Pragmatism and Other Writings

by James, William; Gunn, Giles; Gunn, Giles

• ISBN13: 9780140437355
• ISBN10: 0140437355
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-04-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Written with cordiality and candour, James's essays seek to bring his readers into the processes and play of his own reflections. Ranging across the intellectual terrain from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging and enduring articulation of that distinctly American contribution to world thought, pragmatism. This collection presents in its entirety, Pragmatism, the seminal set of lectures in which James argues for the "reasonableness of ordinary experience" in his inimitably limpid and witty style. Also gathered here are selections from James's other formative works, including The Meaning of Truth, Psychology, The Will to Believe, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Throughout these essays the fecund power of imagination is restored to the operations of rationality by James, whom George Santayana hailed as "an impulsive poet: a master in the art of recording or divining the lyric quality of experience."

Author Biography

Older brother of novelist Henry James, William James (1842-1910) was a philosopher, psychologist, physiologist, and professor at Harvard. James has influenced such twentieth-century thinkers as Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermans, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Giles Gunn
Suggestions for Further Reading	xxxiii
A Note on the Texts	xxxvii
Pragmatism (1907)	1	(132)
Preface	5	(2)
The Present Dilemma in Philosophy	7	(17)
What Pragmatism Means	24	(17)
Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered	41	(17)
The One and the Many	58	(16)
Pragmatism and Common Sense	74	(13)
Pragmatism's Conception of Truth	87	(18)
Pragmatism and Humanism	105	(14)
Pragmatism and Religion	119	(14)
From the Meaning of Truth (1909)	133	(36)
Preface	135	(7)
The Tigers in India	142	(4)
Humanism and Truth	146	(23)
From Psychology: Briefer Course (1892)	169	(22)
The Stream of Consciousness	171	(20)
From The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)	191	(74)
Preface	193	(5)
The Will to Believe	198	(21)
Is Life Worth Living?	219	(23)
The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life	242	(23)
From Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on some of Life's Ideals (1899)	265	(40)
On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings	267	(19)
What Makes a Life Significant	286	(19)
Miscellaneous Essays	305	(36)
Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1903)	307	(7)
A World of Pure Experience (1904)	314	(23)
Is Radical Empiricism Solipsistic? (1905)	337	(4)
Notes	341