James, William [addendum]
William James is to classical American philosophy as Plato was to Greek and Roman philosophy: an originating and inspirational fountainhead. Thinkers as diverse as C. S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, John Dewey and the late work of A. N. Whitehead took their point of departure from William James, especially his monumental Principles of Psychology. Influential philosophers elsewhere were also deeply influenced by James, for instance Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Miguel de Unamuno, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
With the completed publication of all of James's writings, including his manuscripts and notebooks, the full range and philosophical virtuosity of his work comes into focus. For too long the thought of William James was taken to be novel and intriguing but lacking in technical sophistication. In reading James the first response is one of elation at the apparent simplicity and obvious elegance of the literary style. After several careful and close readings, however, the philosophical depth and complexity emerge. The consequence of these more mature readings of James's thought are now found in many areas of contemporary philosophy—for example, the philosophy of mind, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. More significant still is that James represents a helpful philosophical stance, one that is wary of narrowness and rigid conceptual schematisms and affirms the messages of human experience no matter the source. William James believes that philosophy itself is "the habit of always seeing an alternative" ("Essays in Philosophy," Works, 1978, p. 4). He was convinced as well that no matter how recondite the issue in question—for example, the meaning of consciousness or his innovative doctrine of radically empirical relations—the kernel of the position taken could be articulated in prose accessible to the intelligent reader as well as to the philosopher.
The most salutary result of recent commentaries on the philosophy of William James has been the rescue of two of his most beleaguered positions, that of the pragmatic theory of truth and his doctrine of "The Will to Believe." In both areas James's thought was often subject to mocking dismissal and shallow interpretations. With the completion of James's Works, the girth and sophistication of his philosophy is now apparent. Witness, for example, the sterling introductory essays by H. Standish Thayer on James's theory of truth as found in "Pragmatism" (Works, 1975) and "The Meaning of Truth" (Works, 1975). Similarly, one finds an equivalently clarifying essay by Edward H. Madden in his introductory essay to "The Will to Believe" (Works, 1979).
The divide that has existed between mainstream analytic philosophy and pragmatism is no longer purposeful. Transformations of this conflict are now at hand. Hilary Putnam, for decades a major figure in contemporary philosophical thought, writes in his Pragmatism (1995):
I believe that James was a powerful thinker, as powerful as any in the last century, and that his way of philosophizing contains possibilities which have been too long neglected, that it points to ways out of old philosophical "binds" that continue to afflict us. In short, I believe that it is high time we paid attention to Pragmatism, the movement of which James was arguably the greatest exponent.
Although in no way gainsaying the importance of specific philosophical contentions held by James, nonetheless it can be said that the most signal reason for paying serious attention to this work is found in his philosophical attitude, his approach to philosophical inquiry. William James was no stranger to philosophical debate or argument, as one finds in his brilliant and jousting correspondence with F. H. Bradley. Yet James was uneasy about closure, answers, and finality of any kind. In a "Notebook" entry of 1903 James writes of "bad taste," by which he means:
All neat schematisms with permanent and absolute distinctions, classifications with absolute pretensions, systems with pigeon-holes, etc., have this character. All 'classic,' clean, cut and dried, 'noble,' fixed, 'eternal,' Weltanschauungen seem to me to violate the character with which life concretely comes and the expression which it bears of being, or at least of involving, a muddle and a struggle, with an 'ever not quite' to all our formulas, and novelty and possibility forever leaking in.
For the thought and person of William James, the novel call of experience inevitably trumps categories of explanation. Consequently, possibility rather than solution becomes the philosophical watchword, especially in matters of profound human importance.
Bergson, Henri; Bradley, Francis Herbert; Dewey, John; Husserl, Edmund; Peirce, Charles Sanders; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Religion; Pragmatism; Pragmatist Epistemology; Royce, Josiah; Unamuno Y Jugo, Miguel De; Whitehead, Alfred North; Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann.
Bibliography
Since the original publication of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, virtually all of William James's writings have been published in a critical edition. Under the general editorship of Frederick Burkhardt, see The Works of William James, 19 volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975–88). William James is widely admired for his brilliant style of writing, and nowhere is that more apparent than in his letters. To that end, with John J. McDermott as general editor and edited by Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley, a critical edition of The Correspondence of William James has been published in 12 volumes (Charlottesville, NC: University of Virginia Press, 1992–2004). Of commentaries, the finest and most thorough is that of Gerald Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Other recent studies of note include: Samuel Henry Levinson, The Religious Investigations of William James (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1981); George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press 1990); Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David C. Lamberth, William James—The Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); and Phil Oliver, William James's Springs of Delight (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001). For an "Annotated Bibliography of the Writings of William James" and complete selections from his major works, see John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). The entire family is chronicled by R. W. B. Lewis in The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). Biographically, see Linda Simon, Genuine Reality—A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998) and Robert Richardson, William James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
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