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- The Varieties of Religious Experience William James.
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking William James.
- The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1 William James.
- Pragmatism and Other Writings William James, Giles Gunn (Editor)
William James was a 19th-century American intellectual who made contributions to a range of disciplines including psychology and philosophy. Despite being written more than a century ago, his books continue to be recommended by experts on Five Books for a variety of reasons.
- The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy William James 1728 downloads.
- Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking William James 1424 downloads.
- The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature William James 1362 downloads.
- The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2) William James 845 downloads.
The Complete Works of William James. Illustrated: The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Principles of Psychology. Pragmatism. by William James. Kindle. $049. Digital List Price: $1.99. Available instantly.
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- Early life and education
William James was born on January 11, 1842.
When did William James die?
William James died on August 26, 1910.
What did William James write?
William James wrote The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism: A New Name for Old Ways of Thinking (1907), and other works.
Why is William James famous?
James was the eldest son of Henry James, an idiosyncratic and voluble man whose philosophical interests attracted him to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg. One of William’s brothers was the novelist Henry James. The elder Henry James held an “antipathy to all ecclesiasticisms which he expressed with abounding scorn and irony throughout all his later years.” Both his physical and his spiritual life were marked by restlessness and wanderings, largely in Europe, that affected the training of his children at school and their education at home. Building upon the works of Swedenborg, which had been proffered as a revelation from God for a new age of truth and reason in religion, the elder James had constructed a system of his own that seems to have served him as a vision of spiritual life. This philosophy provided the permanent intellectual atmosphere of William’s home life, to some degree compensating for the undisciplined irregularity of his schooling, which ranged from New York to Boulogne, France, and to Geneva and back. The habits acquired in dealing with his father’s views at dinner and at tea carried over into the extraordinarily sympathetic yet critical manner that William displayed in dealing with anybody’s views on any occasion.
When James was 18 years of age, he tried his hand at studying art, under the tutelage of William M. Hunt, an American painter of religious subjects. But he soon tired of it and the following year entered the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. From courses in chemistry, anatomy, and similar subjects there, he went to the study of medicine in the Harvard Medical School, but he interrupted this study in order to accompany the eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz, in the capacity of assistant, on an expedition to the Amazon. There James’s health failed, and his duties irked him. He returned to the medical school for a term and then during 1867–68 went to Germany for courses with the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who formulated the law of the conservation of energy; with Rudolf Virchow, a pathologist; with Claude Bernard, the foremost experimentalist of 19th-century medicine; and with others. At the same time he read widely in the psychology and philosophy then current, especially the writings of Charles Renouvier, a Kantian idealist and relativist.
The acquaintance with Renouvier was a focal point in James’s personal and intellectual history. He seems from adolescence to have been a delicate boy, always ailing, and at this period of his stay in Germany he suffered a breakdown, with thoughts of suicide. When he returned home in November 1868, after 18 months in Germany, he was still ill. Though he took the degree of M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in June 1869, he was unable to begin practice. Between that date and 1872 he lived in a state of semi-invalidism in his father’s house, doing nothing but reading and writing an occasional review. Early in this period he experienced a sort of phobic panic, which persisted until the end of April 1870. It was relieved, according to his own statement, by the reading of Renouvier on free will and the decision that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” The decision carried with it the abandonment of all determinisms—both the scientific kind that his training had established for him and that seems to have had some relation to his neurosis and the theological, metaphysical kind that he later opposed in the notion of “the block universe.” His revolutionary discoveries in psychology and philosophy, his views concerning the methods of science, the qualities of human beings, and the nature of reality all seem to have received a definite propulsion from this resolution of his poignant personal problem.
Britannica Quiz
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers ...
Top William James titles. The Meaning of Truth (Concise Edition) (Foundat…. Mind-Dust and White Crows: The Psychical Researc…. Varieties of Religious Experience, a Stu…. The Principles of Psychology, Vol. William James : Writings 1902-1910 : The Variet…. The Will to Believe : and Other Essays in Popular Philos….
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