American Philosophy (31 page)

I feel very fortunate to count Clancy as a friend, and so many others: Peter Aldinger, Jose Mendoza, Amelia Wirts, Jen McWeeny, Steven Miller, Romel Sharma, Nick Pupik, Susanne Sreedhar, Heidi and Mac Furey, David Livingstone-Smith, Brian Hay and the rest of the Hay Draude Watters clan, Whit Kaufman, Marianna Alessandri (who read draft after draft of the book), Sara Clemence (who meticulously edited the manuscript), Becca Greeves, Tess and Ken Pope, Alice Frye, and Luis Falcon. Special thanks to the Hocking family: Jennifer, Penny, Jill, Katie, Joanna, and the rest. A percent of the royalties from this book will be donated to the Hocking estate for the preservation of the rest of the books and the maintenance of the grounds.

When I was a little boy, I often wanted to grow up faster than humanly possible. But one of the troubles of growing up, as I saw it when I was seven, was that it entailed owing your parents more and more for the life you lived. And if your life went well—all the worse, at least when it came to indebtedness and gratitude. Now that I have children of my own, I understand how horribly misguided this idea is. I am the most fortunate of men: to have a mother and brother like mine is to be deeply blessed. They love in a way that requires no recompense. I don't deserve such love, because it is not, by its very nature, something that is meant to be paid back.

In a lecture entitled “What Makes Life Significant?” William James suggests that the meaning of human existence turns on a strange little word: zest. Zest, the particular, peculiar thrill of experience, is the ultimate source of existential value. For a long time I thought this was complete rubbish. But after meeting Carol, I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that James was once again right. Yes, duty and relationships and community and loyalty and work and marriage all have their place, but without zest—that certain something that makes these things pointedly “mine”—life would mean painfully little. I thank Carol and our daughter, Becca Briony Kaag-Hay, for the zest: for making life worth living.

 

INDEX

The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abenaki

abolitionism

academia.
See also specific universities

Acheson, Dean

Acts, book of

Addams, Jane;
Democracy and Social Ethics
; Hull House and;
Newer Ideals of Peace
;
Twenty Years at Hull-House

Addams, John

Adirondack Doctors

Adirondacks

agape

Agassiz, Louis

Agassiz School

agnosticism

Albuquerque

Alcott, Louisa May

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Anthropologist

American Federation of Labor

American Philosophical Association

American philosophy; Golden Age of; Hocking library and; narrow in focus.
See also
pragmatism, American;
specific philosophers, movements, theories, and works

American Society for Psychical Research

Amsterdam

analytic philosophy

anatomy

“ancestor cult”

Anderson, Doug

Andover Theological Seminary

Anglican
, SS

Anglo-Spanish War

animals

Anthony, Susan B.

Apollo

Aquinas, Thomas

Aristotle,
De Anima

Asian philosophy

astronomy

atheism

Atlantic
magazine

atonement

Augustine, Saint

Australia

Babylon

balance

Beauvoir, Simone de

Beckett, Samuel,
Waiting for Godot

Beede's Boarding House

Belgium

Berkeley

Berkeley, George

Berlin

Beverly Privateers

Bible

biology

Blake, Charles Carter

blasphemy

Bloom, Harold

Boethius

Boole, George

boredom

Bosse, Abraham

Boston; Brahmins; Irish Americans

Boston Tea Party

Bowditch, Henry

Brazil

Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences

British Library

British Royal Engineers

Brook Farm

Bryn Mawr

Buck, John Lossing

Buck, Pearl S.;
East Wind: West Wind
;
The Goddess Abides
;
The Good Earth
; Hocking and

bucrania

Buddhism

Build a Home: Save a Third

Byrd, William,
Mass for Three Voices

Cabot, Ella Lyman

Cabot, James Elliot

Cabot, Richard

cadavers

California

Calvinism

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge Platonists

Camus, Albert,
The Myth of Sisyphus

Carnap, Rudolf,
Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre

Cartesian rationalism

Carus, Paul;
Buddhism and Its Christian Critics

Catholicism

Celts

Century Association

Century Dictionary

chance

Channing, William Ellery

Charles I, King of England

Chicago; Hull House; pragmatism

chicken

Child, Lydia Maria;
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans
; “The Curse of Chocorua”;
The Frugal Housewife
;
Letters from New-York

China

Chinese Republican Army

chloral hydrate

chloroform

Chocorua

Chocorua, New Hampshire; hikes

Chocorua House

Chocorua Public Library

Chocorua River

Chopin, Frédéric

Christian Century, The

Christianity

Christ's College

Citizens' Training Camp, Plattsburgh, New York

Civil War

Clarke, Samuel;
A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God

classicism

Cleveland

cocaine

Cogito
argument

Cole, Thomas,
The Death of Chocorua

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor;
Aids to Reflection
; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Coleridge, Sarah

Columbia University

community

comparative anatomy

compassion

Concord, Massachusetts

Condillac, Étienne

conflict

consciousness

Continental Army

“Cooperative Open Air School”

Cotton, John

Cudworth, Ralph;
A Treatise of Free Will
;
The True Intellectual System of the Universe

cult of the dead

Culver, Helen

daimon

Dante;
Divine Comedy
;
Inferno
; William James and;
Purgatory
;
La Vita Nuova

Darwin, Charles;
The Descent of Man
;
On the Origin of Species
; theory of evolution

death; cult of the dead; of father; life after

Delacroix, Eugene,
La Barque de Dante

deontology

Descartes, Rene; Archimedean point;
Cogito
argument;
Discourse on the Method
;
Meditations

determinism

Dewey, Jane

Dewey, John;
Democracy and Education
;
Liberalism and Social Action

Dickens, Charles

dictionaries

Dilthey, Wilhelm

divorce

doubt

drugs

Dryden, John

dualism

duty

dysentery

Eakins, Thomas,
The Gross Clinic

East-West Philosophers' Conferences

Ecclesiastes

Eckhart, Meister

Edison, Thomas

education, progressive

Edwards, Jonathan

egotism

Egypt

Eliot, Charles

Elizabethan era

Emerson, Ralph Waldo; “The American Scholar”; “Being and Seeming”; “The Character of Socrates”; “Compensation”; “Divinity School Address”; “Experience”;
Fortune of the Republic
; Harvard and;
Indian Superstition
; Kant and; Henry Lee and;
Letters and Social Aims
; on personal loss; political views; “Quotation and Originality”; “Self Reliance”; Whitman and

Emerson, William

Emerson, William Ralph

Emmanuel College

Emory University

empiricism

engineering, military

envy

epistemology

Erasmus

ethics

European philosophy.
See also specific philosophers, movements, theories, and works

evil

evolution

evolutionary love

Ewing, Charles Hull

existentialism

experience

“experience curriculum”

farming

father, death of

FBI

fear

feminism

Fenn, Courtenay

Feynman, Richard; Cornell lectures

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb

Fischer, Marilyn

Flanders

Florence

Forbes, Mrs. Edward

Forbes
magazine

forgiveness

Foster, Roy

France; existentialism; World War I

Frankl, Viktor,
Man's Search for Meaning

freedom

free will

Freud, Sigmund

Frost, Carol

Frost, Elinor

Frost, Elliot

Frost, Fred

Frost, Marjorie

Frost, Robert;
A Boy's Will
; “Revelation”

Fruit, John

Fuller, Margaret

Galileo

gardening

Garrison, William Lloyd

geometry

George Junior Republic School

Germany; idealism; World War I

ghosts

Gifford Lectures

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins; “The Yellow Wallpaper”

God, existence of

Gödel, Kurt

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von;
Faust

Golden Age of American Philosophy

Goldmark, Pauline

Good Earth, The
(film)

Göttingen

grace

granite

Great Britain; Civil War; evolution debate; monarchy; World War I

Greeks, ancient

Gurney, Edmund

Hall, G. Stanley

Hammond Trail

Harvard Board of Overseers

Harvard Divinity School

Harvard Glee Club

Harvard Medical School

Harvard University; Bowdoin Prize Essay; Cabot Library and Science Center; Emerson and; Emerson Hall; graduate studies; Holden Chapel; Houghton Library; Lowell Lectures; Memorial Hall; Rebellion of 1834; Robbins Library; ROTC program; Royce and; University Lectures; Whitehead and; Widener Library; women at; YMCA

Harvard Yard

hate

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hay, Carol

haying

Hayward, John,
College Scenes

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich;
The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Philosophical Systems
;
Encyclopedia
;
Phenomenology

Heidelberg

hell

“here we are”

Hibbert Lectures

Hindenburg Line

Hinduism

Hobbes, Thomas;
De Cive: Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society
;
De Corpore
;
Leviathan

Hocking, Agnes; “Creating a School”; death of; impact on modern education

Hocking, Jill

Hocking, Katherine

Hocking, Penny

Hocking, Richard

Hocking, William Ernest; background of; Pearl S. Buck and;
The Coming World Civilization
; “Creating a School”; death of;
Festschrift
; Gifford Lectures; at Harvard; Hibbert Lectures; library of;
Living Religions and a World Faith
; Gabriel Marcel and; marriage to Agnes;
The Meaning of God in Human Experience
; military engineering and;
Re-Thinking Missions
; sexism and; Whitehead and; World War I and.
See also
West Wind

Hölderlin, Friedrich

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Homer;
The Iliad
;
The Odyssey

Homer, Winslow,
Veteran in a New Field

Hotel Brevoort, New York

Houghton, Henry

Hougoumont

Howison, George

Hull House

Hull House Association

Hume, David

Huntington Library, San Marino, California

husbandry

Hu Shih

Husserl, Edmund

Hutchinson, Anne

Huxley, Aldous,
Brave New World

Huxley, Thomas; “The Darwinian Hypothesis”; determinism and;
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
;
Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy
; “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata”

“hysteria” diagnosis

idealism

India

individualism

Industrial Revolution

insects

inspiration

International Exposition (1900, Paris)

Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts

Ireland; 1880s political rule; nationalist movement

Irish Americans

Irish Land War

Ivy League

Jainism

James, Alice

James, Henry; “The Middle Years”;
Terminations

James, Henry, Sr.

James, William; “Are We Automata?”;
Buddhism in Translation
; Chocorua hikes; Dante and; death of; free will and; Gifford Lectures; “Is Life Worth Living?”; “The Moral Equivalent of War”; pragmatism of;
The Principles of Psychology
;
The Varieties of Religious Experience
; “The Will to Believe”