Most contemporary commentaries on the ethical thought of William James and John Dewey attempt to fit them into the framework of contemporary ethics. On such readings, many of James and Dewey’s most distinctive ethical concerns fade away so that they seem interested, above all, in meta-ethical questions about the nature of moral judgment and in normative questions about moral deliberation. Foregrounding the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on both these thinkers, this dissertation attempts to provide fresh interpretations of the ethical thought of James and Dewey. The locus of James’ most important ethical thought, I argue, comes in his religious writings, where he attempts to find ethical resources in religious belief that help us respond to the problems of suffering and uncertainty: the problem of how to acknowledge the suffering of others, and the problem of how to act with ethical conviction in the absence of social approval for one’s actions. Dewey’s most important work in ethics, I argue, is located in his rich and sophisticated theory of habit, where he reworks the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics to emphasize the contingency of our habitual systems and the importance of the ideal of growth.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:12:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3770.pdf: 1009428 bytes, checksum: de9ff4bc5f81f492e463b7906029b75f (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-09-10 / This work analyzes the psychological texts of William James (1842-1910), specially his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. We begin following an alternative itinerary of reading proposed by James in the preface of the book, which also allows us to understand how the New Psychology has influenced the construction of psychological field in 19th century. We present this in our first chapter trying to show what we call a theory of action. In the second chapter, the previous conclusions are articulated with James exposition of the thought as a stream and with his considerations of the Self. In the third, we investigate the relations between his psychology of cognition and his posterior epistemology. Finally, we postulate that The Principles must be understood as a psychology of action, which has its basis in a philosophy of action incorporated, consciously or not, by James. We emphasize onward the research the tension created between the dualistic point of view assumed by James and the conclusions suggested by a closer reading. / Esta tese investiga a porção da obra de William James (1842-1910) dedicada à Psicologia, tendo como sua fonte principal o livro The Principles of Psychology, publicado em 1890. Seu ponto de partida é um roteiro alternativo de leitura proposto pelo próprio James no prefácio do livro e que serve para acompanhar a forma pela qual os avanços da Nova Psicologia influenciaram na construção da disciplina no século XIX. Este é o tema de nosso capítulo inicial e que nos ofereceu as diretrizes do que denominamos de uma teoria da ação. No segundo capítulo, procuramos articular essas indicações com a exposição do pensamento como um fluxo e também com as considerações sobre o self. No terceiro, abordamos as relações entre aquilo que o autor trata como uma psicologia da cognição e seus desdobramentos para uma teoria do conhecimento. Finalmente, utilizamos as conclusões obtidas nesse percurso para defender a tese de que o Principles, ou a psicologia jamesiana, deve ser compreendido como uma psicologia da ação, que tem sua base em uma filosofia da ação incorporada, implícita ou explicitamente, pelo autor. Percorre toda nossa pesquisa a tensão criada entre os pressupostos dualistas assumidos inicialmente por James e as conclusões sugeridas por uma análise mais minuciosa do texto.

Departamento de Filosofía / El propósito de esta tesis es dar cuenta de las posibles relaciones y contrastaciones, entablando una conversación y una contestación, entre la fenomenología trascendental de Edmund Husserl y, en primer momento, la fenomenología ontológica-existencialista de Jean-Paul Sartre y, en un segundo momento, con la psicología introspectiva de William James. En base a Sartre la discusión estará al alero de una lectura de herejía fenomenológica y con respecto a James se centrará en la posibilidad o no de una lectura pre-fenomenológica de su psicología introspectiva sobre la fenomenología de Husserl, y así reflexionar cómo es que esta psicología tiene ciertos matices que pudiesen ser parte de lo que reflexionó años posteriores Sartre. Ambas lecturas, ya sea la herejía fenomenológica como la pre-fenomenología se sustentarán en los siguientes tres momentos de discusión: 1. Finalidades de sus pensamientos: filosóficas, en el caso de Husserl y Sartre y psicológico, en el caso de William James; 2. Caracterización de la conciencia: a partir de una triada conceptual que será transversal a lo largo de toda la tesina: intencionalidad, constitución y unidad; y 3. Sobre la conexión o relación con los otros sujetos u otras conciencias. Todo con la finalidad de estructurar una descripción de la conciencia, ya sea de sus características, de sus funciones, sus acciones y sus contenidos que pudiese brindan las interrogantes y los conceptos claves para poder describirla como tal.

La tentative menée ici consiste à s’adresser au travail de William James (1842-1910) afin d’y chercher des moyens pour répondre à un problème qui nous concerne intensément :celui du décret séparant la connaissance et le changement. James nous rend en effet sensibles à la manière dont les conceptions habituelles avaient constamment maintenu un point de vue qui interdisait en principe qu’une idée puisse faire une différence. Il nous permet également de sentir à quel point ces conceptions ne peuvent qu’être profondément désespérantes. Cinq moments vont se succéder. Dans un premier temps, il s’agira, avec James, de nous connecter à la situation déconnectée, de saisir cette situation dans les dispositifs mêmes qui y creusent un gouffre séparant « la pensée » d’une « réalité » qui lui semble étrangère. Cette « saisie » s’efforce de remédier à l’anesthésie face à des conceptions qui produisent le désespoir et l’indifférence (« Se connecter / Situer »). Dès lors qu’est, au moins partiellement, levée la sidération qu’entraînent les versions rationalistes des connaissances, il devient possible de ré-épaissir ce que James appelle les « trois départements » de l’intelligence, ces modes d’expériences qui nourrissent les pratiques concrètes de connaissance. Pour commencer, c’est « agir » qui n’apparaît plus comme une incongruité quand il est question de connaître. La quête de certitudes indifférentes n’est pas tenable :connaître requiert la culture d’une confiance active et collective capable de rendre vraies des idées non-garanties (« Faire confiance / Agir »). Ensuite, c’est à propos des sensations que l’on s’aperçoit combien rien ne justifie de les vider de toute activité et de toute capacité. Cinq contraintes jamesiennes (épaissir, particulariser, pluraliser, relativiser, machiner) sont convoquées pour explorer les possibilités ouvertes à cet égard par un empirisme radical (« Faire le plein / Sentir »). Mais, les sensations ne se distinguant des conceptions que d’un point de vue pratique, les premières ne retrouvent pas des couleurs sans que les secondes n’en fassent autant. Les conceptions sont libérées de l’obligation qui leur était faite de seulement « copier » une réalité supposément toute faite ;prises concrètement, elles apparaissent comme pouvant désigner ces opérations délicates qui permettent aux mondes de déplier de multiples versions. C’est toute une agitation que de concevoir (« Faire des histoires / Concevoir »). Ces opérations jamesiennes (« se connecter », « faire confiance », « faire le plein », « faire des histoires ») ne visent aucunement la révélation d’une « nature » qui définirait la « pensée », mais, au contraire, elles visent l’activation de possibilités inattendues d’inventer des connaissances significatives, particulières et intéressantes. Il apparaît que ces possibilités – c’est l’hypothèse de James – avaient été tout spécialement limitées par l’omission des expériences concrètes de relation. Cette omission s’était accompagnée de la constitution tout à fait effective d’une pensée « privée » (« privée » à plus d’un titre). Il s’agit alors de relayer encore cette autre opération jamesienne – qui irriguait toutes les autres mais qui exige pour finir une attention spécifique –, celle qui consiste à restaurer les expériences de relation et à intensifier l’importance des « marges » et des « radicelles » (« S’associer / Agirpâtir »). / Doctorat en Philosophie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Situated at the crossroads of literary studies, ecocriticism and political theory, Active Enchantments explores a strain of thought within American literature that understands life in all of its forms to be generated not by self determined identities, but by interconnectedness and self abandonment. I argue that this interest led American writers across the nineteenth century to develop theories of subjectivity and of politics that not only emphasize the entanglement of the self with its environment, but also view this relationship as structured by self overcoming. Thus, when Emerson calls such interconnectedness "active enchantment," he means to signal life's inherent ability to constantly surpass itself, to never fully be identical with itself. My dissertation brings to the fore the political and ecological stakes of this paradox: if our selves and communities are molded by self abandonment, then the standard scholarly account of how nineteenth century American literature conceptualized politics must be revised. Far from understanding community as an organic production, founded on a teleological and harmonizing principle, the writers I study reconceive it around a sense of a commonality irreducible to fixed identity. The politics emerging out of such redefinition disposes with the primacy of individual or human agency, and becomes ecological in that it renders inoperative the difference between the social and the natural, the human and the non human, ourselves and what comprises us. It is the ecological dimension of what seems like a properly political question that brings together writers as diverse as Emerson and Sarah Orne Jewett, Margaret Fuller and Henry and William James. I argue, for example, that in Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, racial minorities emerge from geological strata as a kind of natural archive that complicates the nation's understanding of its communal origin. When she sets her romances on Native American shell mounds in Maine, or makes the health of a New England community depend on colonial pharmacopoeia and herbalist healing practices of the West Indies, Jewett excavates from history its silent associations and attunes us not only to the violent foundation of every communal identity, but to this identity's entanglement in a number of unacknowledged relations. Her work thus ultimately challenges the procedures of democratic inclusiveness that, however non violent, are nevertheless always organized around a particular notion of identity. The question of the self's constitutive interconnectedness with the world is as central to Margaret Fuller's work. Active Enchantments documents how Fuller's harrowing migraines enabled her to generate a peculiar conception of the "earthly mind," according to which the mind is material and decomposable, rather than spiritual, incorruptible or ideal. This notion eventually led her to devise a theory of the self that absolves persons from self possession and challenges the distinctiveness of personal identity. My concluding chapter argues that Henry James's transnational aesthetics was progressively politicized in the 1880s, and that what scholarship celebrates as the peak of his novelistic method develops, in fact, out of a network of surprising and heretofore unexplored influences, William James's concurrent theories of corporeal emotion, Mikhail Bakunin's anarchism, and Henry James's friendship with Ivan Turgenev, which inflamed James's interest in British politics, the Russo Turkish War, and the Balkan revolutions.