James, William

(born Jan. 11, 1842, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 26, 1910, Chocorua, N.H.) U.S. philosopher and psychologist. Son of the philosophical writer Henry James (1811–82) and brother of the novelist Henry James, he studied medicine at Harvard, where he taught from 1872.

His first major work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), treated thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to live. His most famous work is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In Pragmatism (1907), he generalized the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce to assert that the meaning of any idea must be analyzed in terms of the succession of experiential consequences to which it leads and that truth and error depend solely on these consequences (&see; pragmatism). He applied this doctrine to the analysis of change and chance, freedom, variety, pluralism, and novelty. His pragmatism was also the basis for his polemic against monism, the idealistic doctrine of internal relations, and all views that presented reality as a static whole. He was also a leader of the psychological movement known as functionalism.

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