Great Ideas of Philosophy

Lecture Forty-SixThe Radical William JamesScope: Mortally opposed to all “block universes” of certainty and to theoretical hubris, James (1842–1910) offereda quintessentially homegrown psychology of experience: Every thought is someone’s—it is “owned.”Thought is of a piece, not in pieces; thought entails selection from the welter of possible stimuli and, thus,is active and personal; and thought matches up with interests, which in the nature of things, are personaland unique to the percipient. He opposed the idealistic and Hegelian commitments of his leadingcontemporaries, yet insisted on a mode of philosophical thought that left out nothing that we know ofexperience, including the religious and the intuitive. He advocated a philosophy and a psychology thatwere faithful both to common sense and to the most developed ideas in science.OutlineI. William James surely is the quintessential Yankee philosopher. He comes along when Hegelian thought andRomanticism are fixtures in the American philosophical world.A. Transcendentalist and back-to-nature movements—this is the world of Thoreau, Emerson, Channing—areprominent.B. James will not reject these perspectives but will bring his characteristically Jamesian view to bear on them.C. James comes along in a world of mystery. As late as 1907, Professor Henry Jones wrote, with a sense ofalarm, about how Hegelian thought has overtaken English thought and the English universities. His fear isthat the epidemic is spreading almost without challenge.D. James’s project is to rescue thought from the seductions of the worlds of mystery, while preserving itsfluidity, purpose, and variegated nature.1. James, the eldest of four children and grandson of a multimillionaire, arrived at his project in a ratherplodding way.2. James took longer than usual to complete his studies at Harvard, because of interruptions by bouts ofillness. He read voraciously and retained what he learned.3. He spent six years (1863–1869) completing required studies for a medical degree. He dropped outonce for what proved to be an unsatisfying exploration of the Amazon conducted by Louis Agazzisand a second time for travels in Germany, where lectures by Helmholtz and Wundt aroused James’sinterests in sensory processes and psychology.4. After completing his medical training at Harvard, James joined the faculty there in 1872. Within a fewyears, we find him giving lectures in physiological psychology and presiding over some experiments.5. Still, James suffered from various maladies and was beset by interludes of fear and depression. Hetreated his psychological turmoil by wide and deep reading.E. There were questions about whether Wundt or James deserves the title of the first academic experimentalpsychologist.1. James was a bit prickly on this subject, insisting that he didn’t really get the credit he deserved.2. His work The Principles of Psychology, however, remains perhaps the classic treatise in academicpsychology.II. After the completion of The Principles of Psychology, almost all of James’s writing addresses chiefly thegrounding of our knowledge, as well as the ethical dimensions of life, for reasons that grow out of what hecalled his radical empiricism.A. The usual adoption of, or concession to, empiricistic philosophies is hedged—though there are some thingswe cannot know by way of experience; by and large, we use our senses to gather information about ourworld in most of the ordinary business of life.B. This most assuredly is not the position of a radical empiricist. Radical empiricism maintains that no set ofexperiences has an authority superior to some other set of experiences. It is not the province of science orphilosophy to declare, for instance, that religious experiences and visions are more or less valid than otherexperiences.26©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership