Abstract
What follows is an annotated translation of an obituary of James which appeared in the feuilleton Weit und Wissen. Hannoversche Blätter für Kunst, Literatur und Leben (Beilage zum Hannoverschen Courier), Nr. 198, on 28th September 1910 (James died on the 27th August). The original is to appear in the new Philosophia edition of Reinach’s works.
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It seems likely that Reinach had lectured on James in his course on “Introduction to the Theory of Cognition” of the winter semester 1909/10.
Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking, Popular Lectures on Philosophy, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907. German trans, by W. Jerusalem, Pragmatismus. Ein neuer Name für alte Denkmethoden, Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1908; new edition edited by K. Oehler, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1977. * H.[annoverscher] C.[ourier]
The writings of both Reinach and Wittgenstein (G.E.M. Anscombe, ed., Über Farben/Remarks on Colour, Oxford: Blackwell, 1977, e.g. I, § §56, 70–73, II, §126) exhibit important parallels in this respect also to the work of Stumpf.
See T. Elsenhans, ed., Bericht über den III. Kongreß für Philosophie zu Heidelberg I. bis 5. September 1908, Heidelberg: Winter, 1909. Reinach is not listed among the participants in this conference, though his Munich colleague Geiger is. The first major speech at the conference was given by Josiah Royce, “The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion” (62–90), and James’ translator Wilhelm Jerusalem and F.C.S. Schiller were among those who took part in the discussion. Talks of Schiller (“Der rationalistische Wahrheitsbegriff”) and A.C. Armstrong (“The Evolution of Pragmatism”) then gave rise to a much longer general discussion on pragmatism which had to be extended by the congress organisers. In this extended discussion E. Mally, L. Nelson and K. Grelling were among those who took part. Also talking on pragmatism were: K. Aars, J. Pikier, and Christine Ladd-Franklin, who hit the nail on the head with her remark: T conclude then that pragmatism is not only immoral but also untrue’ (p.670).
One of the members of this “Free Law Movement” was Reinach’s student friend Hermann Kantorowicz. Sec the biography of Reinach by Schuhmann and Smith in this volume.
James, Pragmatism, p. 45: ‘The pragmatic method... is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.’
Free will is discussed by James on pp. 115ff. Reinach dealt with the problem in his lecture course of Summer 1911.
James, p. 53: ‘You must bring out of each word its practical cash value, set it at work within the stream of your experience’.
Reinach is correct to impute to James the somewhat confused idea of ‘truth of a concept’: cf. e.g. pp. 73ff.
James talks of ‘vital benefits’ on pp. 76f.
James talks on p. 243 of ’the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to “agree.” 12 Cf. James, p. 244.
Cf. James, p. 251.
Cf. James, p. 252.
The allusion is to Goethe’s Faust (first appearance of Mephistopheles): ‘Das erste steht uns frei, beim zweiten sind wir Knechte.’
Cf. James, p. 257.
James, p. 257: ‘reality... is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.’
‘Erhöhung des vorgefundenen Daseins’: James quotes this phrase from R. Eucken, in German only, on p, 256. Unfortunately he does not give the source. It is almost certainly taken from Eucken’s Geistige Strömungen der Gegenwart, Leipzig: Veit, 1904, p. 36: the concept of truth ‘is not a matter of mere depicting [Aufnehmen], but of an enhancing of that which is pre-given.’
James, p. 299: ‘... so that it will combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths.’
On the banking house analogy, compare the following passages from James’ work: Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever, (pp. 207f.) Men’s beliefs at any time are so much experience funded. But the beliefs are themselves parts of the sum total of the world’s experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day’s funding operations, (p. 224)
H. Plessner relates that Husserl frequently employed the metaphor of cashing out a term or claim, and that he liked to make the point that ‘if a word has a circulation-value [Umlaufswert], then it must have a surety [Deckung] in the content of the things it refers to’ (Husserl in Göttingen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, pp. 7, 23).
Compare James’ remarks on ‘unstiffening our theories’ at the close of Lectures II and IV.
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Reinach, A. (1987). William James and Pragmatism. In: Mulligan, K. (eds) Speech Act and Sachverhalt. Primary Sources in Phenomenology, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3521-1_14
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