Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James by Jane F. Thrailkill (review)

Reviewed by: Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James by Jane F. Thrailkill Patrick Jones Jane F. Thrailkill. Philosophical Siblings: Varieties of Playful Experience in Alice, William, and Henry James. U of Pennsylvania P, 2022, 301 pp. , 59. 95 (Hardback). Unusually well-written for an academic monograph, this engaging book offers a fresh and dynamic group portrait of Alice, William, and Henry James. Its central claim is clear and persuasively argued: the James siblings have "distinct yet overlapping intellectual projects" (11), which converge in the intuition that the activity of playing affords insight into "the embodied, embedded, and relational aspects of consciousness" (18). Through supple close readings, Thrailkill demonstrates that her subjects' phenomenological investigations are enacted through "narrative performances" that deploy ludic "troping devices" to entice readerly participation and "set minds in motion" (8). The compelling result of this emphasis on literary form is that the James siblings emerge from this study not as dusty theoreticians but as self-reflexive and pedagogically minded producers of experimental "play spaces" (256) and "philosophical toys" (175). "Poised at the intersection of literary studies, the history of science, and cognitive theory" (18), Philosophical Siblings is ambitious in its interdisciplinary scope. Thrailkill skillfully situates the Jameses in relation to "the revolution in nineteenth-century thought about evolution, cognition, and shared subjectivity" (4). It was especially heartening to see such a sustained engagement with Henri Bergson, whose enormously influential process-oriented philosophy has been relatively underexplored in James studies until now. Thrailkill also draws a number of suggestive parallels between the Jameses' writings and more contemporary work in play theory, ecological psychology, and embodied cognition. Thrailkill's most important interlocutors in this regard are Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens, and James J. Gibson, whose neologism "affordance" undergirds much of the book's conceptual architecture. Philosophical Siblings is comprised of three substantial chapters that are dedicated to Alice, William, and Henry James respectively. Intricately subdivided, these chapters are framed by a lucid introduction and a brief conclusion. The book has a End Page E-1 useful index but no bibliography. Given the range of Thrailkill's references—and her capacity to make even the most recondite material sound worthy of exploration—this omission might be a source of frustration for some readers. Chapter 1, "Alice's Bite: Body-Based Humor in The Diary of Alice James, " is the site of an important scholarly intervention. Thrailkill resists the patronizing "invalid narrative" (94) that so often attends readings of AJ and mounts a powerful defense of her as a "full contributor to the James family intellectual project" (12). 1 Of particular interest to Thrailkill is the "edgy" (65) humor that pervades the Diary. For Thrailkill, AJ's bleakly hilarious jokes about illness, suicide, and pain "clatter the cerebral against the corporeal" (89-90) and function as "a complex form of existential inquiry" (24). As she unfolds this argument, Thrailkill does a stellar job of foregrounding AJ's exquisite self-reflexivity as a writer and her sense of the diary genre as "a performative platform—a slightly delirious play space—rather than just a transcription of events" (71). Thrailkill's fine-grained analyses of the Diary are outstanding and were for me the highlight of Philosophical Siblings. I was especially struck by the beautiful idea that "comedic contraction and expansion in the Diary operate like an accordion" (40), a phenomenon that Thrailkill ingeniously reads as AJ's playful spin on Herbert Spencer's "relief theory of humor" (44). Chapter 2, "'In the Same Game': Consciousness and the Child in William James's Lectures-Turned-Texts, " traces the development of an "increasingly play-centered vision of human action and cognition" (100) in WJ's oeuvre. Thrailkill sheds much intellectual-historical insight into the ways in which ludic acts of intellectual sparring (with antagonists like Louis Agassiz) and collaboration (with pragmatist confrères like Charles Sanders Peirce) paved the way for the radical affirmations of plasticity and openness that characterize WJ's mature thought. The chapter would accordingly offer a fine primer on WJ for scholars unfamiliar with his writings in psychology, philosophy, and education. Thrailkill also argues that in adapting his "unconventional … and. . .