William James: The Will to Believe

Five dialogues on belief, and what it has the right to do

A course on the thought of William James.

Course outline

1. The Sense of Reality — Before belief is a doctrine it is a feeling: the sense of reality. What we attend to and what stirs us is real for us; every idea is believed unless something contradicts it; and the root of all…
2. Is Life Worth Living? The Right to Believe — The most misread essay in American philosophy, taught with its scaffolding intact: against Clifford's evidentialism, the passional nature may — and must — decide an option that is live, forced…
3. On a Certain Blindness — The lecture I called the perception on which my whole individualistic philosophy is based: our congenital blindness to the inner significance of lives unlike our own — learned in the mountains of…
4. The Sick Soul — The Varieties opened honestly: religion studied in its documents; the healthy-minded temperament and the sick soul; the panic-fear case read in full and claimed; and conversion — the divided self…
5. Mysticism and the MORE — The Varieties' summit and its honest edge: the four marks of the mystical state; the reality-feeling detached and total; and the furthest thing the documents license — a wider self, continuous…

Part of the Symposium course library.