Writings of William James

by William James, John J. McDermott (Editor)

In his introduction to this collection of the writings of William James, John J. McDermott presents James's thinking in all its manifestations, stressing the importance of radical empiricism and placing in perspective the doctirnes of pragmatism and the will to believe. The critical periods of James's life are highlighted to illuminate the development of his philosophical and psychological thought.

Aside from the first section of the book dealing with the hallucinatory experiences of both William James and his father, some letters, and brief statements on radical empiricism, all the essays are complete

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction

hardback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the greatest figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of the functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty.

Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.

In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.

He took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained there until November 1868; at that time he was 26 years old. During this period, he

Reviews

[Zanriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book changed my life and made me the person I am today. I read it when I was only 18 or 19 years old, and my outlook has never been the same. When I was reading it, I had to have a dictionary next to me so I could look up the words and terms I didn't understand. It was written in the late 1800's, when people used a more sophisticated style than we do now. The vocabulary and sentence structure alone will add a few brain cells and cerebral wrinkles as you read it. But then, if you can wrap your mind around the concepts, you'll come away a richer person.

[Kamili · Rating 5 out of 5]

I checked this out from my school library 9 nines times over the course of a year and a half. When I returned it for the last time, the library aid accused me of ruining the binding and tearing the plastic cover off (which I did). But I denied it.

[Szplug]

I love William James. A humble, overcoming, optimistic, brilliant man, an American original.

I don't care for Henry James.

That, doubtless, reflects poorly on myself, and not upon the legacy of an acknowledged fictive master. It yet remains that, of the latter, I can never divorce myself from those damning words uttered against him by W. Somerset Maugham:

Here was a man who turned his back on one of the great events in the world's history, the rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea parties in English country houses.

He was like a man who should provide himself with all the paraphernalia necessary to the ascent of Mount Everest—in order to climb Primrose Hill.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent compilation of some of James' most inspiring works. This was used as a text book for my class "Recent Great Philosophers: William James". Couldn't recommend it more.

[Jesse Maurais · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm at a point in my life where I have to acknowledge the sorry fact that I will never have enough time to learn or read all the things that I would like to, and that it will be only with difficulty and dedication that I will accomplish all the learning that I have already set myself out to do. As Schopenhauer said, the way of reading good books is akin to avoiding bad ones. Life is short and art is long.

I made it about 200 pages into this 800 page book before I decided the opportunity cost was too high. And I'm sure there's plenty of William James fans out there who are ready to disagree with me. I'll say from the top that it isn't because of pragmatism as a philosophy because I've found a lot in C.S. Pierce that is worthwhile and I still intend to carefully read much of C.I. Lewis, as well as Paul Grice's lecture notes on William James coming up pretty soon in my queue. However, when it came to James himself, there were just too many arguments in this book that I found unconvincing, and others where the logic was altogether invalid. His prose is very good and its all quite easy to understand and follow. But that the writing is so clear as to make its arguments clearly wrong is not a good endorsement of a book, especially one of this length.

I won't go so far as to deconstruct the precise parts of the arguments in this book that I found to be weak or unconvincing; I don't really want to spend so much time writing this review. Suffice it to say that there are many objections that others have already made to James that I believe are deserved. In particular that James' pragmatism gives license to believe things for entirely the wrong reasons, even so far as to endorsing the belief in things that are demonstrably false because it makes one feel better to believe them. Again, I'm sure others will object to the this characterization of his philosophy. James himself lays out some objections to this view of his philosophy right at the start. The problem is that the logic he lays out subsequently doesn't actually discriminate between correct and incorrect means of arriving at truths. As a description of how people in practice reason their way to conclusions it would have a lot to say, and I would hold it in higher regard for a very lucid description of the ways of human error in judging. But that is not the aim of the book. It was written with a normative aim, as to say that this is how one ought to make judgments. If this be medicine, it does not do what's claimed on the tin.

[Audrey Saltarelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

McDermotts translation is the best.

[Kevin Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is worth the price just for the writings on consciousness, of which only i will comment, as an entire review would take pages and pages of text.

james, in his articles on consciousness first points up the classic view, the radical divide between mind and matter. the world around us, subject to entropy and the arrow of time, works in one direction. there is a birth, maturation, and death in everything surrounding us. known through the senses, there is an objective world we shoud seek to grasp and understand as thinking human beings. however, one quickly discovers the mind is not as 'mechanical' and predictable as the world we observe. we know that fire burns, yet we can think strongly on a fire in the winter cold, and not be warmed. further, we can think strongly of a fire that does not burn us, and water that does not douse it's flames. finally, we can reverse the arrow of time, thinking strongly again, of an apple leaving the ground and floating to the stem of the branch of the tree. obviously the mind is separate from matter in it' operations and laws that govern it, correct?

well let us now behold something beautiful, truly beautiful to us and not be moved by it's beauty. here, james brillianty discovers, the mind merges with the object world to the point the experiencing subject is the same as the experienced object. we melt into the object of beauty, forgetting ourselves.....

this is but one expample of pure experience that destroys the notion of the dichotomy between the subjects and objects of normal consciuosness james points up.

interesting read, a bridge between the views that came before; either a radical distinction lying between mind and matter, that the universe is dual..or that of the unifying kind...that the world can at least tenuously during 'pure experiences' become One...

[jeremiah]

"Philosophers are after all like poets. they are pathfinders. What every one can feel, what every one can know in the bone and marrow of him, they sometimes can find words for and express. The words and thoughts of the philosophers are not exactly the words and thoughts of the poets—worse luck. But both alike have the same function. They are, if I may use a simile, so many spots, or blazes,— blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience. They give you somewhere to go from. They give you a direction and a place to reach. They do not give you the integral forest with all its sunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and wonders/ Ferny dells, and mossy waterfalls, and secret magic nooks escape you, owned only by the wild things to whom the region is a home. Happy they without the need of blazes! But to us the blazes give a sort of ownership. We can now use the forest, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lost in and never return. The poet's words and the philosopher's phrases thus are helps of the most genuine sort, giving to all of us hereafter the freedom of the trails they made. Though they create nothing, yet for this marking and fixing function of theirs we bless their names and keep them on our lips, even whilst the thin and spotty and half-casual character of their operations is evident to our eyes." ——"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results"

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Let me repeat once more that a man’s vision is the great fact about him”
- A Pluralistic Universe

Thoreau: All things invite this earth’s inhabitants
To rear their lives to an unheard of height
And meet the expectation of the land...

the inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess

In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hand. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it.

Robert C Pollock: At the point of convergence of a potentially infinite number of perspectives, the human mind’s interest in itself was enormously intensified, with the result that experience in its widest range assumed a commanding position.

Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Look to thyself, O Universe,
Thou art better and not worse. - Emerson