William James (1842-1910) was a groundbreaking thinker who worked in several different fields, including physiology, psychology, and philosophy. His twelve-hundred-page masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of all 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”. This book is rich in pragmatism and phenomenology, and it has had a profound influence on thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
James’s early writings were predominantly philosophical in nature, rather than scientific. Some interesting remarks on Spencer’s idea of mind as correspondence can be found in his works “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879, 1882) and “Some Remarks on Spencer’s Notion of Mind as Correspondence” (1878). These papers contain the first statements of James’s view that philosophical theories are reflections of the philosopher’s temperament.
In 1855, James’s family moved to Europe and he attended school in Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne-sur-Mer. At this point in his life he developed interests in painting and science. Later, in 1858, the family settled in Newport, Rhode Island, where James studied painting with William Hunt.
A year later, they moved back to Geneva, where William studies science at Geneva Academy and then returned to Newport when William decided he wishes to resume his study of painting. As his passion for paining faded, William abandoned painting and entered Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, in 1861, continued his study and joined Harvard School of Medicine in 1864.
While he achieved many things during his studies, like joining his teacher Louis Agassiz’s on his Amazon expedition and travelling to Europe where he first formally studied psychology, physiology, and philosophy at the Berlin University, James suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies throughout his career, which is why he never practiced his M.D degree.
In 1872, William James accepted the offer from President Eliot of Harvard to teach undergraduate physiology. He was also the first to set up an American psychology laboratory in 1874-5, when he was teaching psychology. He married in 1878, and continued publishing his several writing and prominent works.
In his early essays, James hints at his religious concerns. These concerns 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 vacillated between the belief that “the study of human nature” (like variety) could advance “the science of religion” and the belief that religious experience involved a completely supernatural realm, somehow inaccessible to science, but accessible to individual human subjects.
Some of his most important contributions in the field of philosophy were made by James in the last decade of his life. In 1904, the philosopher set out the metaphysical view most commonly known as “neutral monism,” according to which there is only one fundamental “stuff” that is neither material nor mental. In his book, “A Pluralistic Universe,” the author defends the mystical and anti-pragmatic view that concepts distort reality, rather than revealing it. In his book, “Pragmatism,” he presents systematically a set of views about truth, knowledge, reality, religion, and philosophy that permeate his writings from the late 1870s onwards.
In 1910 he published his last work, “A Pluralistic Mystic” in Hibbert Journal. An abandoned attempt to complete a “system” of philosophy. His partially completed work was published after his death as Some Problems of Philosophy. He died of heart failure at summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire in 1910.
