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This coming year, I'm teaching a course on the James family, so am spending some time this summer reading the (voluminous) work of Alice, Henry and William. Have just finished William James' lectures on Pragmatism, and want to suggest that we might add them to our reading list on evolving systems. Here's a taste/tease/invitation to more:

“The most fateful point of difference between being a rationalist and being a pragmatist is now fully in sight. Experience is in mutation, and our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation…Reality stands complete and ready-made from all eternity, rationalism insists…their truth has nothing to do with our experiences. It adds nothing to the content of experience. It makes no difference to reality itself; it is supervenient, inert, static, a reflexion merely….rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity…(99).

For rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, ….On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures….The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism...is no longer a question in the theory of knowledge, it concerns the structure of the universe itself.  On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are @ work" (113).