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William James
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African Spir
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Špir (Russian: Африка́н Алекса́ндрович Спир; Ukrainian: Африка́н Олекса́ндрович Спір or Шпір, transcribed: Afrykan Oleksandrovych Spir or Shpir; German: Afrikan (von) Spir, French: African (de) Spir, Italian: Africano Spir) (November 10, 1837 - March 26, 1890) was a Russian-Ukrainian Neo-Kantian philosopher of German descent who wrote primarily in German. His book Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality) exerted a "lasting impact" on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
http://wn.com/African_Spir -
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
http://wn.com/Alan_Watts -
Alexander Bain
Alexander Bain (11 June 1818 – 18 September 1903) was a Scottish philosopher and educationalist.
http://wn.com/Alexander_Bain -
Alice James
Alice James (August 7, 1848 – March 6, 1892) was a U.S. diarist. The only daughter of Henry James, Sr. and sister of philosopher William James and novelist Henry James, she is known mainly for the posthumously published diary that she had kept in her final years.
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Arthur Holly Compton
http://wn.com/Arthur_Holly_Compton -
B. Alan Wallace
B. Alan Wallace (born 1950) is an American author, translator, teacher, researcher, interpreter, and Buddhist practitioner interested in the intersections of consciousness studies and scientific disciplines such as psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and physics. He endeavors to chart relationships and commonalities between Eastern and Western scientific, philosophical, and contemplative modes of inquiry.
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, socialist, pacifist, and social critic. He spent most of his life in England; he was born in Wales where he also died, aged 97.
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Bill W.
William Griffith Wilson (November 26, 1895 – January 24, 1971), also known as Bill Wilson or Bill W., was the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a fellowship of 100,800 mutual aid groups world-wide of alcoholics helping other alcoholics achieve and maintain sobriety. In compliance with AA Twelfth Tradition of anonymity, Wilson is commonly known as "Bill W." or just "Bill."
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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (; June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand – August 19, 1662, Paris) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a Tax Collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
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Boris Sidis
Boris Sidis, Ph.D., M.D. (October 12, 1867 - October 24, 1923) was a Russian psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education. Sidis founded the New York State Psychopathic Institute and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He was the father of the child prodigy William James Sidis. Boris Sidis eventually opposed mainstream psychology and Sigmund Freud, and thereby died ostracized.
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C. West Churchman
Charles West Churchman (29 August 1913 – 21 March 2004 Bolinas, California.) was an American philosopher and systems scientist, who was Professor at the School of Business Administration and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his pioneering work in operations research, system analysis and ethics.
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Carl Lange
Carl Georg Lange (December 4, 1834 - 1900) was a Danish physician and psychologist. He and William James independently developed the James-Lange theory of emotion, which posits that all emotions are developed from, and can be reduced to, physiological reactions to stimuli. Unlike James, Lange specifically stated that vasomotor changes are emotions. Lange also noted the psychotropic effects of lithium, although his work in this area was forgotten and independently rediscovered much later.
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Chauncey Wright
Chauncey Wright (September 10, 1830 - September 12, 1875), American philosopher and mathematician, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts.
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David Hume
David Hume (7 May 1711 [26 April O.S.] – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian, regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
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Deborah Blum
Deborah Blum (born October 19, 1954) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of ''The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.''
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Emanuel Swedenborg
(born Emanuel Swedberg; January 29, 1688 – March 29, 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741 at the age of fifty-three he entered into a spiritual phase [http://www.swedenborg.com/page.asp?page_name=aboutswedenborgexpanded] in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758), and several unpublished theological works.
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Emmanuel Swedenborg
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Ernst Mach
Ernst Mach () (February 18, 1838 – February 19, 1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, remembered for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and through his criticism of Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's relativity.
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G. Stanley Hall
Granville Stanley Hall (February 1, 1844 -- April 24, 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University.
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Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American writer and thinker who spent most of her life in France. She was well known due to her writing, art collection and the many people (some of whom were, or became, famous) who visited her Paris salon.
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Hegel
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Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson ( 18 October 1859–4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) () was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
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Henry James
Henry James, OM ( – ) was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
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Henry James Sr.
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Hermann Helmholtz
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Hermann Lotze
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Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.
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Horace Kallen
Horace Meyer Kallen (August 11, 1882-February 16, 1974) was a Jewish-American philosopher.
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Horatio Alger, Jr.
Horatio Alger. (January 13, 1832 – July 18, 1899) was a prolific 19th-century American author, most famous for his novels following the adventures of bootblacks, newsboys, peddlers, buskers, and other impoverished children in their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of respectable middle-class security and comfort. His novels about boys who succeed under the tutelage of older mentors were hugely popular in their day.
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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant () (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
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Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 ) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is considered by many scholars and members of the general public to be one of the most influential people in human history. His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
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Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) is a French-born American historian of ideas and culture.
http://wn.com/Jacques_Barzun -
James Huneker
James Gibbons Huneker (31 January 18609 February 1921) was an American music writer and critic.
http://wn.com/James_Huneker -
John Dewey
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, is recognized as one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism and of functional psychology. He was a major representative of the progressive and progressive populist philosophies of schooling during the first half of the 20th century in the USA.
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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
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Joseph E. LeDoux
Joseph E. LeDoux (born 1949), a neuroscientist, is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, and Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at New York University. He is also the director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety, multi-university Center in New York City devoted to using animal research to understand pathological fear and anxiety in humans. He received his Ph.D. in 1977 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
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Joseph LeDoux
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Josiah Royce
Josiah Royce (November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916) was an American objective idealist philosopher.
http://wn.com/Josiah_Royce -
Karl Popper
Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
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Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Biologist, Paleontologist, Glaciologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel at the faculty of Biological Science. Later, he accepted a professorship at Harvard University in the United States.
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Louis Menand
Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is a prominent American writer and academic, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian philosopher who held the professorship of philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947.
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Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
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Mary Whiton Calkins
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) was an American philosopher and psychologist.
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Mordecai Kaplan
Mordecai Menahem Kaplan (June 11, 1881 – November 8, 1983), was a rabbi, essayist and Jewish educator, the ideologue of Reconstructionist Judaism which he founded with his son-in-law Ira Eisenstein.
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Morris Raphael Cohen
Morris Raphael Cohen (July 25, 1880 – January 28, 1947) was an American philosopher, lawyer and legal scholar who united pragmatism with logical positivism and linguistic analysis. He was father to Felix S. Cohen.
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Ola Raknes
Ola Raknes (17 January 1887 – 28 January 1975) was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer. Born in Bergen, Norway, he was internationally known as a psychoanalyst in the Reichian tradition. He has been described as someone who spent his entire life working with the conveying of ideas through many languages and between different epistemological systems of reference, science and religion (Dannevig, 1975). For large portions of his life he was actively contributing to the public discourse in Norway. He has also been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public sphere.
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Pierre Janet
Pierre Marie Félix Janet (May 30, 1859 - February 24, 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory.
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Ralph Barton Perry
Ralph Barton Perry (3 July 1876 in Poultney, Vermont - 22 January 1957 in Boston, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American lecturer, essayist, and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thought through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
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Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject. The philosophical program he developed included a rejection of a representationalist account of knowledge, a concept he referred to as a "mirror of nature," which he saw as a holdover from Platonism and pervasive throughout the history of philosophy. In response to this tradition, which he saw embodied by analytic philosophy, Rorty developed a novel form of pragmatism in which scientific and philosophical methods are merely contingent "vocabularies" which are abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning the representationalist account of knowledge, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their vocabulary. For Rorty, this brand of philosophy is always tied to the notion of "social hope," that without the ideas of representation and other concepts standing in the way between the mind and the world, human society would be more free. Much of his work explicates what a "postmetaphysical" culture that has abandoned representationalist epistemology would look like, incorporating a pragmatist naturalism that treats science as a tool towards liberalism. His best known book is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
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Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud (), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the defense mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient, technically referred to as an "analysand", and a psychoanalyst. Freud is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, as well as for his therapeutic techniques, including the use of free association, his theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship, and the interpretation of dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.
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society
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Susan Haack
Susan Haack (born 1945, England) is an English professor of philosophy and law at the University of Miami in the United States. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism follows that of Charles Sanders Peirce.
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Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919) His last name is, according to Roosevelt himself, "pronounced as if it was spelled 'Rosavelt.' That is in three syllables. The first syllable as if it was 'Rose.'" ; An [http://vvl.lib.msu.edu/record.cfm?recordid=509 Audio recording] in which Roosevelt pronounces his own last name distinctly. To listen at the correct speed, slow the recording down by 20%. Retrieved on July 12, 2007. ) was the 26th President of the United States. He is noted for his energetic personality, range of interests and achievements, leadership of the Progressive Movement, and his "cowboy" image and robust masculinity. He was a leader of the Republican Party and founder of the short-lived Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party of 1912. Before becoming President (1901–1909) he held offices at the municipal, state, and federal level of government. Roosevelt's achievements as a naturalist, explorer, hunter, author, and soldier are as much a part of his fame as any office he held as a politician.
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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, remembered today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
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Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid (7 May (26 April O.S.) 1710 – 7 October 1796), Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. The early part of his life was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he created the'' 'Wise Club' ''(a literary-philosophical association) and graduated from the University of Aberdeen. He was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen in 1752, where he wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). Shortly afterward he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith. He resigned from this position in 1781.
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W. E. B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois ( ; February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, historian, author, and editor.
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Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann (23 September 1889 – 14 December 1974) was an American intellectual, writer, reporter, and political commentator who gained notoriety for the introduction of the concept of Cold War for the first time in the world. Lippmann was twice awarded (1958 and 1962) a Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, “Today and Tomorrow”.
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William Morris Hunt
William Morris Hunt (March 31, 1824 – September 8, 1879), American painter, was born at Brattleboro, Vermont to Jane Maria (Leavitt) Hunt and Hon. Jonathan Hunt, who raised one of the preeminent families in American art. William Morris Hunt was the leading painter of mid-19th century Boston, Massachusetts.
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Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim () (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.
http://wn.com/Émile_Durkheim
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Harvard
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Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country.
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Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts () is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. Most of its population of 6.6 million lives in the Boston metropolitan area. The eastern half of the state consists of urban, suburban, and rural areas, while Western Massachusetts is mostly rural. Massachusetts is the most populous of the six New England states and ranks third among U.S. states in GDP per capita.
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New Hampshire
New Hampshire () is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It borders Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. New Hampshire ranks 44th in land area, 46th in total area of the 50 states, and 41st in population.
http://wn.com/New_Hampshire
- aesthetics
- African Spir
- agnosticism
- Alain Locke
- Alan Watts
- Alexander Bain
- Alice James
- Alkyl nitrites
- Amazon River
- American Civil War
- American philosophy
- anatomy
- Arthur Holly Compton
- associationism
- associationist
- Astor House
- Atlantic Monthly
- avant-garde
- B. Alan Wallace
- Bertrand Russell
- Bill W.
- Blaise Pascal
- Boris Sidis
- C. I. Lewis
- C. West Churchman
- Carl Lange
- chance (philosophy)
- Charles Renouvier
- Chauncey Wright
- chloral hydrate
- choice
- Classicism
- compatibilism
- Damasio
- David Hume
- Deborah Blum
- depression (mood)
- determinism
- Emanuel Swedenborg
- Emmanuel Swedenborg
- emotion
- empiricism
- Epistemology
- Ernst Mach
- evidentialism
- fitness (biology)
- free will
- G. Stanley Hall
- generation
- genius
- George Santayana
- Gertrude Stein
- Gifford Lectures
- Harvard
- Harvard University
- Hegel
- Henri Bergson
- Henri Poincaré
- Henry James
- Henry James Sr.
- Hermann Helmholtz
- Hermann Lotze
- Hibbert Lectures
- Hilary Putnam
- holistic
- Horace Kallen
- Horatio Alger, Jr.
- Howard Mounce
- Immanuel Kant
- indeterminism
- Ingersoll Lecture
- innatism
- Instrumentalism
- Isaac Newton
- Jacques Barzun
- James Huneker
- James-Lange theory
- John Dewey
- John Stuart Mill
- Joseph E. LeDoux
- Joseph LeDoux
- Josiah Royce
- Karl Popper
- Leonora Piper
- Library of America
- Louis Agassiz
- Louis Menand
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Mark Twain
- Mary Whiton Calkins
- Massachusetts
- Meaning (linguistic)
- Medical Doctor
- modernist
- monism
- Mordecai Kaplan
- Morris Raphael Cohen
- mysticism
- neurasthenia
- New Hampshire
- nitrous oxide
- oil crisis
- Ola Raknes
- overbelief
- perception
- peyote
- physician
- physiology
- Pierre Janet
- pleasure
- Pragmatism
- pragmatist
- Psychology
- Psychology Today
- radical empiricism
- Ralph Barton Perry
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- relativism
- religion
- Renouvier
- Richard Rorty
- romanticism
- scepticism
- science
- seasickness
- Sigmund Freud
- smallpox
- society
- spiritualism
- suicide
- Susan Haack
- Swedenborgian
- telepathy
- Theodore Roosevelt
- theology
- Thomas Hobbes
- Thomas Reid
- tone deafness
- truth
- W. E. B. Du Bois
- Walter Lippmann
- William James Sidis
- William Morris Hunt
- Émile Durkheim
James, William Filmography
ALBUMS
- Bohemia After Dark
- Too Late Now
- A Portrait of Elvin
- Road Life
- In the Open Court
- You Are Too Beautiful
- Lullabye of the Leaves
- Bohemia After Dark (alternate take)
Born: 1951-03-08
Died: 2004-07-20
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William James (part 1 of 2)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:58
- Published: 12 May 2011
- Uploaded: 26 Nov 2011
- Author: workingklass0
Chapter Twenty-nine from Book Three, Part Two of Bertrand Russell's "The History Of Western Philosophy" (1945).
http://wn.com/William_James_part_1_of_2
William James: The Psychology of Possibility
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:16
- Published: 19 Jan 2011
- Uploaded: 09 Dec 2011
- Author: DavidsonFilms1955
William James, more than anyone else, was responsible for introducing the wide range of topics that now comprise the broad field of psychology. In his magnificent text, The Principles of Psychology, he explored and expanded what was then known about neuroscience, cognition, emotion, perception, and behavior and left a legacy of inquiry into the workings of human experience that still fuels this social science. This film presents some of James's most important formulations, including his discussions of habit, consciousness, will, and religious experience with current live-action illustrations. Dr. McDermott's commentary reminds viewers that James's work also prods us to lead our own individual lives with courage, openess to possibilities and awareness to what James referred to as the "fringe" of experience. This fringe includes the hunches, un-expressible feelings, and haunting memories that influence our thoughts and actions. An interview with a young recovering alcoholic and an account of James's own struggle with suicidal depression make this film an emotionally moving experience as well as an instructional one for students. "For More Information, visit www.davidsonfilms.com."
http://wn.com/William_James_The_Psychology_of_Possibility
Rorty on William James (Part 1)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:18
- Published: 07 Oct 2008
- Uploaded: 29 Aug 2011
- Author: neopragvideo
Lecture by Prof. Richard Rorty discussing William James.
http://wn.com/Rorty_on_William_James_Part_1
A Visit with William James
A video by Dr. Bill Noonan for philosophy students at Columbia Gorge Community College.
http://wn.com/A_Visit_with_William_James
Chasing William James
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:16
- Published: 30 Nov 2006
- Uploaded: 08 Dec 2011
- Author: LenEdgerly
Robert D. Richardson, author of a new William James biography, spoke with me on camera for a few minutes at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass.
http://wn.com/Chasing_William_James
William James (W6MUV). Memorial
The life of the worlds best Father in pictures. Bill was born on Jan. 6th 1919 in San Francisco, His mother Lena moved the family to Terra Bella Calif. a few years later when Bills' brother Frank was born. He grew up on a farm outside of Porterville during the great depression of the 1930s, in a small house with no plumbing or electricity he ran his "Ham" radio station off of a generator that he had made with a 1/2 hp Briggs&Stratton gas engine. After his graduation from Porterville Union High in 1937 he started school at Porterville Junior Collage, but that was cut short with the death of his father in 1938 when he had to go to work loading trucks for the Porterville Poultry Assn. to help suport the family. In Jan. of 1942 he quit his job at the poultry assn. and entered the US Navy to serve his country. After gaduating a "Aviation Chief Radio Technician" from the Naval school at Treasure Is. in San Francisco he was sent to NAS Kodiak Alaska where he was part of a crew in a PBY "Catalina" (in his later years he always remembered his time in Alaska and in the PBY fondly) Near the end of the war he was sent to the "Office of Research & Inventions, Special Devices Division" where he worked with the "Link Trainer" an early vertion of the flight simulator. When he was discharged from the Navy he returned to the central valley in California where he worked in several radio stations as anouncer, he also had a radio repair shop for a short time. In 1948 he decided to return to <b>...</b>
http://wn.com/William_James_W6MUV_Memorial
William James "Will You or Won't You Have It So?"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:01
- Published: 18 Jan 2011
- Uploaded: 13 Oct 2011
- Author: infophilosopher
Robert D. Richardson. Presented at the William James Symposium, Chocorua, New Hampshire, on the 100th anniversary of the death of William James, August, 2010 See David Leary's introduction and the discussion after the lecture. www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/William_James_Will_You_or_Won't_You_Have_It_So?
Essays in Radical Empiricism by William James - Does Consciousness Exist?(Part 1)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:57
- Published: 01 Mar 2009
- Uploaded: 24 Dec 2011
- Author: DustinPepper
For Text Version: www.topicia.com
http://wn.com/Essays_in_Radical_Empiricism_by_William_James__Does_Consciousness_Exist?Part_1
Rorty on William James (Part 2)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:03
- Published: 08 Oct 2008
- Uploaded: 29 Aug 2011
- Author: neopragvideo
Professor Rorty discusses Wlliam James.
http://wn.com/Rorty_on_William_James_Part_2
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James - Lecture 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:01
- Published: 06 Apr 2010
- Uploaded: 10 Nov 2011
- Author: HeIsSailing
I am starting a new book, William James' classic, 'The Varieties of Religious Experience', a series of 20 lectures given by the renowned psychologist in 1902. In this exciting episode, I briefly discuss lecture 1 on the psychology of religion, or Religion and Neurology. I am currently reading this entire book as an audio book for Librivox.org - Click on this link to follow my progress and download the entire audiobook when I am finished. librivox.org Thanks for listening.
http://wn.com/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience,_by_William_James__Lecture_1
WILLIAM JAMES
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:33
- Published: 11 Dec 2007
- Uploaded: 31 Oct 2011
- Author: leoseguran
Descubre a este interesante personaje. Te va a gustar todo lo que nos regalo.
http://wn.com/WILLIAM_JAMES
Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists: Section 1
The American Pragmatists: CS Peirce, William James, John Dewey In this program, Columbia University professor Sidney Morgenbesser discusses the nuances of pragmatic philosophy as expressed by three of America's greatest thinkers. Moranbesser examines Peirce's theory of meaning and the notion of fallibilism that supports the changing nature of truth. James' concept of meaning, knowledge, and truth is examined within the context of the usefulness of particular conceptual schemes. The discussion of Dewey focuses on the human quest for warranted beliefs, and his philosophy of education—a "bottom up" approach that bases instruction on a child's real problems and experiences. Section 1: www.youtube.com Section 2: www.youtube.com Section 3: www.youtube.com Section 4: www.youtube.com Section 5: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Sidney_Morgenbesser_on_the_American_Pragmatists_Section_1
Rorty on William James (Part 3)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:47
- Published: 08 Oct 2008
- Uploaded: 15 Dec 2011
- Author: neopragvideo
Professor Rorty discussing William James and religious belief.
http://wn.com/Rorty_on_William_James_Part_3
Re: William James: A Will to Believe, 1 of 3
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:54
- Published: 22 May 2008
- Uploaded: 14 Oct 2011
- Author: randyhelzerman
Video Cam Direct Upload
http://wn.com/Re_William_James_A_Will_to_Believe,_1_of_3
For your consideration...(William James)
Once again feel free to disagree! William James: en.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/For_your_considerationWilliam_James
William James: O Precursor da Psicologia Funcional
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:30
- Published: 21 Nov 2010
- Uploaded: 12 Nov 2011
- Author: pamefortes
Trabalho do Grupo 6 do Componente curricular História da Psicologia I - Unijuí Primeiro semestre do curso de Psicologia - 2010 Augusto Bastiani Dall' Asta Bruna Dobbert Carol Hubert José Stona Katlin Lavall Pâmela Fortes Renata Queiroz
http://wn.com/William_James_O_Precursor_da_Psicologia_Funcional
William James, aka Will Peterson of NY Giants Interview
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:46
- Published: 07 Dec 2007
- Uploaded: 26 Aug 2010
- Author: krgcreative
William James of the Philadelphia Eagles (then known as Will Peterson, Corner Back for the NY Giants) takes a break from a busy day of training camp to share his personal story for the teens of TeenCentral.Net
http://wn.com/William_James,_aka_Will_Peterson_of_NY_Giants_Interview
William James Junior High School
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:02
- Published: 22 Jun 2010
- Uploaded: 27 Aug 2010
- Author: WilliamJamesTV
Servicios para secundaria para secundaria, versión ciclo 2009/2010.
http://wn.com/William_James_Junior_High_School
Rorty on James' Varieties of Religious Experience (1of4)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:18
- Published: 22 Aug 2008
- Uploaded: 14 Dec 2011
- Author: riversonthemoon
During the Center for the Study of Science's March 24-25, 2002 conference, leading scholars reexamined William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience" on the centennial of its publication. The late Richard Rorty opines that James' classic work presents clashing definitions of religious experience. Enjoy. plato.stanford.edu plato.stanford.edu
http://wn.com/Rorty_on_James'_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience_1of4
Instinct and Intelligence
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:23
- Published: 10 May 2008
- Uploaded: 04 Nov 2011
- Author: 0ThouArtThat0
Quote by William James from "The Varieties of Religious Experience" Some people see "instinct" as carrying negative connotations, as though anything instinctual is necessarily selfish, barbaric, and cruel. I do not hold this view. Instinct is best defined as "the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior" (wikipedia). There is nothing evil about instinct; in fact, I think one could even say that love is an instinctual emotion for mammals. No doubt that predation is instinctual for lions and egg snatching for some snakes, but there is no reason to demean instinct as if it were always directed toward destructive ends. Intelligence is just as often used for unenlightened purposes.
http://wn.com/Instinct_and_Intelligence
Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists: Section 2
The American Pragmatists: CS Peirce, William James, John Dewey In this program, Columbia University professor Sidney Morgenbesser discusses the nuances of pragmatic philosophy as expressed by three of America's greatest thinkers. Moranbesser examines Peirce's theory of meaning and the notion of fallibilism that supports the changing nature of truth. James' concept of meaning, knowledge, and truth is examined within the context of the usefulness of particular conceptual schemes. The discussion of Dewey focuses on the human quest for warranted beliefs, and his philosophy of education—a "bottom up" approach that bases instruction on a child's real problems and experiences. Section 1: www.youtube.com Section 2: www.youtube.com Section 3: www.youtube.com Section 4: www.youtube.com Section 5: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Sidney_Morgenbesser_on_the_American_Pragmatists_Section_2
William James Guy Carr
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:51
- Published: 18 Dec 2010
- Uploaded: 06 Aug 2011
- Author: nicolacoche
www.dailymotion.com William James Guy Carr (Commander Carr) (né le 2 juin 1895 en Angleterre et mort le 2 octobre 1959 en Ontario), sous-marinier anglais lors de la Première Guerre mondiale, puis commandant de la Marine royale canadienne (RCN) et membre des services de renseignements canadiens. Lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, il s'occupe de l'aspect financier de la mobilisation de 22 divisions dans l'armée canadienne. En 1958, Carr publia un livre nommé Pawns in the game dans lequel il affirme avoir eu connaissance au British Museum de Londres d'une lettre de Pike à Giuseppe Mazzini, en date du 15 août 1871 et dans laquelle Pike aurait expliqué le but des trois guerres mondiales dans des termes étonnants pour un écrit de 1871.
http://wn.com/William_James_Guy_Carr
The Divided Self
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:37
- Published: 17 Apr 2010
- Uploaded: 19 Aug 2010
- Author: HeIsSailing
I briefly discuss Lecture 8 of William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. James considers the believers' cycle of sin and repentance, and the struggle between spiritual and carnal senses of morality. I suggest that the believer struggle's over a moral standard that is artificially imposed by the religion itself, and has little meaning in the secular world. Oh yes, and I talk about masterbation. Thanks for listening
http://wn.com/The_Divided_Self
photo: White House / Chuck Kennedy
25 Dec 2011
Nearly half a century ago Time magazine famously asked: Is God Dead? The verdict is in. God is definitely not dead — the United States remains a highly religious nation — but God has...
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| Coordinates | 12°58′0″N77°34′0″N |
|---|---|
| region | Western Philosophy and Psychology |
| era | 19th/20th century philosophy |
| color | #B0C4DE |
| image | William James b1842c.jpg |
| name | William James |
| birth date | January 11, 1842 |
| birth place | New York City, New York |
| death date | August 26, 1910 |
| death place | Tamworth, New Hampshire |
| alma mater | Harvard University |
| doctoral advisor | Louis Agassiz |
| school tradition | Pragmatism |
| main interests | Pragmatism, Psychology, Philosophy of Religion, Epistemology, Meaning |
| influences | Peirce, Hume, African Spir, Blaise Pascal Mill, Bain, Swedenborg, Schiller, Lotze, Reid, Renouvier, Brown |
| influenced | Dewey, Alan Watts, Schiller, Bergson, Santayana, Putnam, Rorty, Churchman, Jackson, Bill W., B. Alan Wallace, Mordecai Kaplan, Wittgenstein, Raknes, Cohen, Durkheim |
| notable ideas | The Will to Believe Doctrine, the pragmatic theory of truth, radical empiricism, James-Lange theory of emotion, psychologist's fallacy |
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric 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, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
Early years
William James, with his younger brother Henry James (who became a prominent novelist) and sister Alice James (who is known for her posthumously published diary), 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 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.
James 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 until November 1868. (During this period he began to publish, with reviews appearing in literary periodicals like the North American Review.) He finally earned his M.D. degree in June 1869, but never practiced medicine. What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.
James's time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave".
Career
James spent almost his entire academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in physiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, endowed chair in psychology in 1889, return to philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907.James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz in Germany and Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at Harvard University. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875–1876 academic year.
During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions with Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright that evolved into a lively group informally known as The Metaphysical Club in 1872. Louis Menand speculates that the Club provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come.
Among James's students at Harvard University were such luminaries as Boris Sidis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, C. I. Lewis, and Mary Calkins.
Following his January, 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, publishing Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth. James was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy). He sailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 to take experimental treatments which proved unsuccessful, and returned home on August 18. His heart failed him on August 26, 1910 at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He was one of the strongest proponents of the school of functionalism in psychology and of pragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. He challenged his professional colleagues not to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those beliefs.
In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al. using six criteria such as citations and recognition, James was found to be the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th Century.
Writings
William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott, is 47 pages long. (See below for a list of his major writings and additional collections)He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), totaling twelve hundred pages in two volumes, which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.
President Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War Speech, on April 17, 1977, equating the United States' 1970's energy crisis, oil crisis and the changes and sacrifices Carter's proposed plans would require with the "moral equivalent of war," may have borrowed its title, much of its theme and the memorable phrase from James' classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" derived from his last speech, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, in which "James considered one of the classic problems of politics: how to sustain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of war or a credible threat...." and "...sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation."
Epistemology
James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truth was a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension. Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice."The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function," he wrote.
James held a world view in line with pragmatism, declaring that the value of any truth was utterly dependent upon its use to the person who held it. Additional tenets of James's pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly interpreted and understood through an application of "radical empiricism." Radical empiricism, not related to the everyday scientific empiricism, asserts that the world and experience can never be halted for an entirely objective analysis, if nothing else the mind of the observer and simple act of observation will affect the outcome of any empirical approach to truth as the mind and its experiences, and nature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition — over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality — has maintained a strong influence in American culture, especially among liberals (see Richard Rorty). James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness (psychology)", had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art.
In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them." Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalist interpretation of James.
In The Meaning of Truth, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's [sc., the critic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' " However, James responded to critics accusing him of relativism, scepticism or agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths. To the contrary, he supported an epistemological realism position.
Cash Value
From the introduction to William James's Pragmatism by Bruce Kuklick, p.xiv.:James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "Cash Value" was, what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness. If what was true was what worked, we can scientifically investigate religion's claim to truth in the same manner. The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked. James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying — they enabled us to lead fuller, richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives. Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence, just as scientific beliefs were.
Will to Believe Doctrine
In William James's lecture of 1896 titled "The Will to Believe," James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. This idea foresaw the demise of evidentialism in the 20th century and sought to ground justified belief in an unwavering principle that would prove more beneficial. Through his philosophy of pragmatism William James justifies religious beliefs by using the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis' truth. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in God and prove His existence by what the belief brings to one's life.
Free Will
In The Will to Believe, James simply asserted that his will was free. As his first act of freedom, he said, he chose to believe his will was free. He was encouraged to do this by reading Charles Renouvier, whose work convinced James to convert from monism to pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, 1870, James wrote,
"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will — 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
In 1884 James set the terms for all future discussions of determinism and compatibilism in the free will debates with his lecture to Harvard Divinity School students published as "The Dilemma of Determinism." In this talk he defined the common terms "hard determinism' and "soft determinism" (now more commonly called "compatibilism").
"Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."
James called compatibilism a "quagmire of evasion," just as the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume that free will was simply freedom from external coercion were called a "wretched subterfuge" by Immanuel Kant.
James described chance as neither hard nor soft determinism, but "indeterminism". He said
"The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance."
James asked the students to consider his choice for walking home from Lowell Lecture Hall after his talk.
"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen."
With this simple example, James was the first thinker to enunciate clearly a two-stage decision process (others include Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper), with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice which grants consent to one possibility and transforms an equivocal ambiguous future into an unalterable and simple past. There is a temporal sequence of undetermined alternative possibilities followed by adequately determined choices.
James’ two-stage model effectively separates chance (the indeterministic free element) from choice (an arguably determinate decision that follows causally from one’s character, values, and especially feelings and desires at the moment of decision).
Philosophy of religion
James did important work in philosophy of religion. In his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:
The investigation of mystical experience was constant throughout the life of James, leading him to experiment with chloral hydrate (1870), amyl nitrite (1875), nitrous oxide (1882), and even peyote (1896). James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel. He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such. For example, consider the claim to truth held by the immutable laws of physics.
Instincts
Like Sigmund Freud, James was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At the core of James's theory of psychology, as defined in Principles of Psychology (1890), was a system of "instincts." James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals. These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts were actually in conflict with each other. In the 1920s, however, psychology turned away from evolutionary theory and embraced radical behaviorism.
Theory of emotion
James is one of the two namesakes of the James-Lange theory of emotion, which he formulated independently of Carl Lange in the 1880s. The theory holds that emotion is the mind's perception of physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. In James's oft-cited example; it is not that we see a bear, fear it, and run. We see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. Our mind's perception of the higher adrenaline level, heartbeat, etc., is the emotion.This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of aesthetics. Here is a passage from his great work, Principles of Psychology, that spells out those consequences.
William James' bear
From Joseph LeDoux's description of William James's Emotion:Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger? Because we are afraid of what will happen if we don't. This obvious (and incorrect) answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions.
:It all began in 1884 when William James published an article titled "What Is an Emotion?" The article appeared in a philosophy journal called Mind, as there were no psychology journals yet. It was important, not because it definitively answered the question it raised, but because of the way in which James phrased his response. He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus {the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system}; and ends with a passionate feeling, a conscious emotional experience. A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequence—to figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling.
:James set out to answer his question by asking another: do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? He proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid, was wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run:
::Our natural way of thinking about... emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion (called 'feeling' by Damasio).
:The essence of James's proposal was simple. It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses (racing heart, tight stomach, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and so on; sympathetic nervous system) and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world. According to James, emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations, and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations. For example, when we see James's bear, we run away. During this act of escape, the body goes through a physiological upheaval: blood pressure rises, heart rate increases, pupils dilate, palms sweat, muscles contract in certain ways (evolutionary, innate defense mechanisms). Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals. In each case, the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations, and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality. Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature {the parasympathetic nervous system for love}. The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to its physiology, not vice versa: we do not tremble because we are afraid or cry because we feel sad; we are afraid because we tremble and are sad because we cry.
Philosophy of history
One of the long-standing schisms in the philosophy of history concerns the role of individuals in social change.One faction sees individuals (as seen in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, A History) as the motive power of history, and the broader society as the page on which they write their acts. The other sees society as moving according to holistic principles or laws, and sees individuals as its more-or-less willing pawns. In 1880, James waded into this controversy with "Great Men and Their Environment," an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly. He took Carlyle's side, but without Carlyle's one-sided emphasis on the political/military sphere, upon heroes as the founders or overthrowers of states and empires.
A philosopher, according to James, must accept geniuses as a given entity the same way as a biologist accepts as an entity Darwin's ‘spontaneous variations’. The role of an individual will depend on the degree of its conformity with the social environment, epoch, moment etc.
James introduces a notion of receptivities of the moment. The societies' mutations from generation to generation are determined (directly or indirectly) mainly by the acts or examples of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movements, setters of precedent or fashion, centers of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction For James, the great men of history manipulate the thoughts of society. "Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." He continues, "The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."
View on Spiritualism and Associationism
James studied closely the schools of thought known as associationism and spiritualism. The view of an associationist is that each experience that one has leads to another, creating a chain of events. The association does not tie together two ideas, but rather physical objects. This association occurs on an atomic level. Small physical changes occur in the brain which eventually form complex ideas or associations. Thoughts are formed as these complex ideas work together and lead to new experiences. Isaac Newton and David Hartley both were precursors to this school of thought, proposing such ideas as “physical vibrations in the brain, spinal cord, and nerves are the basis of all sensations, all ideas, and all motions...” James disagreed with associationism in that he believed it to be too simple. He referred to associationism as “psychology without a soul” because there is nothing from within creating ideas; they just arise by associating objects with one another.On the other hand, a spiritualist believes that mental events are attributed to the soul. Whereas in associationism, ideas and behaviors are separate, in spiritualism, they are connected. Spiritualism encompasses the term innatism, which suggests that ideas cause behavior. Ideas of past behavior influence the way a person will act in the future; these ideas are all tied together by the soul. Therefore, an inner soul causes one to have a thought, which leads them to perform a behavior, and memory of past behaviors determine how one will act in the future.
These two schools of thought are very different, and yet James had a strong opinion about the two. He was, by nature, a pragmatist, and therefore believed that one should use whatever parts of theories make the most sense and can be proven. Therefore, he recommended breaking apart spiritualism and associationism and using the parts of them that make the most sense. James believed that each person has a soul, which exists in a spiritual universe, and leads a person to perform the behaviors they do in the physical world. James was influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg, who first introduced him to this idea. James states that, although it does appear that humans use associations to move from one event to the next, this cannot be done without this soul tying everything together. For, after an association has been made, it is the person who decides which part of it to focus on, and therefore determines in which direction following associations will lead. In time James found the investigations of Piper's mysterious abilities boring.
See also
Notes
Bibliography
Works by James
Works by others
Collections
Secondary works
Fiction
External links
Full texts of James's works
Category:1842 births Category:1910 deaths Category:20th-century philosophers Category:American academics Category:American agnostics Category:American people of Scotch-Irish descent Category:American philosophers Category:American psychologists Category:American religion academics Category:Educational psychologists Category:Functionalist psychologists Category:Harvard Medical School alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:People from New York City Category:People from Staten Island Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Pragmatists Category:Psychedelic researchers Category:Psychologists of religion Category:Social philosophy Category:Gifford Lecturers
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