William James
American psychologist and philosopher
1842 CE to 1910 CE
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who trains as a physician.
He is the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S.
He writes influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism.
He is the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James.
In the summer of 1878, James marries Alice Gibbens.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City.
He is the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day.
The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James 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, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
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William Morris Hunt, now fifty-four, receives a major commission in 1878 to paint two murals for the capitol in Albany, New York (entitled The Flight of Night and The Discoverer, they eventually are lost as a result of the disintegration of the stone panels on which they are painted).
Hun, who has focused predominately on the American landscape in his later work, writes (Talks on Art, 1878) and is a magnetic and persuasive teacher; among those influenced by him are the painter John La Farge and William and Henry James.
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.