William James

1842-1910 · American · Pragmatism, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Radical Empiricism, Psychology

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

Brother of the novelist Henry James and son of a Swedenborgian theologian, William James grew up in a household of restless transatlantic intellectual energy — and nearly broke under it. A depressive crisis in his late twenties was resolved by a willful act: following Renouvier, he decided to believe in his own free will. That moment seeded his whole philosophy.

Topics William James addresses

• pragmatism
• the pragmatic theory of truth
• cash value of an idea
• the will to believe
• genuine option (live, forced, momentous)
• the ethics of belief
• radical empiricism
• pure experience
• relations as experienced
• the stream of consciousness
• the specious present
• the fringes of consciousness
• the four characters of consciousness
• the James-Lange theory of emotion
• pluralism vs monism
• the pluralistic universe
• the block universe
• critique of absolute idealism
• tough-minded vs tender-minded
• religious experience as empirical phenomenon
• the sick soul vs the healthy-minded
• mystical states
• the four marks of mystical experience
• the more

Converse with William James on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in William James's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.