I’d like to touch on the point that I’d raised last week about ‘antagonistic reading’. I’m embarrassed about this term, because it is quite silly, but naming things can be helpful when we first start thinking about them. The reason I applied this term was that I often find myself reading philosophy in one of two ways (or moods): (1) a mood of agreement, of ‘going with the argument’ and ‘acquiring tools’ for my own thinking, and (2) a mood of disagreement, of tearing down or ‘applying’ the tools I acquire in the first way. I’m not sure that this is a great way to read philosophy, though it might be somewhat unavoidable if William James is right about temperament being a determining factor in philosophy¹. By naming these tendencies I want to be a bit more conscious of them, so that I can try and expand the ways I read philosophy (and the types of philosophy that I read).

I have continued with the pragmatists this week, following up Peirce and James with John Dewey. I cannot say that I have read Dewey as critically as I should have, he and I seem to share a lot of ground and I agree with a lot of what he has written. A point that he often returns to is the notion of responsibility, and that’s a concept that I have been discovering is pretty central to my own thinking. I have been working on an essay where I try and work through some recent calls in the Australian press for greater civic education and engagement. It seems to me as though a lot of those calls are pretty light on details, and don’t really think about what that requires from people. I’d like to try and get a picture of what it does demand of us and why we can resist political engagement. Dewey, I think, is going to become pretty central to the way I try and think through those problems.s