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Gunn Giles - Pragmatism and Other Writings

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The writings of William James represent one of Americas most original contributions to the history of ideas. Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism. Pragmatism grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with The Meaning of Truth, Psychology, The Will to Believe, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Read more...
Abstract: The writings of William James represent one of Americas most original contributions to the history of ideas. Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism. Pragmatism grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with The Meaning of Truth, Psychology, The Will to Believe, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology

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CONTENTS

PENGUIN Picture 1 CLASSICS

PRAGMATISM AND OTHER WRITINGS

William James was born to Henry James, Sr., the peripatetic nineteenth-century religious philosopher and devotee of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and his wife, the former Martha R. Walsh, in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the eldest of five children, his siblings including the novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James.

James attempted for a time to become a painter before commencing an education at Harvard in 1861 that would lead him by way of studies in chemistry, comparative anatomy, and physiology toward an M.D. degree in 1869. But Jamess first love was always philosophy. After an initial appointment at Harvard in 1873 as an instructor in physiology and anatomy, he was invited three years later to begin offering courses in psychology and philosophy. In 1878, the year he signed a contract with Henry Holt to publish a textbook on psychology that eventuated as his two-volume masterwork The Principles of Psychology (1890), he married Alice Howe Gibbens, with whom he was to have five children. In 1880 he assumed a new position as assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard.

Because of his early artistic inclinations as well as his later scientific training, James was always a committed but wary empiricist who sought to thread his way between the emergent new materialisms of his day and the thick legacy of religious and philosophical idealism that suffused so much post-Civil War American intellectual culture. The Principles of Psychology and his later The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) helped up to a point to secure Jamess reputation as a tough-minded lover of facts who was nonetheless intent on complicating, even humanizing, our notions of the real. In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, published in 1897, and Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, which appeared ten years later, together with The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, and A Pluralistic Universe, published in 1909, and Essays in Radical Empiricism, published posthumously in 1912, James sought to make idealisms of all kinds moral, philosophical, religious, and social more critical of themselves. James died of heart failure on August 26, 1910.

Giles Gunn is professor of English and of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author and editor of a dozen volumes, the most recent of which are Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (1992) and the anthologies (with Stephen Greenblatt) Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992) and Early American Writing (1994), he has written and lectured widely on American literature, culture, and thought, as well as on cultural theory and criticism, in the United States and abroad.

PRAGMATISM AND OTHER WRITINGS

Picture 2

WILLIAM JAMES

EDITED WITH AN
INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
GILES GUNN

PENGUIN BOOKS

INTRODUCTION

William James is a thinker whose charm as well as importance derives at least in part from his ability to appeal to different readers in different eras and for different reasons. This remarkable availability for repossession by such varied readers in so many eras would be less likely, perhaps, if James were not so protean a philosopher. Indeed, to call him a philosopher in the traditional sense is to risk doing him an injustice.

Jamess first book which some still consider his greatest was entitled The Principles of Psychology and was published in two volumes in 1890. This pioneering study, which was immediately received with wide acclaim and adopted as a text in many British and American universities, was then followed seven years later by a collection of essays in what appeared to be moral and religious thought entitled The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. The essays comprised in this volume, a volume James almost immediately wished he had called instead The Right to Believe, turned out in some respects to prepare him for the prestigious Gifford Lectures that he was invited to give in May and June of 1901 and 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and which were published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religions Experience. However, it was not until five years later, in 1907, that James published the lectures in practical philosophy, as he termed it, that would ever after provide his thinking with its signature description.

First delivered as a set in Boston to a large and receptive audience at the Lowell Institute in November and December 1906, and then later to a much larger and still more enthusiastic audience at Columbia University in January and February 1907, the essays gathered under the title Pragmatism, and dedicated to one of the great exponents of liberty, John Stuart Mill, were almost immediately to define Jamess reputation in the public mind, even as they produced widespread consternation in more specialized philosophical circles. Preceded by several additional texts in practical, indeed popular, philosophy such as his one-volume condensation of The Principlesentitled Psychology: Briefer Course, published in 1892, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Lifes Ideals, based on a lecture series he frequently gave at Harvard, published in 1899, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking was quickly followed by a succession of other volumes. These include The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism, in which he attempted to clarify some of the misinterpretations that the earlier text immediately produced (and still does), and the posthumously published and unfinished Essays in Radical Empiricism, in which he sought to flesh out the lineaments of his metaphysics. Taken together with such additional works as A Pluralistic Universe, which appeared in 1909, and Some Problems in Philosophy, published in 1911, the year after James died, these many volumes, along with more than a hundred essays he wrote on similar or related subjects, as well as a plethora of articles on issues of more topical concern, describe a thinker who was a master not only of philosophy, as it classically defined itself in his age around questions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and the theory of truth, but also of critical thinking generally, as it was seeking to reconstitute itself as a form of public discourse capable of reflecting on such philosophically nontraditional subjects as psychology, religion, educational theory, social thought, politics, cultural experience, and contemporary morals and manners.

Yet what sets all of Jamess writing apart, rendering it simultaneously so attractive and so accessible, are his immense and varied gifts not only as a thinker but also as a writer. James was brilliantly adept at producing an American middle style that makes up in suppleness, wit, grace, and fluidity for what it sometimes lacks, at least for certain kinds of readers, in coherence, rigor, and internal consistency. James writes always out of the decencies and commonplaces and reasonableness of ordinary experience, which he welcomes into his thinking not only as an old and trusted if also frequently amusing friend but also as an ever-renewing and renewable source for reflection. Thought should never rise so far above the plane of common life, James seems to say, that it forgets where it came from and to what it must finally be accountable.

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