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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - William James
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - William James
edu/james-o/ — 04-02-2014
Table of Contents
1. Life and Works
2. Philosophical Psychology
3. Epistemology
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3. The Pragmatic Approach to Belief
4. Philosophy of Religion
5. Metaphysics
1. Realms of Reality
1. Human Freedom
2. Moral Responsibility
7. Social Philosophy
1. Primary Sources
2. Secondary Sources
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In 1861, the American Civil War erupted. In response to President Lincoln’s call for volunteers,
James committed himself to a short-term enlistment. However, already in delicate health, he left
when it expired after three months. (His younger brothers Wilky and Bob served in the Union
Army.) He then enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, his family
moving to Boston. There he studied chemistry and then physiology, prior to his entering
Harvard’s Medical School in 1863. A couple of years later, he took a year off to join a scientific
expedition to Brazil, led by Louis Agassiz. But bad health eventually forced him to quit the
expedition, and he returned to medical school (the James family moving from Boston to
Cambridge, Massachusetts). Again he left, this time to study physiology and medicine in
Germany and to recover his health. He failed to find a cure for his curious back pains, but
returned to Harvard, passed his medical exams, and received his medical degree in 1869.
Nevertheless, he did not plan to practice medicine and seemed lost as to what to do with the rest
of his life.
By the end of that same year, James’s neurological symptoms had become worse. His training in
hard science was making it impossible for him to believe in human freedom and, thus, in the
value of struggling for moral ideals; the despair of materialism was leading him to the depression
of determinism. In a barely disguised case history in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he
tells of visiting an asylum while he was a medical student, and seeing an epileptic patient whose
condition had reduced him to an idiotic state. James could not dispel the realization that if
universal determinism prevails, he could likewise sink into such a state, utterly incapable of
preventing it (Varieties, pp. 135-136). His dread over the sense of life’s absolute insecurity
pushed him to become a virtual invalid in his parents’ home. He considered suicide. By the
spring of 1870, when James was twenty-eight years old, he experienced a critical moment while
reading a treatment of human freedom by the French neo-Kantian Charles Renouvier. He
discovered the solution to his problem in the voluntaristic act of will whereby he could commit
himself to believing in his own freedom despite any lack of objective evidence. He started down
the road to recovery, though the remainder of his life would be plagued by seemingly
psychosomatic troubles (serious eye strain, mysterious back pains, digestive problems, and
periods of exhaustion, as well as chronic mood swings, including times of brooding depression).
Unfortunately, he still lacked a constructive career goal.
In 1872, one of James’s former chemistry professors, now Harvard’s President, offered him a job
teaching physiology. He accepted and began his career of more than a third of a century as a
faculty member there. The next year, he became an instructor of anatomy and physiology. By
the mid-eighteen-seventies, he was teaching psychology there, using the physiological approach
he had learned in Germany and establishing the first psychology laboratory in America. He met
a schoolteacher named Alice Howe Gibbens, whom he married in 1878. Like his parents, they
had five children, naming the first two Henry and William. Alice was adept at handling his
neurotic obsessions and emotional moodiness, and they seem to have had a good marriage, living
comfortably in Cambridge. The year they married, James agreed to write a psychology textbook;
however, by then he was already drifting away from psychology into philosophy. He was a
member of a Metaphysical Club that included Oliver Wendell Holmes, who taught law at
Harvard and would go on to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court, and Charles Sanders Peirce, a
philosopher of science, who would become the founder of American pragmatism. In 1879,
James began teaching philosophy at Harvard, becoming an assistant professor of philosophy the
next year. He published “The Sentiment of Rationality,” his first important article in his new
discipline. As he got deeper into philosophy, he developed a negative attitude towards
psychology. After becoming a full professor of philosophy in 1885 and of psychology in 1889,
he published his Principles of Psychology in 1890. It had taken him close to twelve years to
finish it, and, though it would be extremely successful, he was dissatisfied with it and disgusted
with psychology (Letters, vol. 1, pp. 294, 296, & vol. 2, pp. 2-3). Nevertheless, he agreed to
prepare an abridged version, which was published two years later as Psychology: Briefer
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Course; it too would be widely used and help to establish his reputation as the foremost living
American psychologist. He resigned his directorship of Harvard’s psychology lab and
committed himself to teaching and writing philosophy.
In 1897, James’s first philosophical book, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy, was published, dedicated to Charles Sanders Peirce. The following year, at the
University of California at Berkeley, he delivered a lecture, “Philosophical Conceptions and
Practical Results,” which helped to launch pragmatism as a nationwide philosophical
movement. In 1899, his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals was published. Overworked at Harvard and jeopardizing his fragile health, he suffered a
physical breakdown that same year. While recovering his health, he studied a wide range of
accounts of religious experience and prepared his Gifford Lectures, which he delivered at the
University of Edinburgh in 1901-02. These were published as The Varieties of Religious
Experience in 1902 and proved to be quite successful, although James himself was displeased,
believing them to contain too much reporting on facts and too little philosophical analysis.
For the remainder of his life, James focused on the development of his own philosophy, writing
essays and lectures that would later be collected and published in four books. In the spring of
1906, he took a leave of absence from Harvard to take a visiting professorship at Stanford
University, though his lecture series in California was interrupted by the great San Francisco
earthquake. In late 1906 and early 1907, he delivered his lectures on Pragmatism in Boston and
at Columbia University, publishing them in the spring of 1907. That was also the year he
resigned from Harvard, worried that he might die before being able to complete his philosophical
system, as he was suffering from angina and shortness of breath. He delivered the Hibbert
Lectures in England in 1908, published the next year as A Pluralistic Universe, aimed at
combating the neo-Hegelian idealism that was then prevalent in Great Britain. Meanwhile, he
was under intellectual assault by mainstream philosophers for his pragmatic treatment of truth,
which he defended in a collection of essays published in 1909 as The Meaning of Truth.
By the next year, James’s heart trouble left him so plagued by fatigue that normal activities
became quite difficult. He was attempting to complete his textbook on Some Problems of
Philosophy, but died on August 26, 1910. In 1911, his textbook, edited by his son Henry, and his
Memories and Studies were posthumously published. In 1912, his Essays in Radical Empiricism
was published, followed, in 1920, by some of his Collected Essays and Reviews and The Letters
of William James, edited in two volumes by his son Henry. His writings have survived in part
because of the provocative honesty of his ideas, but also because of the vibrant, sometimes racy,
style in which he expressed them. In A Pluralistic Universe, he castigates philosophers who use
technical jargon instead of clear, straightforward language. He practiced the spontaneous
thinking and freshness of expression he advocates there (Universe, pp. 129-130). It has been
said (by the novelist Rebecca West) that, while Henry James wrote fiction as though it were
philosophy, his older brother, William, wrote philosophy in a colorful style typical of fiction.
2. Philosophical Psychology
By the early 1890s, when James published his two books on psychology, the discipline was in
the process of splitting off from philosophical speculation (“psychology” literally means “the
study of the soul”) to establish itself as an empirical social science. Despite impatience with the
process of that development, he contributed significantly to moving it along, regarding
psychology as the science of our mental phenomena or states of consciousness, such as thoughts,
feelings, desires, volitions, and so forth.
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In analyzing what can broadly be termed human thinking, James delineates five generic
characteristics: (1) all thought is owned by some personal self; (2) all thought, as experienced by
human consciousness, is constantly in flux and never static; (3) nevertheless, there is an ongoing
continuity of thought for every thinker, as it moves from one object to another (like the
alternating times of flight and perching in a bird’s life), constantly comprising shifting foci and
the contextual fringes within which they are given; (4) thought typically deals with objects
different from and independent of consciousness itself, so that two minds can experience
common objects; and (5) consciousness takes an interest in particular objects, choosing to focus
on them rather than on others (Principles, vol. 1, pp. 224-226, 236-237, 239, 243, 258-259, 271-
272, 284; Psychology, pp. 152-154, 157-160, 166-167, 170). The self can be viewed as an object
of thought or as the subject of thought. The former is the empirical self or “me,” while the latter
is the pure ego or “I.” The dimensions of the empirical self (“me”) include the “material” self
(comprised of one’s body and such extensions of it as one’s clothing, immediate family, and
home), the “social” self (or significant interpersonal relations), and the “spiritual” self (one’s
personality, character, and defining values). The pure ego (“I”), identifiable with the soul of
traditional metaphysics, cannot be an object of science and should not be assumed to be a
substance (Principles, vol. 1, pp. 291-294, 296, 319, 343-344, 348, 350; Psychology, pp. 176-
181, 194, 196, 198, 200, 202-203, 215-216).
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such as overhearing a rumor; (3) the sort that is prompted by our submission to something within
ourselves, such as a habit formed by past actions; (4) the sort that results from a sudden change
of mood such as might be caused by a feeling of grief; and (5) the rare sort that is a consequence
of our own voluntary choice, which will be identified as the “will to believe.” Whether we have
free will or not is a metaphysical issue that cannot be scientifically determined (Principles, vol. 2,
pp. 486-488, 528, 531-534, 572-573; Psychology, pp. 415, 419-420, 428-434, 456-457).
3. Epistemology
Even if philosophically interesting matters such as freedom vs. determinism cannot be
scientifically resolved, some sort of epistemological methodology is needed if we are to avoid
arbitrary conclusions. Whatever approach is chosen, it is clear that James repudiates rationalism,
with its notions of a priori existential truths. He is particularly hostile to German idealism, which
he identifies especially with Hegel and which he attacks in many of his essays (this identification
leads him to be remarkably unfair to Kant, an earlier German idealist). As he makes clear in
“The Sentiment of Rationality,” the personality of the would-be knower and various practical
concerns are far too relevant to allow for such abstract intellectualism. The tradition of modern
empiricism is more promising, yet too atomistic to allow us to move much beyond the
knowledge of acquaintance to genuine comprehension (Will, pp. 63-67, 70, 75-77, 82-86, 89,
92). Fortunately, James had already learned about the pragmatic approach from Peirce.
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lecture. He begins with a standard dictionary analysis of truth as agreement with reality.
Accepting this, he warns that pragmatists and intellectualists will disagree over how to interpret
the concepts of “agreement” and “reality,” the latter thinking that ideas copy what is fixed and
independent of us. By contrast, he advocates a more dynamic and practical interpretation, a true
idea or belief being one we can incorporate into our ways of thinking in such a way that it can be
experientially validated. For James, the “reality” with which truths must agree has three
dimensions: (1) matters of fact, (2) relations of ideas (such as the eternal truths of mathematics),
and (3) the entire set of other truths to which we are committed. To say that our truths must
“agree” with such realities pragmatically means that they must lead us to useful consequences.
He is a fallibilist, seeing all existential truths as, in theory, revisable given new experience. They
involve a relationship between facts and our ideas or beliefs. Because the facts, and our
experience of them, change we must beware of regarding such truths as absolute, as rationalists
tend to do (Pragmatism, pp. 91-97, 100-101). This relativistic theory generated a firestorm of
criticism among mainstream philosophers to which he responded in The Meaning of Truth.
4. Philosophy of Religion
James is arguably the most significant American philosopher of religion in intellectual history,
and many of his writings, in addition to the obligatory “Will to Believe” essay and his book on
The Varieties of Religious Experience, offer provocative insights into that area.
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absence of any objective justification. However, he claims we naturally do so all the time, our
moral and political ideas being obvious examples. When you believe that your mother loves you
or in the sincerity of your best friend, you have no conclusively objective evidence. In addition,
you will never be able to secure such evidence. Yet it often seems unreasonable to refuse to
commit to believing such matters; if we did so, the pragmatic consequences would be a more
impoverished social life. Indeed, in some cases, believing and acting on that belief can help
increase the chances of the belief being true. Now let us apply this argument to religious belief.
What does religion in general propose for our belief? The two-pronged answer is that ultimate
reality is most valuable and that we are better off if we believe that. Committing to that two-
pronged belief is meaningful, as is the refusal to do so. At any given moment, I must either
make that two-pronged commitment or not; and how I experience this life, as well as prospects
for a possible after-life, may be at stake. Whether one makes that commitment or not, pragmatic
consequences can be involved. Nor should we imagine that we could avoid having to make a
choice, as the commitment not to commit is itself a commitment (Will, pp. 1-4, 7-9, 11-14, 22-
30; see also Problems, pp. 221-224).
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materialist) of a sort less refined than idealists and as unable to subscribe to popular Christianity.
He is unwilling to assume that God is one or infinite, even contemplating the polytheistic notion
that the divine is a collection of godlike selves (Varieties, pp. 384-386, 388-390, 392-393, 395-
396). In “The Dilemma of Determinism,” James depicts his image of God with a memorable
analogy, comparing God to a master chess player engaged in a give-and-take with us novices.
We are free to make our own moves; yet the master knows all the moves we could possibly
make, the odds of our choosing one over the others, and how best to respond to any move we
choose to make. This indicates two departures from the traditional Judeo-Christian concept of
God, in that the master is interacting with us in time (rather than eternal) and does not know
everything in the future, to the extent that it is freely chosen by us. In “Reflex Action and
Theism,” James subscribes to a theistic belief in a personal God with whom we can maintain
interpersonal relations, who possesses the deepest power in reality (not necessarily omnipotent)
and a mind (not omniscient). We can love and respect God to the extent that we are committed
to the pursuit of common values. In “Is Life Worth Living?” James even suggests that God may
derive strength and energy from our collaboration (Will, pp. 181-182, 116, 122, 141, 61).
Elsewhere, rejecting the Hegelian notion of God as an all-encompassing Absolute, he subscribes
to a God that is finite in knowledge or in power or in both, one that acts in time and has a history
and an environment, like us (Universe, pp. 269, 272; see Letters, vol. 2, pp. 213-215, for James’s
responses to a 1904 questionnaire regarding his personal religious beliefs).
5. Metaphysics
a. Realms of Reality
In contrast to monists such as Hegel, James believes in multiple worlds, specifying seven realms
of reality we can experience: (1) the realm that serves as the touchstone of reality for most of us
is the world of physical objects of sense experience; (2) the world of science, things understood
in terms of physical forces and laws of nature, is available to the educated; (3) philosophy and
mathematics expose us to a world of abstract truth and ideal relations; (4) as humans, we are all
subject to the distortions of commonplace illusion and prejudices; (5) our cultures expose us to
the realms of mythology and fiction; (6) each of us has his or her own subjective opinions, which
may or may not be expressed to others; and (7) the world of madness can disconnect us from the
reality in which others can readily believe. Normally we can inhabit more than one of these and
be able to discriminate among them. What we take to be real must connect with us personally
because we find it interesting and/or important, which emphasizes elements of both subjectivity
and pragmatic relevance (Principles, vol. 2, pp. 292-299).
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result of divine activity or of the random interactions of atoms moving in space; whether or not it
was intelligently designed in the distant past has no bearing on the fact that we experience it as
we do. But a world intelligently designed by a deity pragmatically involves the possibility of a
promising future, whereas one resulting from unconscious physical forces promises nothing
more than a collapse into meaningless obliteration. On the one hand, if everything we may do or
fail to do is determined, why bother doing anything? On the other hand, if we are free to choose
at least some of our actions, then effort can be meaningful. In the fourth lecture, James states
that our world can be viewed as one (monism) or as an irreducible many (pluralism). There are
certain ways in which we humans generate a unity of the objects of our experience, yet the
absolute unity to which monism is committed remains a perpetually vanishing ideal. In his
seventh lecture, James identifies three dimensions of reality: (1) the objects of factual
experience; (2) relationships between our sensations and our ideas and among our ideas; and (3)
the entire network of truths to which we are committed at any given time. Again, we see here a
combination of subjectivity and pragmatic relevance that views reality as a process of
development, which he calls “humanism” (Pragmatism, pp. 7, 43-55, 62-69, 71, 73-74, 110-111,
115-116; see also Truth, pp. 100-101).
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not is ultimately a matter of personal faith rather than one of objective logic or scientific
evidence (Pragmatism, pp. 125, 127-128, 132).
a. Human Freedom
Like God and human immortality, the possibility of which James defends without firmly
committing himself to believing in it (Immortality, pp. 3, 6-7, 10-18, 20, 23-24, 28-31, 35-37,
39-41, 43-45), freedom is a postulate of rationality, an unprovable article of faith. James wrote
an essay on the topic, called “The Dilemma of Determinism.” After admitting that human
freedom is an old and shopworn topic about which we may suspect that nothing new can be said,
and that he will not pretend to be able to prove or disprove, he launches a pragmatic justification
for believing in it. Indeterminism, the belief in freedom, holds that there is some degree of
possibility that is not necessitated by the rest of reality, while determinism must deny all such
possibilities. These beliefs constitute exhaustive and mutually exclusive alternatives, so that if
we reject either, we logically should accept the other. Let us consider a commonplace example
such as walking home from campus. Before the fact neither the determinist nor the indeterminist
can infallibly predict which path will be taken, but after the fact the determinist can irrefutably
claim that the path taken was necessary, while the indeterminist can irrefutably claim that it was
freely chosen. Thus far, there is no advantage on either side. But now consider the example of a
man gruesomely murdering his loving wife. We hear the awful details recounted and naturally
regret what the wicked man did to her. Now, what are we to make of that regret from the
perspective of determinism? What sense can it make to regret what had to occur? From that
perspective, we logically must embrace pessimism (all of reality is determined to be bad) or
optimism (everything is destined to work out for the best) or subjectivism (good and evil are
merely subjective interpretations we artificially cast on things). All of these can be logically
coherent positions, but each of them minimizes the evil we experience in the world and
trivializes our natural reaction of regret as pointless. From a practical (as opposed to a logical)
point of view, can we live with that? James deliberately puts the point quite personally. Though
thoughtful and reflective pessimists, optimists, and subjectivists can live with it, he would not,
because its pragmatic implications would render life not worth living. In that sense,
determinism, though logically tenable, is pragmatically unacceptable, and James commits to
indeterminism (Will, pp. 145-146, 150-152, 155-156, 160-161, 175-176, 178-179).
b. Moral Responsibility
In addition to God, immortality, and freedom, moral duty is a fourth postulate of rationality.
James offers us one remarkable essay on the topic, entitled “The Moral Philosopher and the
Moral Life.” He addresses three questions: (1) the psychological one, regarding the origins of
our moral values and judgments, (2) the metaphysical one, regarding the grounds of meaning for
our basic moral concepts, and (3) the casuistic one, regarding how we should order conflicting
values. First, our human nature comprises a capacity for an intuitive moral sense, but this must
be developed in a context of values that socially evolve. Second, our basic moral concepts of
good and bad, right and wrong, and so forth, are all person-relative, grounded in the claims
people make on their environment. Third, when values conflict, those which would seem to
satisfy as many personal demands as possible, while frustrating the fewest, should have priority
regardless of the nature of those demands. This represents a pragmatic form of moral relativism,
in which no action can be absolutely good or evil in all conceivable circumstances. Finally,
James distinguishes between “the easy-going mood” that tries to avoid conflict, and “the
strenuous mood” that strives to achieve ideals, apparently preferring the latter (Will, pp. 185-186,
190, 194-195, 197, 201, 205, 209, 211).
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In answering the question of what is the primary objective of human life, James maintains that a
natural answer is happiness. It is this, which motivates us to act and endure. Evolution is often
seen as a progressive advance towards happiness (Varieties, pp. 76, 85). The person who seems
incapable of achieving it may well wonder whether life is worth living; suicide deciding that it is
not. For James there is no absolute answer, and it is relative to the life being lived. A human life
involves an ongoing series of possibilities. Some of these “maybes” may be realized if we
believe in our own capacity to realize them; others will not be, either because we do not try or
because we try and fail. Life can become worth living if we believe that it is and act on that
belief, our commitment giving it meaning (Will, pp. 37, 59-62). Our happiness seems to require
that we have ideals, that we strive to achieve them, and that we think we are making some
progress towards doing so (Talks, pp. 185-189).
7. Social Philosophy
a. Individuals and Their Communities
James’s philosophy is so individualistic that it does not allow for a robust theory of community.
Still, he offers us some interesting insights and one great paper. “Great Men and Their
Environment” views one’s society as not only a context in which great individuals emerge, but
even as playing a selective role in allowing their greatness to develop. In turn, that social
environment is affected by them. Whether or not an individual will be able to have an impact is,
to some extent, determined by society. Thus socially significant individuals and their
communities have a dynamic, correlative relationship. In a follow-up article, “The Importance
of Individuals,” he maintains that agents of social change, beyond being gifted in some way(s),
tend to take greater advantage of given circumstances than more ordinary persons do (Will, pp.
225-226, 229-230, 232, 259).
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would yield good consequences rather than more suffering (Studies, pp. 300-301, 303-306, 267,
269, 275-276, 280, 283, 286-292).
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b. Secondary Sources
Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984.
o This is a non-technical discussion of James’s life and thought.
R. W. B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1991.
o This is a monumental collective biography of the James family.
Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986.
o This is a long, comprehensive, in-depth analysis of James’s psychology and
philosophy.
Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James: Briefer Version.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948.
o This is a classic intellectual biography of James by one of his famous students.
Ruth Anna Putnam, The Cambridge Companion to William James. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
o This is a collection of critical analyses of important parts of James’s thought.
Robert J. Vanden Burgt, The Religious Philosophy of William James. Chicago: Nelson-
Hall, 1981.
o This is a short but illuminating treatment of James’s philosophy of religion.
Author Information
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Wayne P. Pomerleau
Email: Pomerleau@calvin.gonzaga.edu
Gonzaga University
U. S. A.
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