("Certain Philosophical Questions"). The "Quaestiones" reveal that Newton had discovered the new concept of nature that provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution. Bio...

The School of Life, London

"The Sandwalk was our play-ground as children, and here we continually saw my father as he walked round. He liked to see what we were doing, and was ever ready to sympathise in any fun that was going on." Francis Darwin

YouT… Darwin online

Darwin’s Thinking Path

Soon after settling at Downe, Darwin constructed a sand-covered path, known as the sandwalk, that still winds through the shady woods and then returns toward the house along a sunny, hedge-lined field. He strolled it daily, referring to it as "my thinking path." Often he would stack a few stones at the path's entrance, and knock one away with his walking stick on completing each circuit. He could anticipate a "three-flint problem," just as Sherlock Holmes had "three-pipe problems," and then head home when all the stones were gone.

James, Wells, and pragmatic seduction

William James scandalized his brother Henry during a visit with the latter in England, by mounting  a ladder and peering into the garden next door in hopes of spotting G.K. Chesterton. The story is well-known among Jamesians, but David Lodge's fictionalized version in A Man of Parts adds a delightful layer of (presumably) invented but entirely plausible detail, bringing H.G. Wells and his young mistress (whose favorite philosopher was F.C.S. Schiller) into the scene… DS

How William James offended the English mind

In one letter to HG Wells he reflected on "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success". We are indebted to him for expressions such as "stream of consciousness" too. Some have said he was a better writer than his brother, the novelist Henry James…

In his A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell records how James was universally loved as a person. "His religious feelings were very Protestant, very democratic, and very full of the warmth of human kindness," Russell writes. "He refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness." But if Russell is generous about the man, he is less so about the man's philosophy.

James was a tremendous populariser of the philosophy of pragmatism. The principle of pragmatism is, roughly, that something can be said to be true if it works. James wrote: "We cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it." This led him to the conclusion that "the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief". He argued that there is a bridge between our ideas about reality and reality itself, and that our notions about what is true can provide us with the bridge. This is what he meant by what works. So, again, he writes: "Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them."

There is something about this way of thinking that is offensive to the English mind, and Russell was quick to spot it…