William James - On Freedom, Life, and Love
Reading & the Good Life (13 Oct at Noon EST)
Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life, a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living! This week begins an exploration of the writing and wisdom of William James (through John Kaag’s book — Sick Souls, Healthy Minds).
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, […]
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, 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/
William James — On Freedom, Life, and Love
The topic of free will has come up more than a few times on In Search of Wisdom, most recently in my conversation with Ken Sheldon (author of Freely Determined). According to Sheldon, “Not only might we have free will, we might have radical, even inescapable free will—meaning that we can’t help but make choices, on a daily and even moment-to-moment basis.” It sounds obvious, right? We all generally feel free (more or less). But why did James (and so many others) spend significant time exploring and wrestling with the idea of free will?
In Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, John Kaag explains,
The idea of determinism, generally speaking, arises in the following way. Imagine you are asked a seemingly innocuous question: ‘Do you believe in science?’ James certainly did, so let’s assume you do too. Now, if you believe in science, you probably also believe in causation, the principle that the events and occurrences in the world can be traced to certain causes that bring them about. There are rational but also very personal reasons to grant causation. The principle allows people to make sense of the change they see in the world, but also to hold that their actions can effect some change.
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