Vatic: James & RWE as Public/Professional Philosophers

[ish mailian]

I learn a lot of our List here, from Mark, a great deal. Recently he
used a word I rarely use myself or see in print: vatic. Not sure of
it, I checked its etymology and usage and I like the word much.

1620s, "poet or bard," specifically "Celtic divinely inspired poet"
(1728), from Latin vates "sooth-sayer, prophet, seer," from a Celtic
source akin to Old Irish faith "poet," Welsh gwawd "poem," from PIE
root *wet- (1) "to blow; inspire, spiritually arouse" (source also of
Old English wod "mad, frenzied," god-name Woden; see wood (adj.)).
Hence vaticination "oracular prediction" (c. 1600).

I have not moved on from Peirce and Pynchon, but I am, as Emerson
would have it, Circling the subject.

Back to James and RWE and Hinduism.
Much has been written about James and RWE.
Here, for those interested, is an excellent essay by Cotkin on the
two, it treats the Vatic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson & William James as Public Philosophers By GEORGE COTKIN



https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1025&context=hist_fac


Cheers,
Ish