scholarly journals William James and British thought: then and now

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-56
Author(s):  
David E. Leary
Keyword(s):  
Physiological Psychology ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
William James ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Theoretical Conclusion ◽  
Therapeutic Practice ◽  
Cognition And Emotion ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
Mind And Brain

The American psychologist and philosopher William James drew inspiration from British evolutionary theory, neurology, psychiatry, psychology and philosophy. Trained in anatomy, physiology and medicine, he developed a physiological psychology that offered acute analyses of consciousness and of the relations between mind and brain, habit and thought, cognition and emotion and other aspects of psychology. One of his insights, regarding the relation between attention and will, was based upon his own experience of panic anxiety, which was resolved through his reading of several British authors. The story of his psychiatric experience, practical response and later theoretical conclusion offers a potential contribution to contemporary therapeutic practice.

The Hermeneutical Keys to William James’s Philosophy of Religion: Protestant Impulses, Vital Belief

2010 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-316
Author(s):  
David J. Zehnder
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
Over Time

This essay argues that the American psychologist and philosopher William James should be viewed in the Lutheran Reformation’s tradition because this viewpoint offers the hermeneutical key to his philosophy of religion. Though James obviously didn’t ascribe to biblical authority, he expressed the following religious sensibilities made possible by Martin Luther and his contemporaries: 1) challenge of prevailing systems, 2) anti-rationalism, 3) being pro-religious experience and dynamic belief, 4) need for a personal, caring God, and also 5) a gospel of religious comfort. This essay asks, in one specific form, how religious concerns can hold steady over time but cause very different expressions of faith.

Münsterberg, Hugo (1863–1916)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Gerow
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Forensic Psychology ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Applied Psychology ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
American Psychologist

Hugo Münsterberg was a German American psychologist whose pioneering work in applied psychology led him to investigate such topics as forensic psychology, industrial efficiency, and even the motion pictures. Born in Germany, he studied psychology under Wilhelm Mundt (1832–1920) before being invited to teach at Harvard by William James (1842–1910). While making important contributions to experimental and clinical psychology from a behaviorist standpoint, his belief in applied psychology made him a prominent contributor to popular magazines, commenting on the contributions of psychology to industrial organization (as a Taylorist), business, science, education, and criminology. In terms of Modernism, his greatest contribution was as the author of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), one of the first theoretical examinations of the cinema. While defending film as an art through a neo-Kantian analysis of its differences from both other media and physical reality, Münsterberg in particular argued the parallels between emergent filmic devices such as the close-up and flashbacks, and psychological processes like attention and memory. Cinema was a superior art because of this, becoming aesthetic in Kant’s sense—disinterested and purposive without purpose—because it was not a slavish reproduction of reality, but rather an embodiment of the workings of the human mind. Münsterberg’s approach to film influenced later attempts to understand the medium through psychology and spectatorship.

scholarly journals The History Of Psychotherapy. Lecture 2. Historical Background Of Psychotherapy (Part IV)

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-145
Author(s):  
I.B. Grinshpun
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
History Of Psychotherapy ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

The paper continues the cycle of lectures by Igor Borisovitch Grinshpun on history of psychotherapy. The current part of the lecture recounts the work of American psychologist and philosopher William James. His main works “The Principles of Psychology” and “The Varieties of Religious Experience” are discussed, his ideas on consciousness and personality are considered, and their influence on psychology and psychotherapy is traced. This lecture takes stock of the historical background of psychotherapy and makes a summary of the main events of the 19th century, which either influenced psychotherapy directly or proved significant to the development of psychotherapy. Students and colleagues of I.B. Grinshpun prepared the text for publication: Yana Bovbas, Ekaterina Mazaeva, Maria Marchenkova.

Evolution and the Human Mind: how far can we go?

2001 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 267-275
Author(s):  
Henry Plotkin
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
William James ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Wilhelm Wundt ◽  
The Social

There is a close coincidence in time between the appearance of psychology as a science and the rise of evolutionary theory. The first laboratory of experimental psychology was established in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt just as Darwin's writings were beginning to have their enormous impact, especially as they might be applied to understanding the human mind (Darwin, 1871). Psychology is an important discipline because it straddles the boundary between the biological sciences and the social or human sciences (defined as those sciences that study exclusively human characteristics) of anthropology, sociology and economics. Given that importance, and given that new sciences lack the conceptual history within which older, established sciences might be mired, it might have been expected that psychology would have embraced in a way that established sciences did not the equally new, sensational and central theorem of biology which spoke to the origins of species as well as the origins of their traits and, crucially, the functions of those traits. Yet for over a century evolutionary theory had virtually no presence in psychology, despite having powerful friends like William James at court (James, 1880).

TWO ROUTES TO EMOTION: SOME IMPLICATIONS OF MULTI-LEVEL THEORIES OF EMOTION FOR THERAPEUTIC PRACTICE

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Power ◽  
Tim Dalgleish
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Clinical Theory ◽  
Therapeutic Practice ◽  
Cognition And Emotion ◽  
Cognitive Behaviour ◽  
Clinical Consequences ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Sequential Processes ◽  
The Relationship

Traditional models of the relationship between cognition and emotion have typically presented the relationship between cognition and emotion as a single level of sequential processes. However, a number of more recent models have argued to the contrary that the relationship is complex and has to be modelled by multi-level processing systems. One such model, the SPAARS approach (Power & Dalgleish, 1997), is summarized, in particular, in relation to clinical theory and practice in the cognitive behaviour therapies. For example, the proposal in SPAARS that there are two parallel routes to the production of emotion has a number of interesting clinical consequences. Highlights are presented of what some of these consequences might be, and a number of recommendations are made for clinical practice.

William James

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krister Dylan Knapp
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Professional Relationships ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Psychical Research ◽  
Third Way ◽  
American Psychologist ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Will

In this insightful new book on the remarkable William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, Krister Dylan Knapp provides the first deeply historical and acutely analytical account of James's psychical research. While showing that James always maintained a critical stance toward claims of paranormal phenomena like spiritualism, Knapp uses new sources to argue that psychical research held a strikingly central position in James's life. It was crucial to his familial and professional relationships, the fashioning of his unique intellectual disposition, and the shaping of his core doctrines, especially the will-to-believe, empiricism, fideism, and theories of the subliminal consciousness and immortality. Knapp explains how and why James found in psychical research a way to rethink the well-trodden approaches to classic Euro-American religious thought, typified by the oppositional categories of natural vs. supernatural and normal vs. paranormal. He demonstrates how James eschewed these choices and instead developed a tertiary synthesis of them, an approach Knapp terms tertium quid, the third way. Situating James's psychical research in relation to the rise of experimental psychology and Protestantism's changing place in fin de siècle America, Knapp asserts that the third way illustrated a much broader trend in transatlantic thought as it struggled to navigate the uncertainties and religious adventurism of the modern age.

A pragmatist philosophy of psychological science and its implications for replication

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Gantman ◽  
Robin Gomila ◽  
Joel E. Martinez ◽  
J. Nathan Matias ◽  
Elizabeth Levy Paluck ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Behavioral Measurement ◽  
The World ◽  
Pragmatist Philosophy

AbstractA pragmatist philosophy of psychological science offers to the direct replication debate concrete recommendations and novel benefits that are not discussed in Zwaan et al. This philosophy guides our work as field experimentalists interested in behavioral measurement. Furthermore, all psychologists can relate to its ultimate aim set out by William James: to study mental processes that provide explanations for why people behave as they do in the world.

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