I saw a very good film last night called The Hurt Locker. Highly recommended.
Anyway, I have a question for those who have seen it:
The people I saw it with insist that there's some deep (but, to them, unknown) significance in the fact that one of the main characters is named "William James," and they expected me to be able to explain it to them. (Btw: I thought there was greater significance in the fact that the character was called "Will" by his fellow soldiers.)
Now, I'm no William James expert. In fact, my knowledge of William James is limited to the usual stuff: He had an absurd view of truth, a dumb defense of religious belief, but he said interesting things about consciousness. Does anyone out there who knows the philosopher's work have any insight into why the character was named "William James"?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willy_F._James,_Jr.
Well, Will James did write the WILL to Believe. Coincidence? I think not.
But seriously, reading the IMDB description it mentions another character who unlike the main character is "is an insecure soldier who is constantly worried that an error or misjudgment on his part will lead to the death of an innocent civilian or a military colleague."
Dramatic portrayal of the Clifford\James debate on the ethics of belief methinks.
Thanks for recommending this film.
I wasn't really sure if there was anything philosophical intended by the name of the protagonist, but, sure enough, it turns out that the screenwriter, Mark Boal, graduated with honors in Philosophy from Oberlin. He went on to become a journalist, and was embedded with an EOD in Iraq, his source of information for the script. He also co-wrote the screenplay for "In the Valley of Elah."
It's amazingly cool to be able to point to him as a fantastic example of what one might do after getting a degree in philosophy!
http://www.movieset.com/the-hurt-locker/castandcrew/903604/producer/mark-boal
"Dumb defense of religion"? Read the whole of "The Will to Believe," not just the excerpt from a freshman philosophy of religion anthology: it's about epistemology, with the religion bit just an example. (Note the "live option" bit: TWTB was addressed to an audience for whom religious belief was a live option, and would have to be rewritten for a contentedly and settledly non-theistic one.)
Dear Allen Hazen:
First, learn to read. I claimed James offered a "dumb defense of religious *belief*," thereby indicating to anyone who's not incompetent that I probably know that "The Will to Believe" deals with epistemology. My contention, btw, is that the epistemology offered in that essay is also dumb. James can't even get Clifford's view right, and the positive argument is laughable.
Second, you're not my teacher, and don't presume you can teach me anything or give me assignments. It's stupid of you to presume that since I think James's view is dumb, I must not have studied it carefully. I have. And it's dumb.
Third, the whole of James's defense of religious belief is not to be found in "The Will to Believe," an essay that James himself found unsatisfactory (which is why he kept trying to reformulate/rework it). In fact, when taken in the context of Jame's corpus, "The Will to Believe" essay is a minor document on the topic of religious belief. One would, at the very least, need to consider "Reflex Action and Theism," "The Sentiment of Rationality," "Faith and the Right to Believe," and relevant sections from /Varieties/ and /Principles/ to get a clear view of his position. That you presume that my mention of James's dumb defense of religious belief was referring exclusively to "The Will to Believe" essay strongly suggests that you don't know what you're talking about.
Here's some advice: Take some time off from leaving stupid comments on blogs, learn to read, then find some people who are good at Philosophy and ask them, politely, to teach you. Then maybe you can come back here and not embarrass yourself.
Wow! Spiros, you really put that Allen dude in his place. Impressive. Btw, my philosophy is that anyone that puts as much effort as you did into putting down a simple thought invoking comment must be a real ass. Notice how your diatribe killed the thread? Great job - You win!
Spiros,
Your comment is an example of why few young and engaged people care about philosophy any more. Someone with an amateur interest in the discipline sees Hurt Locker, remembers James' name from an old college class, googles the two together, and finds this thread capped by your petty, intellectually insecure tirade against Allen Hazen's moderate comment. He concludes that people who care about philosophy are brittle and humorless pedants.
James for all his other qualities would not have approved of this. He was large in spirit and wrote with a grace and clarity that is rare among his contemporaries. Your tone in your response to Hazen may not reflect your character in general, but in isolation it was repugnant.
To return to the initial topic, it seems to me that the most obvious way to link James the philosopher to James the character is though his famous essay The Moral Equivalent of War, in which he searches for some pursuit that can make men feel part of some transcendently urgent struggle-- that they are their utmost selves, that their actions are of heroic importance-- without having to find that feeling in the wanton carnage of actual war. The Hurt Locker opens with a line from Chris Hodges to the effect that war is a potent drug; it ends with the James character returning to his job as an IED-defuser, which he describes as the one thing that he loves, apparently because that is when he is most alive.
In addition to "The Moral Equivalent of War", consider the congruency between the character William James in the movie and the observations and conclusions James reaches in his essay, "The Energies of Man".
Oh, and don't forget his essays "What Makes A Life Significant?" and "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings".
It is a fabulous film, I watched with my girlfriend of the moment and she passes the entire film crying.
sv77
I've heard that's a good film, also I've heard the Director of this movie is perfect, that's why I want to watch this movie with my family and my girlfriend.
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