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, educationabroad@mtsu.edu, 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 Dickens
The 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 flourish
Highgate 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

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 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…

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