William James

(1842-1910)

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens.

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 Swedenborgiantheologian 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's discussion of Herbert Spencer broaches characteristic themes of his philosophy: the importance of religion and the passions, the variety of human responses to life, and the idea that we help to “create” the truths that we “register” .Taking up Spencer's view that the adjustment of the organism to the environment is the basic feature of mental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own vision of what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to describe. Survival, James asserts, is merely one of many interests human beings have: “The social affections, all the various forms of play, the thrilling intimations of art, the delights of philosophic contemplation, the rest of religious emotion, the joy of moral self-approbation, the charm of fancy and of wit — some or all of these are absolutely required to make the notion of mere existence tolerable;…”

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

Yet james wishes to defend his sense that any such formulation will be determined as much by a freely-acting human mind as by the world, a position he later (in pragmatism) calls “humanism”: “there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgments of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences…”

Quotable Quotes of William James

●Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

●Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

●Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

ViewpointSome people disagreed with this

reductionist viewpoint. For one, William James, an American, described consciousness as a stream that continually changes, and it cannot be reduced to elements. James still believed that consciousness could be studied, but he was interested in the functions of consciousness rather than its elements. His focus on the functions of consciousness was motivated by (a) his pragmatic philosophy, which means he was interested in the usefulness of things and ideas rather than their ultimate explanation, and (b) by Darwin's theory of evolution, which had suggested that every creature's features had evolved for some purpose. Thus, human consciousness must have some purpose or function, and James wanted to understand what that purpose was.

OVERVIEWWilliam James is considered by

many to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey).  As a professor of psychology and of philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and later the most famous living American philosopher of his time.  Avoiding the logically tight systems typical of European rationalists, such as the German idealists, he cobbled together a psychology rich in philosophical implications and a philosophy enriched by his psychological expertise. 

More specifically, his theory of the self and his view of human belief as oriented towards conscious action raised issues that required him to turn to philosophy.  There he developed his pragmatic epistemology, which considers the meaning of ideas and the truth of beliefs not abstractly, but in terms of the practical difference they can make in people’s lives. He explored the implications of this theory in areas of religious belief, metaphysics, human freedom and moral values, and social philosophy.

His contributions in these areas included critiques of long-standing philosophical positions on such issues as freedom vs. Determinism, correspondence vs. Coherence, and dualism vs. Materialism, as well as a thorough analysis of a phenomenological understanding of the self and consciousness, a “forward-looking” conception of truth (based on validation and revisable experience), a thorough-going metaphysical pluralism, and a commitment to a full view of agency in connection with communal and social concerns. Thus he created one of the last great philosophical systems in western thought, even if he did not live quite long enough to complete every aspect of it. The combination of his provocative ideas and his engaging writing style has contributed to the enduring impact of his work.

SHEMA E. BACONGA

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