About
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, born in New York City and the elder brother of the novelist Henry James. He earned a Harvard MD in 1869 but never practised, becoming instead the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States; The Principles of Psychology (1890) gave the field the 'stream of consciousness', and his James–Lange theory held that our felt perception of the body's own changes is the emotion, rather than its consequence. With Charles Sanders Peirce he founded pragmatism, set out in Pragmatism (1907), and he went on to develop a radical empiricism in which the relations between things are as much a part of experience as the things themselves. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) treated mystical and conversion experience as serious psychological evidence. Called the father of American psychology, he left a picture of mind as a flowing process rather than a container — and a definition of intelligence as reaching the same goal by different means — that people thinking about biological and artificial minds still reach for.
Key Contributions
- Wrote The Principles of Psychology (1890) and coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness'
- Proposed, with Carl Lange, the James–Lange theory that feeling the body's changes is the emotion
- Co-founded pragmatism with Charles Sanders Peirce and set it out in Pragmatism (1907)
- Developed radical empiricism: relations between things are directly experienced, not added by the mind
- Studied mystical and conversion experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Connections
Kitarō Nishida
InfluencedPhilosopher, Founder of the Kyoto School
Nishida's first book opens with a term he took from James: pure experience, the moment of seeing a colour before you have judged that it is a colour, or that someone is seeing it. He kept James's starting point and changed its owner. Where James's version stayed close to an individual stream of consciousness, Nishida stressed experience that is not yet anyone's: it comes before there is an individual to have it, and the self is something that forms inside it.
plato.stanford.edu · Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (1911)
Alfred North Whitehead
InfluencedMathematician & Process Philosopher
The preface to Process and Reality (1929) says Whitehead is 'greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey', and that he wants to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism. He took James's observation that experience arrives in 'buds or drops of perception' and built it into his epochal theory of time. His biographer Victor Lowe called the relation less influence than sympathy: Whitehead gave James's psychology a cosmology.
encyclopedia.whiteheadresearch.org · Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929), Preface, p. xii; p. 68
Michael Levin
InfluencedBiologist & Morphogenesis Researcher
When Levin needs a definition of intelligence that does not presuppose a brain, he reaches for James: the ability to reach the same goal by different means. It does the heavy lifting in his account of cells and tissues as problem-solvers — a newt whose cells are made several times too large still builds a normal-sized animal, by using fewer of them, and so passes James's test. With Matt Segall he also took up James's suggestion that it is not obvious which is the thought and which the thinker.
youtube.com · youtube.com · youtube.com · footnotes2plato.substack.com
Lisa Feldman Barrett
InfluencedDistinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University
Barrett claims James as a forerunner of psychological construction: he warned that 'there is no definite affection of "anger" in an "entitative" sense', and that naming a group of phenomena tempts us to suppose an entity behind them. She also marks where she parts from him — James is perhaps the one constructionist who reduced emotion to its bodily component. That makes him her ancestor and her foil at once, which is how the James–Lange theory usually enters arguments about whether a machine could have feelings.
affective-science.org
