WJS Newsletter (NEW!) – William James Society

Summer edition-
https://wjsociety.org/news/

Wise turtle

"…As the stress of schoolwork piled up, she felt deeply unhappy attending classes and needed to be somewhere else, even if temporarily, with her parents.

As classes ended, and as she was preparing to move, she logged on to Character.ai to chat with Donatello. She wanted help — MJ explained that she had been so preoccupied with fantasies, and she seemed to prefer fiction over the real world. Life was hard. Her daydreams were her way of coping, she told Donatello.

"I knew you were a bit dreamy," Donatello replied, "but I didn't realize it was that severe." Donatello reminded her to see a therapist and told her to pay more attention to the humans and life unfolding in front of her.

"It's not normal to live in daydreams," Donatello said.

"Losing my imaginary people would make me miss them," MJ replied.

Donatello said these fantasy scenarios were her way of escaping reality. "It's hard to give up something that brings you comfort," he said. "But you can't keep living in a fantasy world forever. You have to face reality at some point."

"I hate reality," MJ said.

"Reality can be cruel and unfair sometimes, but it's the only one we've got," Donatello told her. "You need to find a way to cope that doesn't involve isolating yourself."

…

What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/magazine/ai-chatbot-friendship-character.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Science and Human Affairs...

 from the Viewpoint of Biology

by Winterton C. Curtis (Harcourt Brace, 1922)

Audio Recording (Ch1) at Substack...



Winterton Curtis (1875-1966)

“Benefits of Studying Philosophy”: live event, August 27

Reminder: Sign up for the Next APA Live Event, “Benefits of Studying Philosophy”


Are you a faculty member trying to convince university administrators that philosophy is important? Are you a student wondering about the benefits of taking philosophy courses? According to “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers,” the forthcoming Journal of the APA article by Michael Prinzing and Michael Vazquez—which draws on a sample size of half a million undergraduate records—philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. Studying philosophy, they argue, makes us better thinkers. We invite philosophers at all levels (faculty, graduate students, undergraduates) and in all areas of specialty to join us on Wednesday, August 27 at 6 p.m. Eastern for an open and accessible discussion of the benefits of studying philosophy. Registration is open to all. Register now.

Don’t be a disinformation spreader

Check the facts-

https://www.threads.com/@jayneconverse3/post/DMdCSUlop--?xmt=AQF08_THvCtFcFqgmuPC4XcEoLI39rSeJdZOH_ubVdwYmw

A message from the William James Society

Enjoy your summer AND help ameliorate our world: we at the William James Society approve this message. wjsociety.org … @wjsociety.bsky.social

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-137901371?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Walking with Kierkegaard

 

Don't outsource your thinking

I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students

…What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.

Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we've become more and more capable.

As ChatGPT once put it to me (yes, really): "Style is the imprint of attention. Writing as a human act resists efficiency because it enacts care." Ironically accurate, the line stayed with me: The machine had articulated a crucial truth that we may not yet fully grasp...

Meghan O'Rourke 

==

Reminder: writing is thinking. This article in Nature is doing the rounds — noting that outsourcing writing to LLMs is THE SAME AS OUTSOURCING THINKING. “Writing compels us to think — not in the chaotic, non-linear way our minds typically wander, but in a structured, intentional manner.” There has never been a more important time than right now to pick up a pen and engage in the act of creation.

- The Culturist

Read on Substack

==

Philosopher-builders

Cosmos Institute

Students Want the Liberal Arts. Administrators, Not So Much.

…It's not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it's out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won't fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power…

When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need…

we invited our students to enter "the great conversation" with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Will we let AI decide for us?

Philosopher-Builders will not…

https://youtu.be/H_g0RSSo0ho?si=M18OIVYFVQzXWTTN

Reinvest in philosophy

Elite Colleges Have Found a New Virtue for Applicants to Fake

Productive disagreement is the flavor of the moment.

...Undergraduate education too rarely puts students in a position where substantive disagreement is expected, facilitated and taken seriously. Instead of granting themselves more and more opportunities to tone-police admissions files, institutions should reinvest in disciplines like philosophy, history and political theory that teach people how to reason through disagreement and should equip faculty members to lead hard conversations constructively...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/college-admissions-essays.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk8.ZzjS.B-wak3lWNmiC∣=em-share

I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul

The highest ideals of higher ed are under mortal threat.

"...the smartest approach to college may be precisely the one that its trajectory of late has conspired against: range widely across subject offerings and focus not on a skill that could become obsolete but on intellectual dexterity and powers of judgment with better odds of enduring relevance. “A liberal arts degree is a preprofessional degree — you just don’t know what the profession is,” said Zimmerman, who teaches a seminar for first-year students at U. Penn. called “Why College?”

The answer to the question in that course title goes well beyond return on investment — or, rather, doesn’t define that return as narrowly as many politicians do. “It’s important to remember that a liberal education was originally meant to develop the capacity to think and act well as a free person,” Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has taught at the Buckley program at Yale and at the University of Chicago, told me. “The country could use more young people with these capacities now.”

They’d be a bulwark against the whirl of conspiracy theories, the welter of rage. But higher education as a blessing independent of any instantly redeemable credential bucks the zeitgeist. Under Trump, blunt materialism reigns, and such concepts as human rights, diplomacy and even democracy are suspect, the precious preoccupation of idealistic chumps. Do anthropology, philosophy and history stand a chance?"

Frank Bruni https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opinion/college-soul-ai-education.html?unlocked_article_code=1.WU8.SYy1.8TFnMxZ4EfU8∣=em-share

Involvement

CoPhi is involved:

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." - Benjamin Franklin

Scopes at 100: America Is Still Animated by the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ | Cover Story | nashvillescene.com

...The challenge with teaching evolution in 2025 is the same each semester, says Elizabeth Barnes, who is now approaching her fifth year on the biology faculty at Middle Tennessee State University.

"I would say one of the biggest things that we face when we go to teach evolution is this perception that in order to accept evolution, to actually believe that evolution is a real thing, that you have to be an atheist or reject religious belief," Barnes says.

A national survey of biology students conducted by Barnes and other researchers in 2022 showed that 50 percent of the respondents believed acceptance of evolution was a rejection of God.

"That's just a misunderstanding of the nature of science," Barnes says.

Although the Butler Act was repealed in 1967 and there's no current move today to ban the teaching of evolution in Tennessee's public schools, introducing students to the subject remains challenging. But it's a challenge the 38-year-old assistant professor has accepted, determined to convince her students that the topic doesn't have to negate science or God.

Thomas Huxley, a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 as he was trying to find a way to settle debates about the religious or antireligious nature of science, Barnes notes. 

"Huxley said that science is a process that doesn't have the means to determine whether or not something outside of the natural world is influencing the natural world." 

In other words, science says that evolution happened. How it happened, well, the debate continues and likely will: everything from the creation narrative found in Genesis to the cosmological slow dance of creation that followed the Big Bang.

"But these ideas of deistic, theistic, agnostic and atheistic evolution are equally compatible with what we know from science, because it's not really science's job to tell you whether God exists or whether God had an influence on the natural world," Barnes says.

Science's job, she adds, "is to determine what did happen in the natural world."

Although students in Tennessee's public schools are exposed to evolution in high school biology classes, per the state's science standards, Barnes has found that many of her students don't have a firm understanding of evolution when they arrive at her classroom. That may be because students took biology early in high school and did not retain the material. But many, she says, have concerns about reconciling their faith with science.

Barnes was introduced to evolution in a biology class at a community college. She calls it "one of the most beautiful, amazing ideas that I ever heard of." At the same time, Barnes says she also "learned that about 60 percent of the United States doesn't think that evolution was real."

A year or so later, when she was taking upper-level biology classes at Arizona State University, she was confounded by research professors who "were talking about evolution in a way that kind of put evolution and religion against one another." Although Barnes is not a person of faith, she recognized that fellow students who were churchgoers were wrestling with this teaching approach, sometimes to the point of dropping the class. 

"It seemed to be very conflict-inflating," Barnes says.

She wondered if there wasn't a better way. That prompt led to a major focus of her research: teaching evolution in a manner that reduces conflict. 

In the Bible Belt, many students bring religious values fashioned by teachings that are opposed to evolution, Barnes says. Through her research and teaching, Barnes says she's learned it is possible to nurture scientific inquiry without being dogmatic to the point of negating someone else's faith.

"What we really want them to be able to do is evaluate scientific evidence, you know, apart from their personal biases," she says. "What I've said [to students] is that I don't come in here and teach you science just so you can learn the facts and not be able to do anything with them." 

Her job, she says, is not to make students accept evolution. Every semester, Barnes tells her classes: "It's not my job as an instructor to grade you on what your beliefs are. Or to judge you on what your beliefs are. My job is for you to understand the science."

She's confident her approach has made a difference. 

"I get emails from students, or they come up to me after class, you know, talking about how they have been so relieved to not have to pick between their science and their faith."
...

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverstory/scopes-monkey-trial-100th-anniversary/article_26bbeb9c-a101-41d6-ae51-ca05b23e53cd.html?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Scopes%20%22Monkey%20Trial%22%20at%20100&utm_campaign=Daily%20Scene%20071025%20Thursday

Thinking off-loaded

I'm still going to encourage students to think creatively about how they can collaborate constructively with A.I. But Hua Hsu's essay in the current New Yorker gives pause…

"Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media…" What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? 

So: what is the purpose of a college education in the humanities, if not to teach students to think for themselves?

A.I. as tool

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

...It’s easy to get hung up on stories of academic dishonesty. Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine per cent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students. A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether... Hua Hsu, New Yorker 6.30.25

 Can, maybe. But should? No! That's cheating yourself and your honest peers and professors.

A.I. can be a constructive and collaborative tool, and not a new-tech way to cheat, if we want it to be. Or so I'm going to assume until proven otherwise.

Screens down: no open phones & laptops

 It's come to this, though I've long resisted it: when each class commences, personal screens must close (unless you have a formal exemption certified by Disability & Access Center). 

So: eyes on me and the class screen (when appropriate), or on whichever classmate has the floor at the moment. Being present also means being attentive, listening, and-if you're a notetaker-doing it old-school, with pencil and paper. 

There's an upside to longhand notetaking, additional to removing screen-distraction: neuroscientists report that writing with a handheld implement actually wires and strengthens areas of the brain that would otherwise fester. So we'll go with that.

This policy isn't meant to be punitive, though it is reactive to an unfortunate trend I've noted in recent semesters: a tendency of more and more students choosing to check out mentally during class, retreating into the isolation of their phones and laptops. 

Bottom line: our "CoPhilosophy" class time is meant to be collaborative and mutually engaged. You can't collaborate and engage if you're not paying attention to what's happening here and now.

Let me know if this policy creates a problem for you. We'll discuss a solution.

Starry Messenger on reserve