William James
1842 – 1910 · New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts
A founder of American psychology and of pragmatism, who described the stream of consciousness and argued for the right to believe.
Key ideas
James's Principles of Psychology described consciousness as a continuous stream rather than a chain of separate ideas, and examined habit, attention and emotion with a vividness that made it a classic of both science and literature.
As a founder of pragmatism, he held that the meaning of an idea lies in its practical consequences, and that true ideas are those that work, that we can verify and live by. In The Will to Believe he argued that when a choice is live, forced and momentous, and evidence cannot settle it, we are entitled to let our passions decide.
In 'The Dilemma of Determinism' he rejected both hard determinism and what he called the 'soft determinism' of the compatibilists, which he thought evaded the real issue, and defended a world with genuine chance in it.
“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
William James, Diary, 30 April 1870
Life, briefly
James was the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He trained as a doctor, went through a long period of depression in his twenties which he said was broken partly by deciding to believe in free will, and taught at Harvard for over thirty years, first physiology, then psychology, then philosophy.
Major works
- The Principles of Psychology (1890)
- The Will to Believe (1897)
- The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
- Pragmatism (1907)
Schools of thought
Appears in
Further reading
- EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: William James
- WikipediaWilliam James