James and Consciousness

Between 1872 and 1890, William James developed an evolutionary account of phenomenal consciousness. He contended that consciousness enables the active evaluation of what is in (or might be in) one’s environment. James hypothesized that this evaluative capacity was selected (in the Darwinian sense) because it regulated the behavior of vertebrates with highly articulated brains. His hypothesis was intended to explain some surprising results in physiology, particularly a series of experiments purporting to show purposive behavior in (of all things) decapitated frogs. This chapter reconstructs and evaluates James’s evolutionary hypothesis, showing how it would explain those surprising experiments. His account requires interactionist dualism, so he also developed what would become an influential objection to epiphenomenalism: that the latter cannot explain the evolution of our natively patterned, phenomenal pleasures and pains.

James and Peirce

After presenting some parallels between James and Peirce, as regards their views on psychology, truth, ethics, and even realism, some differences between both philosophers are pointed out: whether they favor concrete individuals rather than the community of inquirers, favor life rather than knowledge, take or do not take all aspects of the sceptical challenge seriously, and are committed or not committed to a strong realistic (rather than nominalistic) metaphysics. Such differences, or even oppositions, may have more to do with what they took as decisive in philosophy and, more generally, with their respective conceptions of our ethical priorities.

James and Religion

William James made signal contributions to the philosophical and psychological study of religion. One of James’s greatest contributions to the study of religion is his defense of the permissibility of religious beliefs. In his essay “Will to Believe,” he argues that it can be permissible (morally and epistemically), if certain criteria are met, to hold beliefs for which one does not have conclusive evidence in support (provided there isn’t conclusive evidence against). This applies to religious beliefs, but also to moral beliefs and certain beliefs that are essential to our social lives and to the scientific enterprise. His second-greatest contribution to the study of religion is his methodological focus on individuals’ religious experiences, which we see most extensively in Varieties of Religious Experience. In addition to these two contributions, he has important things to say on the relation between religion and other aspects of culture, such as ethics, politics, science, and philosophy.

James and the Metaphysics of Intentionality: Royce, Bergson, and the Miller-Bode Objections

This chapter argues that from the 1880s to the very end of James’s life, some of the central developments in his metaphysics were driven by the aim of providing an adequate response to the problem of intentionality highlighted by Josiah Royce’s argument from error. The chapter shows that James made several attempts to show how his philosophy could provide a solution to the problem, but, on two occasions, his eventual dissatisfaction with these solutions led him to major revisions of his metaphysics. The chapter argues that it was by means of his conversion to Bergsonism—in response to the Miller-Bode objections—that he was able to find a solution with which he could remain happy.

James’s Radical Empiricism: Sensation and Pure Experience

This chapter examines the concept of sensation in William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). Like empiricists before him, James thought that the contents of the mind are built up from sensations; this is the sensationalism of the Principles. But for him, this interior location is secondary to sensation’s first location, which is exterior to the mind. In James’s psychology, the interiority and exteriority of sensations are differentiated by their role in the economy of the mind. In his radically empiricist metaphysics, the economy of the mind will become the economy of the world. The law-governed dualism of mind and body persists, even if these categories are anachronistic from a metaphysical viewpoint. The world of pure experience retains the nomic structure introduced in the Principles, and as such it is not autonomous from the physical. The physical is rendered pure-experiential, but its relationship to the mental, also now rendered pure-experiential, remains governed by scientific law. The chapter then considers how, in the Principles, James’s sensationalism is tied to his cerebralism.

James on the Perception of Space

The perception of space was a central topic in the philosophy, psychology, and sensory physiology of the nineteenth century. William James engaged all three of these approaches to spatial perception. On the prominent issue of nativism versus empirism, he supported nativism, holding that space is innately given in sensory perception. This chapter focuses on James’s discussions of the physiology and psychology of spatial perception in his Principles of Psychology. It first examines the historical context for James’s work, guided by (and commenting on) his own account of that history. Included here are his arguments for nativism. It then examines central aspects of his theory of spatial sensation, perception, and conception. Finally, it touches on the reception of his nativism, his phenomenological holism, his characterization of perception as involving active processes of discernment and construction, and his conception of perceiving organisms as environmentally embedded.

James and Attention: Reactive Spontaneity

This chapter discusses William James’s analysis of attention in the Principles of Psychology (1890). Though presented as an empirical review, it is really much more, since James offers original theoretical perspectives on attention, and attention becomes an important player in his theory of the mind, more broadly. It factors, for example, into his theories of perception, belief, and the will. The chapter then summarizes James’s treatment of attention and offers a theory of what attention is and what it does. It suggests that James postulates a kind of spontaneity in mental processes that are often regarded as merely receptive, and that this has implications for philosophical psychology, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and even ontology.

James, Intentionality, and Analysis

William James was always gripped by the problem of intentionality (or “knowing”), that is, of how our thoughts come to be about the world. Nevertheless, coming up with a sympathetic reading of James’s account requires appreciating that James’s approach to analyzing a phenomenon is very different from that which most contemporary philosophers have found natural. In particular, rather than trying to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a thought’s being about an object, James presented an account of intentionality that focused on certain core cases (particularly those where we actually see or handle the objects of our thoughts), and explained the extension of our “knowing” talk to other cases (objects and events in the past, unobservables, etc.) in terms of various pragmatically relevant relations that can be found between those cases and the “core.” Once this account of intentionality is in place, a number of features of James’s approach to truth come in to clearer focus, and can seem less problematic than they would if one presupposed a more traditional account of intentionality and analysis.

James and Politics: The Radical Democracy of a Radical Empiricist

William James never developed a comprehensive political philosophy. The radically pluralist epistemology and metaphysics for which “pragmatism” became his shorthand represented a revolt against all closed systems of thought. Yet James’s very resistance to certainty and finality led him to participate actively in civic life. Varying by context, this activity was consistently guided by James’s pragmatist accounts of individual experience, moral obligation, and social interdependence, which to him implied a collective, ongoing responsibility to balance freedom, justice, and order amid complexity and change. Though providing no detailed blueprint for achieving and maintaining that balance, James’s writings suggest a suite of practices and institutions that, in various forms and degrees, have proven effective in the past and deserve continued trial. These writings also articulate a regulative ideal by which to evaluate all such experiments: an ideal of popular participation in all levels of social ordering that James described, toward the end of his life, as “radical democracy.”

James and Medicine: Reckoning with Experience

Throughout his career in psychology and philosophy, William James consistently based his insights on natural facts. He began his career as a scientist, earning a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 on his path toward learning physiology for psychological understanding. In his youth and for the rest of his life, he also engaged in alternative medical practices. He found value in both scientific and “sectarian” medicine, with each attending to different parts of natural experience and each empirical, with experimental and experiential access to natural facts. From scientific medicine, he learned methods of rigorous specialized inquiry and the importance supporting speculation with factual material evidence, and from sectarian medicine, he learned about the range of lived natural experiences and their interactions. Most significantly, immersion in the medical marketplace of his time encouraged his non-dualist way of understanding the natural world with interaction of material facts and non-material mind and emotions. His immersion in medical practices prepared him for both his contributions to professional psychology and philosophy, and his explorations of alternative consciousness in religious beliefs and depth psychology. Throughout, he maintained fidelity to the facts of experience.