William James champions philosophical pragmatism in The…

1897 CE

William James champions philosophical pragmatism in The Will To Believe.

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

James will spend almost all of his academic career at Harvard.

He had been 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, and return to philosophy in 1897.

James writes voluminously throughout his life. (A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott, is forty-seven pages long.)

He had gained widespread recognition with his monumental The 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 had 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.

James defines true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer.

His pragmatic theory of truth is 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.

James holds a world view in line with pragmatism, declaring that the value of any truth is utterly dependent upon its use to the person who holds 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; the mind of the observer and the act of observation affect any empirical approach to truth.

The mind, its experiences, and nature are inseparable.

James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality—will maintain a strong influence in American culture.

James's description of the mind-world connection, which he describes in terms of a "stream of consciousness", will have a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art, notably in the case of James Joyce.