Reading & the Good Life
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Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading!
Who is William James?
William James was an original thinker in and between physiology, psychology, and philosophy. His twelve-hundred-page masterwork, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection. It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. […]
James hints at his religious concerns in his earliest essays and in The Principles, but they become more explicit in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine (1898), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and A Pluralistic Universe (1909). James oscillated between thinking that a “study in human nature” such as Varieties could contribute to a “Science of Religion” and the belief that religious experience involves an altogether supernatural domain, inaccessible to science but accessible to the individual human subject. […]
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/
What is Pragmatism?
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that broadly understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a vibrant and, at times, contrary range of interpretations, including that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation and that a claim is valid if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be entirely made explicit.
Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870 and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called ‘classical pragmatists’ Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who first defined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleague William James (1842–1910), who further developed and ably popularized it. […]
Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/
The Wisdom of William James
James was interested in leading a life. In a well-known speech to a group of young men and women at Harvard Yard, James stressed, “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
In their book, Be Not Afraid of Life, John Kaag and Jonathen Belle write,
A key to being less afraid of life is simply to see it a bit more clearly and completely. Shielding one’s eyes when confronted with sudden danger is a protective reflex, yet shutting one’s eyes to the fullness of reality—its novelty, its foreignness, its brutality—can make one feel particularly vulnerable, afraid, and small. At least that is James’s suspicion. ‘The art of being wise,’ James held, ‘is knowing what to overlook’ but also knowing when to pay absolute attention.
What matters? What truly warrants our attention? Following the American transcendentalists who defined his early education at Harvard, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, James entreated his readers to open their eyes to the cosmos—to realize that the world is vastly more complex and nuanced than we typically acknowledge, explains Kaag and Belle.
Selected Passages
In a certain sense, the way that we take in life is determined without our permission. No one asks us if we would like to be born or if we might like to grow up in this family rather than that one. One’s race, sex, socioeconomic condition, and health are factors that are largely accidental. We are, in the words of the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “thrown” into the world, set adrift, and, through much of adolescence, live at the mercy of forces beyond our control. […]
— John Kaag, Sick Souls, Healthy Minds
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