William Gavin
Videointerview
Contact information
Home Address
23 Battery Point Lane
Yarmouth, Maine 04096
University Address University of Southern Maine Department of Philosophy PO Box 9300Portland Maine 04104-9300
Telephone
office: 207-780-4242 home: 207-846-5745
E-mail wjg43@maine.rr.com gavin@usm.maine.edu
Date of Birth December 16, 1943
Citizenship: United States
Education: PhD Philosophy Fordham University, 1970 Thesis:"An Aesthetic Approach to the Philosophy of William James" MA Philosophy Fordham University, 1967 BA Russian Language & Soviet Area Studies Fordham University, 1965
Employment: 2007-2008 Chair, Philosophy Department 1977-present Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine, Portland, Maine
Interests: American Philosophy; Russian Philosophy; Ancient Philosophy; Aesthetics; Epistemology; Philosophy of Science; Death and Dying.
Books: see below
Videointerview
William Gavin #5bWhat can you tell about the difference regarding experience
and language between Dewey and James?
Universalism/Contextualism
»Habits of speech, including syntax and vocabulary, and modes of interpretation have been formed in the face of inclusive and defining situations of context ... We are not explicitly aware of the role of context just because our every utterance is so saturated with it that it forms the significance of what we say and hear ... Now thought lives, moves, and has its being in and through symbols, and, therefore, depends for meaning upon context as do the symbols ... I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.« (LW 6: 4-5)
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Re/de/constructions
Construction (experience)
»I have used the word construction" to denote "the creative mind, the mind
that is genuinely productive in its operations. We are given to associating
creative mind with persons regarded as rare and unique, like geniuses. But
every individual is in his own way unique. Each one experiences life from a
different angle than anybody else, and consequently has something
distinctive to give others if he can turn his experiences into ideas and
pass them on to others.« (LW 5: 127)
Reconstruction (habit)
»There is no one among us who is not called upon to face honestly and
courageously the equipment of beliefs, religious, political, artistic,
economic, that has come to him in all sorts of indirect and uncriticized
ways, and to inquire how much of it is validated and verified in present
need, opportunity, and application.« (LW 5: 142)
Deconstruction (criticism)
»Creative activity is our great need; but criticism, self-criticism, is the
road to its release.« (LW 5: 143)
»We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take
on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But
intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off,
that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what
wearing them does to us« (LW 1: 40)
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Truth and Warranted Assertions (Experimentalism)
»... the term ‘warranted assertion' s preferred to the terms belief and knowledge. It is free from the ambiguity of these latter terms, and it involves reference to inquiry as that which warrants assertion« (LW 12: 17)
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Experience and the Real
»... the question ... is what the real is. If natural existence is qualitatively individualized or genuinely plural, as well as repetitious, and if things have both temporal quality and recurrence or uniformity, then the more realistic knowledge is, the more fully it will reflect and exemplify these traits« (LW 1: 127)
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Experience and Language
»If existence in its immediacies could speak it would proclaim: ‘I may have relatives but I am not related.' In aesthetic objects, that is in all immediately enjoyed and suffered things, in things directly possessed, they thus speak for themselves.« (LW 1: 75f)
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What can you tell about the difference regarding experience
and language between Dewey and James?
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Communication and Participation
»Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales.« (LW 1: 132)
»Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular; and part of the miracle it achieves is that, in being communicated, the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen« (LW 10: 248f).
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Democracy (Liberalism and Socialism)
»The end of democracy is a radical end. For it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any country at any time. It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural.« (LW 11: 298f)
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Democracy (Experience and Education)
»Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in experience and education.« (LW 14: 229)
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Democracy (Culture and the Power of Imagination)
“Imagination is the chief instrument of the good” (LW 10: 350), because only “imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual.” (LW 10: 348)
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Democracy (Intelligence and Local Communities)
»In a word, that expansion and reinforcement of personal understanding and judgment by the cumulative and transmitted intellectual wealth of the community which may render nugatory the indictment of democracy drawn on the basis of the ignorance, bias and levity of the masses, can be fulfilled only in the relations of personal intercourse in the local community ... Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator ... We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its communications are broken, inarticulate and faint until it possesses the local community as its medium.« (LW 2: 371f)
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Education as Growth
»Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.« (MW 9: 58)
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Special question to the scholar
What do you thing about the difference between Dewey and Marx?
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Books:
In Dewey's Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction, edited byWilliam J. Gavin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
Cuttin' the Body Loose: Historical, Biological, and Personal Approaches to Deathand Dying (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).
William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press, 1992).
Context Over Foundation: Dewey and Marx, William J. Gavin, editor (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1988).
Marxism and Alternatives: Towards the Conceptual Interaction Among SovietPhilosophy, Neo-Thomism,Pragmatism, and Phenomenology, Tom Rockmore, James Colbert, William J. Gavin, and Thomas J. Blakeley (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981)
Russia and America: A Philosophical Comparison, William J. Gavin and Thomas J. Blakeley (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976)
Articles (selected last ten years):
2008:
“James, William (1842-1910),” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
“Vagueness,” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
“Immediacy,” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
“Ambiguity,” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
“Sick Soul,” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
“Habit,” Encyclopedia of American Philosophy, edited by John Lachs and Robert Talisse, (New York: Rutledge, Jan 2008)
2007:
“’Problem’ vs. ‘Trouble’: James, Kafka, Dostoevsky and ‘The Will to Believe’,” William James Studies, Vol 2 issue 1, 2007
2006:
“The Importance of Context in John Dewey’s Philosophy,” Dewey, Pragmatism and Modern Philosophy, edited by Yu Wujin, (Beijing: Renmin Press, 2006)
“Locality in American Culture and the American Experience,” in Experience as Philosophy: On the Work of John J. McDermott, edited by James Campbell and Richard E. Hart, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006)
2004:
"William James, 1842-1910," in The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy, edited by Armen T. Marsoobian and John Ryder (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, LTD, 2004)
“The Importance of ‘The Vague’ in William James’s Philosophy,” Jianghai Academic Journal, 2004, #4
2003:
"Contexts Vibrant and Contexts Souring in Dewey's Philosophy," in InDewey's Wake: Unfinished Work of Pragmatic Reconstruction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003)
"On 'Tame' and 'Untamed' Death: Jamesian Reflections, "Pragmatic Bioethics, edited by Glenn McGee, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003) (Reprint of 1999)
"Between Logic and Philosophy: A Jamesian View," Society and Culture, Vol 10, 2003
1999:
"On 'Tame' and 'Untamed' Death: Jamesian Reflections," in Pragmatic Bioethics, edited by Glenn McGee (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999.)
1998:
"The Woman, the Warrior, and the Wedding: James's Pragmatism, Marriage, and Divorce," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol 12, # 4, 1998
