William James

American philosopher and psychologist

Date of Birth	:	11 Jan, 1842
Date of Death	:	26 Aug, 1910
Place of Birth	:	New York, New York, United States
Profession	:	American Philosopher, Psychologist
Nationality	:	American

William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers in the United States, and is considered the "father of American psychology".

Along with Charles Sanders Peirce, James founded the philosophical school known as pragmatism and is cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. A Review of General Psychology Analysis, published in 2002, ranked James as the 14th most prominent psychologist of the 20th century. A 1991 survey published in the American Psychologist ranked James' reputation second only to Wilhelm Wand, who is widely considered the founder of experimental psychology. James also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced philosophers and educators such as Emile Durkheim, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Marilyn Robinson.

Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr. and the brother of both the distinguished novelist Henry James and the diarist Alice James. James trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard, but never practiced medicine. Instead, he pursued his interests in psychology and then philosophy. He wrote extensively on many subjects, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology; Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy; and the diversity of religious experience, an investigation of different forms of religious experience, including theories of mind-healing.

First half of life

William James was born on January 11, 1842 at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Senior, a renowned and exceptionally wealthy Swedenborgian theologian who was well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elite of his time. The intellectual genius of the James family environment and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them of constant interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. The education of the James family encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe when William James was still a child, creating a pattern that led to thirteen more European trips in his life. James wanted to pursue painting, his first artistic turn leading to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but his father urged him to become a physician instead. Since this did not align with James' interests, he said he wanted to specialize in physiology. Once he realized that this was not what he wanted to do, he then announced that he was going to specialize in neurology and psychology. James then moved to Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School for scientific research in 1861.

In his early youth, James suffered from various physical ailments, including eye, back, stomach and skin ailments. He was also tone deaf. He was subject to a variety of psychotic symptoms diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for several months. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilkie) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. James himself was an advocate of peace. He suggested that young men serve in the army instead of serving the public for a term of service, "to remove childishness from them." The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from infertility.

He studied medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1864 (according to his brother Henry James). He took a break to join the naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition to the Amazon River in the spring of 1865, but canceled the trip after eight months, as he suffered from severe seasickness and mild smallpox. In April 1867 his studies were again interrupted by illness. He went to Germany in search of a cure and stayed there until November 1868; He was 26 years old at that time. During this period, he began to publish; Reviews of his work have appeared in literary periodicals such as the North American Review.

James finally earned his MD degree in June 1869 but never practiced medicine. What he called his "soul-sickness" would be resolved in 1872, after a long period of philosophical inquiry. He married Alice Gibbons in 1878. In 1882 he joined the Theosophical Society.

working life

James corresponded throughout his life with a variety of writers and scholars, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Cedis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonia Fernandez, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, G. Stanley Hall, Henri Bergson, Carl Jung, Jane Addams and Sigmund Freud.

James spent most of his academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in physiology for the spring of 1873, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, psychologist in the chair in 1885. 1897, and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in 1907.

James studied medicine, physiology and biology and began teaching in those subjects, but was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was establishing itself as a science. James's exposure to the work of such figures as Hermann Helmholtz of Germany and Pierre Janet of France helped launch a course in scientific psychology at Harvard University. In the academic year 1875-1876 he gave his first lecture on experimental psychology at Harvard.

During his Harvard years, James joined Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright in philosophical discussions and debates that in 1872 developed into a lively group known informally as The Metaphysical Club. Louis Menand (2001) suggests that this club provides a foundation. For decades of American intellectual thought. James joined the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 to oppose the US annexation of the Philippines.

The family

William James was the son of Henry James (Sr.) and Mary Robertson Walsh of Albany. He had four siblings: Henry (novelist), Garth Wilkinson, Robertson and Ellis. William was engaged to Alice Howe Gibbens on May 10, 1878; They got married on 10 July. They had 5 children: Henry (May 18, 1879 - 1947), William (June 17, 1882 - 1961), Herman (1884, died in infancy), Margaret (March 1887 - 1950) and Alexander (December 22, 1890 - 1946 ).

Most of William James' ancestors came to America from Scotland or Ireland in the 18th century. Many of them settled in eastern New York or New Jersey. James' ancestors were all Protestant, well-educated and characterful. Within their communities, they worked as farmers, merchants, and traders who were heavily involved with their church. The last ancestor to come to America was William James' grandfather also named William James. He came to America from Ballyjamesduff, County Cavan, Ireland in 1789 when he was 18 years old. It is suspected that he fled to America because his family tried to force him into the ministry. After traveling to America penniless, he got a job as a clerk in a store. After working continuously, he managed to own the shop himself. As he traveled west looking for more work opportunities, he became involved in various ventures such as the salt industry and the Erie Canal project. After becoming a prominent worker in the Erie Canal project and helping to make Albany a major center of commerce, he became the first vice-president of the Albany Savings Bank. William James (grandfather) rose from a poor Irish immigrant to become one of New York's richest men. After his death, his son Henry James inherited his fortune and lived in Europe and the United States in search of meaning in life.

Of James' five children, two—Margaret and Alexander—are known to have had children. Alexander's descendants are still alive.

Writings

William James wrote extensively throughout his life. A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott, is 47 pages long.

He became widely known for his psychological treatise The Principles of Psychology (1890), which totaled twelve hundred pages in two volumes, which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: A Briefer Course, was an abridgement of 1892 designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his time as competing dogmas of little explanatory value and sought to reconceptualize the human mind as inherently objective and selective.

President Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalence of War speech on April 17, 1977, equated the US energy crisis of the 1970s, the oil crisis, and the changes and sacrifices that Carter's proposed plan would require with the "moral equivalent of war". The title and much of its theme derive from James's classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War," his last lecture, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, and published in 1910, in which "James considered one of the classic problems of politics: how to maintain political unity in the absence of war or a credible threat. and maintaining civic virtue, and which "sounds a rallying cry for service to the interests of the individual and the nation".

Simply put, his philosophy and writings can be understood as emphasizing "fruit over roots", reflecting his pragmatic tendency to focus on the practical consequences of ideas rather than indulge in unproductive metaphysical reasoning or fruitless attempts at ground truth. abstract way. Ever the empiricist, James believes that we are better off evaluating the effectiveness of ideas by testing them on the common ground of lived experience.

James is remembered as one of America's representative thinkers, psychologists, and philosophers. William James was also an influential writer on religion, psychological research, and self-help.

Epistemology

James defines true faith as that which proves effective for the believer. His realist theory of truth was a synthesis of the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth, with an additional dimension. Truth can be verified to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond to real things, as well as to the extent that they "hang together" or fit together, as pieces of a puzzle fit together; They are verified by the observed results of applying a concept in real practice.

Even the most ancient parts of truth were once plastic. They are called truths for human reasons. They still mediated between earlier truths and what were then novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in the establishment of which the satisfaction of man by marrying the earlier part of experience with the new, played no part, is nowhere to be found. The reasons we call true are the reasons why they are true, because 'being true' simply means performing this marriage-work.

—"Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," Pragmatism (1907), p. 83.

James held a world view in line with realism, declaring that the value of any truth depends entirely on the use of the person who holds it. Additional tenets of James' realism include the view that the world is a mosaic of different experiences that can only be properly interpreted and understood through the application of 'radical empiricism'. Radical empiricism, not related to everyday scientific empiricism, insists that the world and experience can never be stopped for completely objective analysis; The mind of the observer and the act of observation influence any empirical approach to truth. Mind, its experience and nature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—as opposed to duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality—remained a powerful influence in American culture. James' description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of 'stream of consciousness', had a direct and significant influence on avant-garde and modernist literature and art, particularly James Joyce.

Doctrine will believe

In William James's 1896 lecture entitled "The Will to Believe," James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify the hypothesis enterprise. This idea presaged 20th-century objections to evidencialism and sought to justify belief in an unwavering principle that would prove more beneficial. Through his philosophy of pragmatism, William James justified religious belief by using the results of his speculative ventures as evidence to support the truth of the hypothesis. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to presuppose belief in God and prove his existence by what that belief brings to one's life.

It was criticized by rationalists of skepticism, such as Bertrand Russell in Free Thought and Official Propaganda and Alfred Henry Lloyd with The Will to Doubt. Both argued that one must always adhere to fallibilism, recognizing in all human knowledge that "none of our beliefs is completely true; all have at least a portion of ambiguity and error," and that the only way to progress closer to truth is never to assume certainty, but always Examining all aspects and trying to arrive at a decision objectively.

Instinct

Like Sigmund Freud, James was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At the core of James' theory of psychology, defined in The Principles of Psychology (1890), was a system of "instincts". James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more so than other animals. These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and one another, because many instincts were actually in conflict with each other. In the 1920s, however, psychology moved away from evolutionary theory and embraced radical behaviorism.

Theory of Emotion

James is one of the two names of James-Lange's theory of emotion, which he formulated independently of Karl Lange in the 1880s. This theory holds that emotion is the mind's perception of a physiological state that results from some stimulus. In James' oft-cited example, it is not that we see a bear, get scared, and run; We see a bear and run; As a result, we fear bears. Emotions are our mind's perception of elevated adrenaline levels, heartbeat, etc.

This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of aesthetics as well as the philosophy and practice of education. Here is a passage from his work, The Principles of Psychology, that spells out those conclusions:

It must immediately be emphasized that the aesthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given to us by certain lines and masses and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling which is primary, and not because it reacts behind other sensations successively stimulated elsewhere. . To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and their harmonious combinations, it may be added true, secondary pleasures; And these secondary pleasures play a large part in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind. The more classic one's tastes are, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures experienced than the primary ones.

Emotion theory was also developed independently by the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi in Italy.

See Social Darwinism

When James accepted Darwin's theory of biological evolution, he considered the social Darwinism promoted by philosophers such as Herbert Spencer to be a sham. He was highly skeptical of applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to human society in a way that placed the Anglo-Saxons at the top of the hierarchy. James's rejection of social Darwinism was a minority opinion at Harvard in the 1870s and 1880s.

See on Spiritualism and Sangamism

James studied closely the schools of thought known as associationism and spiritualism. An associationist's view is that each experience that leads to one leads to another, creating a chain of events. Association does not connect two concepts, but physical objects. This association occurs at an atomic level. Small physical changes occur in the brain that eventually form complex ideas or associations. Thinking is created as these complex ideas work together and lead to new experiences. Both Isaac Newton and David Hartley were pioneers of this school of thought, proposing the idea that "the bodily vibrations of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves are the basis of all sensation, all perception, and all motion..." With association he believed it was very simple. He refers to associationism as "psychology without a soul" because there is nothing in the creation of ideas; They are created by simply connecting objects to each other.

On the other hand, a spiritualist believes that mental phenomena are attributed to the soul. Whereas in associationism, ideas and behavior are separate, in spiritualism, they are connected. Spirituality includes the term instinctualism, which suggests that ideas cause behavior. Perceptions of past behavior influence a person's behavior in the future; All these ideas are tied together by spirit. Therefore, an inner self causes one to have a thought, which leads them to perform a behavior, and the memory of past behavior determines how one will act in the future.

James had strong opinions about all these schools of thought. He was, by nature, a pragmatist and thus took the view that the parts of the theory that made the most sense and could be proven should be used. Therefore, he recommended separating Spiritualism and Sanghvaism and using the parts of them that made the most sense. James believed that every person has a soul, which exists in a spiritual universe, and leads a person to perform behaviors in the physical world. James was influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg, who first introduced him to the concept. James said that, although it appears that people use associations to move from one event to another, this cannot be done without the spirit uniting everything together. Because, after an association is formed, it is the person who decides which part of it to focus on and therefore the direction in which the following associations will be directed. Associationism is very simple in that it does not account for decisions about future behavior, and memories of what worked well and what didn't. Spirituality, however, does not exhibit an actual physical representation for how association occurs. James combined the views of Spiritualism and Sanghaism to create his own way of thinking. James discusses soft-minded thinkers as religious, optimistic, dogmatic, and monistic. Hard-hearted thinkers were irreligious, pessimistic, pluralistic and skeptical. Sane-minded individuals believing in God and universal order were seen as natural believers. Those who focused on human misery and suffering were identified as sick souls.