Philosophy
1842 to 1910, New York City, USA
Pragmatism, the will to believe, and the stream of consciousness - a philosophy for a world still in the making.
Start learning William →William James’s pragmatism - the method that settles disputes by tracing their practical consequences, and the theory that an idea’s truth is not a property it simply has but something that happens to it, as…
James’s defence of our right to believe ahead of the evidence - when an option is living, forced, and momentous and cannot be settled by reason alone, refusing to decide is itself a decision, and may cost us the t…
James’s revolution in psychology: consciousness is not a chain of separate mental ‘atoms’ but a continuous, personal, ever-changing, selective flow - a stream in which no state ever recurs unchanged, a…
James’s empirical study of religion from the inside - not creeds or institutions but the lived experiences of individuals: the once-born and the twice-born, conversion, saintliness, and mysticism - judged not by t…
James’s mature metaphysics: that relations and connections are themselves directly experienced (radical empiricism), and that reality is not one closed system (the ‘block universe’) but a genuinely ope…
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