William
James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of
physiology, psychology and philosophy. His twelve-hundred
page
masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich
blend of
physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that
has
given us such ideas as "the stream of thought" and the
baby's impression of the world "as one great blooming,
buzzing confusion" (PP 462). It contains seeds of
pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of
thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand
Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. James studied at
Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine,
but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as
scientific. "Some Remarks on Spencer's Notion of Mind
as Correspondence" (1878) and "The Sentiment of
Rationality" (1879, 1882) presage his future pragmatism and
pluralism, and contain the first statements of his view that
philosophical theories are reflections of a philosopher's
temperament.
James hints at
his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The
Principles, but they become more explicit in The Will to
Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human
Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic
Universe (1909). James oscillated between thinking that
a "study in human nature" such as Varieties could
contribute to a "Science of Religion" and the belief
that religious experience involves an altogether supernatural
domain, somehow inaccessible to science but accessible to the
individual human subject.
James made some of his most important philosophical contributions
in
the last decade of his life. In a burst of writing in 1904-5
(collected
in Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)) he set out the
metaphysical view
most commonly known as "neutral monism," according to
which there is one fundamental "stuff" that is neither
material nor mental. In "A
Pluralistic Universe" he defends the mystical and
anti-pragmatic view
that concepts distort rather than reveal reality, and in his
influential
Pragmatism (1907), he presents systematically a set of views about
truth, knowledge, reality, religion, and philosophy that permeate
his
writings from the late 1870s onwards.
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