William James

This is the first inexpensive edition of the complete Long Course in Principles of Psychology, one of the great classics of modern Western literature and science and the source of the ripest thoughts of America’s most important philosopher. As such, it should not be confused with the many abridgements that omit key sections. The book presents lucid descriptions of human mental activity, with detailed considerations of the stream of thought, consciousness, time perception, memory, imagination, emotions, reason, abnormal phenomena, and similar topics. In its course it takes into account the work of Berkeley, Binet, Bradley, Darwin, Descartes, Fechner, Galton, Green, Helmholtz, Herbart, Hume, Janet, Kant, Lange, Lotze, Locke, Mill, Royce, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Wundt, and scores of others. It examines contrasting interpretations of mental phenomena, treating introspective analysis, philosophical interpretations, and experimental research. Although the book originally appeared nearly 75 years ago, it remains unsurpassed today as a brilliantly written survey of William James’ timeless view of psychology.

This seventh volume continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that was begun in volume four. Consisting of some 488 letters, with an additional 510 calendared, it offers an account of the academic's correspondence for the years 1890 to 1894.

Hailed as "one of the greatest philosophical minds of all time" by English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, William James is widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century Western philosophy and as the founder of the psychology of religion. An immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience weaves together acute observations with simple anecdotes to argue that individual religious experiences, rather than the tenets of organized religion, are what form the backbone of religious life. The book explores all sides of religous life, from repentance and conversion to mysticism and the value of saintliness. Written with James' characteristic humor and skill, The Varieties of Religious Experience sounds the depths of what he termed "Man's Religious Appetites. The old clich that Henry James wrote novels as though they were philosophical treatises whereas William James wrote philosophic treatises as though they were novels, while unfair to Henry, describes . . . the William James of The Varieties of Religious Experience, very well. Believers and unbelievers (and semibelievers) will continue to find in it both a resource and a challenge," wrote religion scholar Jaroslav Pelikan.

This fifth volume of letters chronicles James's emergence into professional and personal maturity. The correspondence is dominated by letters to his wife, Alice, and they reflect difficult events of the period such as the death of his parents and the responsibility he took for heading the family.

Preeminent American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859-1952) rejected Hegelian idealism for the pragmatism of William James. In this collection of informal, highly readable essays, originally published between 1897 and 1909, Dewey articulates his now classic philosophical concepts of knowledge and truth and the nature of reality. Here Dewey introduces his scientific method and uses critical intelligence to reject the traditional ways of viewing philosophical discourse. Knowledge cannot be divorced from experience; it is gradually acquired through interaction with nature. Philosophy, therefore, has to be regarded as itself a method of knowledge and not as a repository of disembodied, pre-existing absolute truths.

This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange spanning 50 years between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Their correspondence demonstrates the persons, places, and events that effected the Euro-American world from 1861-1910.

With the clarity that James deemed obligatory, Some Problems of Philosophy outlines his theory of perception. The early chapters expose the defects of intellectualism and monism and the advantages of empiricism and pluralism. The novelty that enters into concrete perceptual experience, and that is disallowed by the rationalizing intellect, suggests exciting possibilities. Denied any absolute truth in an ever-changing world, privy to only a piece of the truth at any given moment, the individual can, with faith and good will, help create order out of chaos. Some Problems in Philosophy, published posthumously, represents an important advance in William James's thought.

Essays in Radical Empiricism shows William James concerned with ultimate reality and moving toward a metaphysical system. The twelve essays originally appeared in journals between 1904 and 1906. James himself collected them to illustrate what he called "radical empiricism," but this volume was not published until 1912, two years after his death. Included are such seminal essays as "Does Consciousness Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience." The distinguished scholar and biographer Ralph Barton Perry, who edited this volume, called the essays essential to an understanding of James's writings. Radical empiricism takes us into a "world of pure experience." In the essays, as introducer Ellen Kappy Suckiel notes, "James inquires into the metaphysically basic reality underlying the common-sense objects of our world. It is here that he defends his view that 'experience' is the sole and ultimate reality." The essays deal with the applications of this "pure" or "neutral" experience: the general problem of relations, the role of feeling in experience, the nature of truth. Horace M. Kallen observed: "The fundamental point of these essays is that the relations between things, holding them together or separating them, are at least as real as the things themselves . . . and that no hidden substrata are necessary to account for the clashes and coherences of the world."

This volume contains 309 letters which start when William James was 14 years old and conclude when he was 35. The letters range from his relations with family and friends to his courtship of Alice Howe.

This volume presents the correspondence between William James, known for his contributions to psychology and philosophy, and his brother Henry. It covers their most productive years, when William was writing The Varieties of Religious Experience and Henry was writing his late masterpieces.

William James, known for his contributions to psychology and philosophy, occupies a secure place in American intellectual history. The 12 volumes of ""The Correspondence of William James"" present his vast and entertaining correspondence with his brother Henry, with other members of his family, with friends and colleagues, as well as with enthusiasts and detractors among readers of his work. The publication of James's private letters complements the 17 titles of ""The Works of William James"". During the years covered in this second of 3 volumes devoted to the letters of William and Henry, each of the brothers underwent a period of trial or testing as a writer. Henry's attempts at fame as a playwright failed, and his 1880s novels did not receive the popular reception he had hoped for. William struggled for years to complete ""The Principles of Psychology"", while burdened by many responsibilities, intermittent depression and eye troubles, finally to have it published in 1890, 12 years after the contract date. These letters offer glimpses of the diverse academic, literary, and social worlds in which the brothers circulated, of Henry's friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Rudyard Kipling, and the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have been in love with him. In William's letters he expresses pleasure and progress in his work, comments on Henry's writing, describes his meetings with and reactions to Paul Bourget and other continental writers, and even reports an attack of crab lice and an experiment with peyote. After the death of both parents in 1882 and of brother Garth Wilkinson in 1883, the famous family had dwindled to William, Henry, the unstable and alcoholic Robertson and the invalid Alice. The anxieties of William and Henry over the troubles of Robertson and Alice are a recurrent theme of these letters, particularly up to the time of Alice's death from breast cancer in 1892. William's letter show his continuous concern for and frustration with the philandering, alcholic Robertson. But it is Alice who elicits the most extensive and moving commentary. After her move to England in 1884, Henry writes at great length and poignancy of her difficulties. She emerges as an example of how American civilization laid crippling constraints on the development of young women. The correspondence in this volume also covers the birth of William's daughter, Margaret Mary (Peggy), and his fourth son, Francis Tweedy, later renamed Alexander Robertson, and the poignant death of 18-month-old Herman. It details William's purchase of a large farmhouse in New Hampshire and his building of a home in Cambridge, the two residences that afforded him some solitude for his periods of moodiness, melancholia and insomnia. Henry's letters, though occasionally hinting at some regret over his life as a confirmed bachelor, reveal how he cherished his solitude, because it suited him and was conducive to his literary art. Altogether, this volume is a window into the lives of two brothers who stood out as accomplished and influential figures in their generation.

"The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and to me, at definite instances in our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one." With these words, William James, one of the great minds of American philosophy, captures the power of pragmatism, a theory first developed by Charles S. Peirce. Pragmatism explores the various theories of truth, meaning, and reality to discover their "cash value" when implemented. Exactly what happens to our understanding of the world when this or that perspective is adopted? Most important of all, do the proposed theories really work when their principles are put into practice? Unless the consequences of these competing positions are tested, we will never know if any of them can help us to make better sense of the world we live in so that the problems we face as individuals and as a society can be resolved. William James, the leading proponent of pragmatism and chief advocate for critically evaluating theoretical positions vying for our attention, remains a prominent figure in the distinguished history of Americdan philosophy.

This final volume of The Works of William James provides a full record of James's teaching career at Harvard from 1872 to 1907. It includes extensive working notes for lectures in more than twenty courses. Some of the notes contain summary statements of views of James's that have never been published before, such as his treatment of the question of proof in ethics, in the only course he ever taught in that subject; others reflect contemporary controversies in philosophy, notably the famous debate on Idealism and the nature of the Absolute; still others illuminate early stages of James's thinking on crucial problems in what was to become his philosophy of radical empiricism. Often the notes yield information about his sources that is not to be found in the published writings. Because James's teaching was so closely involved with the development of his thought, this unpublished material adds a new dimension to our understanding of his philosophy. James's public lectures gained him world renown, and most of them were subsequently published. There are, however, several sets of notes for and drafts of important lectures that he never wrote out for publication; these are included in the present volume. Among them are his two series of lectures in 1878 on the physiology of the brain and its relation to the mind; the Lowell Lectures of 1896 on exceptional mental states; and the lectures of 1902 on intellect and feeling in religions, which were designed to supplement Varieties of Religious Experience and were intended to be his last word on the psychology of religion.

When William James died in 1910 he left a large body of manuscript material that has never appeared in print. Much of it is of biographical interest only, but the largest part is concerned with James's work. The present volume, the first of two that will bring The Works of William James to completion, includes the manuscripts devoted to work in progress on philosophical and psychological subjects. The last volume will bring together the manuscripts relating to James's public lectures and teaching. The most important of these manuscripts are those of the years 1903 and 1904 called "The Many and the One." This was material for the book that James hoped would be the full technical exposition of his philosophy of radical empiricism. It contains discussions of problems and concepts that are not found in his published work. Closely related to this are his responses to the so-called Miller-Bode objections, which charged that his philosophy of pure experience could not solve the problem of the many and the one or the question "How can two minds know the same thing?" James's notes record his offers to work his way out of the impasse, which eventually led to his formulation of radical empiricism and his total rejection of the mind-body dualism that had dominated Western philosophy since Descartes. The manuscripts in the rest of the volume contain James's reflections over a period of forty years in the form of drafts, memoranda, and notebook entries. The diverse subjects are arranged under the headings of Philosophy, Psychology, Aesthetics, Ethics, and Religion. Of special interest are the early notes in which James began to work out his own philosophical point of view.

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of his works. Miscellaneous and diverse though the pieces are, they are unified by James's style and personality, which shine through even the slightest of them. The volume includes 25 essays, 44 letters to the editor commenting on sundry topics, and 113 reviews of a wide range of works in English, French, German, and Italian. Twenty-three of the items are not recorded in any bibliography of James's writings. Two of the new discoveries are of particular interest: dating from 1865, when he was still a medical student, they are James's earliest known publications and give his first published views on Darwinian biology, which was to affect profoundly his own work in philosophy and psychology. Among his reviews are one of "Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phäomene," by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, published a year after the first appearance of that historically famous essay, and showing the breadth of James's interests, reviews of George Santayana's Sense of Beauty (1897) and Bernard Berenson's Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896).

The more than fifty articles, essays, and reviews in this volume, collected here for the first time, were published by William James over a span of some twenty-five years. The record of a sustained interest in phenomena of a highly controversial nature, they make it amply clear that James's work in psychical research was not an eccentric hobby but a serious and sympathetic concern. James was broad-minded in his approach but tough-minded in his demand that investigations be conducted in rigorous scientific terms. He hoped his study of psychic phenomena would strengthen the philosophy of an open-ended, pluralistic universe that he was formulating during the same period, and he looked forward to the new horizons for human experience that a successful outcome of his research would create. Robert A. McDermott, in his Introduction, discusses the relation of these essays to James's other work in philosophy, psychology, and religion.

The Varieties of Religious Experience, first delivered as the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, was published in 1902 and quickly established itself as a classic. It ranks with its great predecessor, The Principles of Psychology, as one of William James's masterworks. The book is not concerned with institutional religion. Its subtitle is "A Study in Human Nature," and James defines his subject as the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals in relation to what they consider to be divine. His broad topics include the religion of healthy-mindedness; the sick soul; the divided self and its unification; conversion; saintliness; and mysticism. These and other phenomena are vividly documented by individual case histories--recorded in autobiographies, diaries, confessions, and similar writings--drawn from the whole range of world literature. Constantly reprinted over the years, Varieties here appears for the first time in an edition prepared and annotated according to modern standards of textual scholarship. Manuscript material has been used to recover the form in which the last two lectures were originally delivered.

Chesterfield recorded the effects of post life upon the Cree and Inuit, and showed how the white agents of the church and fur trade made us of native implements, clothing, and transportation. Recognizing the threat to native ways of life posed by the white man's advancing civilization, he photographed the native people's dress, their everyday activities, the details that define a culture. Much of what he recorded is now lost forever. The text by William C. James provides a detailed framework in which to understand the photographs. James describes Chesterfield's life, the region, the people he photographed, the role of the Hudson's Bay Company, the documentary significance of the activities depicted in the photographs, and the relationship between these and other extant photos of that region and era. The three-year period Chesterfield spent in the District of Ungava emerges as crucial in his own development and as a decisive turning point in the history of the region. Together with James's text, these pictures constitute an arresting chronicle of a place, its people, and their ways of life, now all irrevocably changed.