William James

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William James

William James (born January 11, 1842 in New York , † August 26, 1910 in Chocorua , New Hampshire ) was an American psychologist and philosopher . From 1876 to 1907 he was a professor of psychology and philosophy at Harvard University . James is considered both the founder of psychology in the USA and one of the most important exponents of philosophical pragmatism .

Life

William James was born in New York's Astor House in 1842 . His father Henry James sr. had inherited a fortune; for William and his younger brother, the later writer Henry James , this meant that he was promoted from an early age and, between 1847 and 1860, numerous public and private schools in New York, London , Paris (1856), Newport (1858 ), Geneva (1859) and Bonn (1860) - without a degree - visited. The only sister of the two, Alice James (1848-1892), on the other hand, at her father's request, remained without any training.

William James in Brazil, 1865

From 1860 William James studied painting in Newport and from the winter of 1861 chemistry at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. During this time he met the young Charles S. Peirce , with whom he was to become a lifelong friend. James switched subjects repeatedly and began studying medicine in 1863. In 1864 he accompanied the geologist Louis Agassiz on an expedition to Brazil on the Amazon. However, his illness-related stays in various German spas gave him the opportunity to attend lectures on physiology and psychology in Berlin in 1867. After returning from Germany, James successfully completed his studies in medicine in 1869 with an MD (Doctor of Medicine). The scientist suffered from chronic back and eye problems, insomnia and depression throughout his life.

From 1872 to 1907 William James worked as a lecturer at Harvard University . From 1873 to 1876 he taught anatomy and physiology. In 1875 he gave the first courses on experimental psychology on American soil. In 1875 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1898 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1876 he was appointed professor of psychology and philosophy. In 1885 he switched entirely to philosophy. He was valued by his students for his humor and unconventional lecture management, because with him - unlike many other professors of his time - it was possible to ask questions during the lectures.

James gained international recognition for his major work Principles of Psychology and for his philosophical achievements. In addition to his scientific work, James co-founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and protested against the Philippine-American War .

psychology

James is considered the founder of American psychology as a science. The introduction of the department of psychology at US universities goes back to him. His psychological theories anticipated basic ideas of gestalt psychology and behaviorism and are an important basis of the psychology of religion . The publisher Henry Holt had originally agreed with James to produce a textbook that would appear after two years in 1880. However, James continued to work on a systematic presentation of the entire knowledge of his subject, in which he also incorporated the results of his empirical research and his new functionalist theory. The Principles of Psychology finally appeared in two volumes of 1400 pages in 1890, in which James offered a summary of nineteenth-century psychology in almost its entire breadth. Two years after publication, a heavily shortened and partially revised version Psychology: Briefer Course (1892) came on the market.

The work, written in a remarkable scientific prose, is interesting from a science-historical perspective, because it shows the state of research in psychology towards the end of the 19th century and critically examines the predominant theoretical positions of Wilhelm Wundt , Ernst Mach and Gustav Theodor Fechner . In addition, James includes philosophically relevant positions such as those of David Hume , Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill in the presentation, for example in the theory of the “self” .

The main innovation by James is that he understood psychology scientifically and created a connection between states of consciousness and brain states in his theory. James saw body and mind as belonging together parts of a unified organism. The contrast between body and soul, as it had been dealt with in the previous association psychology, was thus abolished and replaced by a psychophysical functionalism . Methodologically important in his new psychology were introspection, experiment and comparison. More than a unified theory, James offered an open catalog of research questions that, from his point of view, can only be solved in conjunction with an accompanying metaphysics. Psychology as a science is only possible with a clarification of the epistemological prerequisites. This view, formulated in the short version in the introduction and at the end, already anticipates the later philosophical focus in the work of James. James viewed empirical (materialistic) psychology only as a preliminary stage of a unified human science in which the questions of consciousness are to be completely clarified. (Psychologie (1920), p. 468)

A psychological theorem that James put forward at about the same time and independently of the Danish physiologist Carl Lange (1834–1900) has repeatedly entered the discussion of a theory of emotion as the so-called James Lange theory . Furthermore, James' description of the self in the Principles with its subdivision of "I" (English "I", meaning one's own stream of consciousness ) and the "Self" (English "Me", meaning the reflective identity ) is in the story of developmental psychology .

1894–1895 he was president of the Society for Psychical Research , as well as a member of the Theosophical Society Adyar . James dealt with parapsychological phenomena such as clairvoyance and worked for years with the trance medium Leonora Piper.

James describes religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience as a deeply subjective phenomenon, the inner side of which he would like to expose largely from religious concepts and theological systems, to the simple or original sense date, the "original" experience, the "radical quality" of the sensation consider.

philosophy

William James is considered one of the co-founders of philosophical pragmatism . In particular, in 1872, together with his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, he founded the "Metaphysical Club", which can be seen as a kind of intellectual nucleus of pragmatism. A few years later, Peirce published several texts that contained the central core theses of pragmatism, and James, too, developed pragmatism further in the period that followed.

As the first important collection of philosophical texts, he published The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy in 1897 . Several essays in this volume deal with the defense of the rational justifiability of religious belief. In particular, he takes a position against William Kingdon Clifford .

The essay The Will to Believe, which gives this volume its name, is particularly well known . James notes there in relation to Pascal's wager that someone who comes to believe in that calculating way certainly lacks "the inner soul of faith's reality". So we would look on gleefully if God refused such a person the eternal reward. His own strategy of justification is structurally similar to Pascal's bet, but the motivating factor for him is not self-interest, but the inner need for belief and its moral advantage. The starting point is the assumption that we cannot obtain evidence for or against religious belief on the basis of rational considerations. This gives rise to a weak justification that states that rationalism can not raise legitimate objections to the assumption of religious belief. In The Dilemma of Determinism , which is also contained in this volume, James develops an argument for the assumption of free will that has parallels to the argument just presented.

The Talks to Students on Some Life's Ideals , which first appeared in 1899 as the second part of the Talks to Teachers on Psychology , can also be counted among the popular philosophical writings . Using narrative and poetic elements, James strengthens awareness of the value and uniqueness of individual life on the one hand, and demands absolute respect for every form of life on the other.

In the winter of 1901/1902, James gave a series of lectures in Edinburgh , which he published under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature . In addition to his psychological interest in religiosity, James also tries to defend religion philosophically in this text. The fact that religion apparently lacks a justification is only significant from an intellectualistic perspective. For James, the nature of religion is precisely not interpretative-analytical (as a "science of god"), but rather intuitive.

James' influential lecture series on pragmatism was published in 1907 under the title Pragmatism: a new name for some old ways of thinking . For James, the value of a theory must be measured by its “cash value”: what counts are the practical consequences that follow from it. If its correctness or falsehood makes no difference to us, the theory is superfluous and may be called false. Two theories that lead to the same practical consequences have the same meaning to James. For James, many philosophical debates can be resolved by disambiguating the disputed terms so that the intuitive justifications of both theories can be recognized as legitimate. For example, the view that the world can be understood as a unity is correct in some respects, and in other respects the world must be understood as a multitude.

The concept of truth advocated by James in Pragmatism , according to which something is true if it is useful for us to believe it, aroused particularly strong criticism . In response to this criticism, James published a collection of his lectures and essays on the subject in 1909 under the title The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” . There he defends his position and questions the justification of possible opposing positions.

Fonts

  • Are we automata? In: Mind 4 (1879), pp. 1–22.
  • What is an emotion? In: Mind 9 (1884), pp. 188–205.
  • The Principles of Psychology . 2 volumes. Holt and Macmillan, New York / London 1890.
  • Psychology: Briefer Course . Holt, New York 1892. ( translated excerpt 148-174 )
  • Human Immortality: two supposed objections to the doctrine (Ingersoll Lecture). Houghton Mifflin & Co., New York 1893.
  • The Will to Believe, and other essays in popular philosophy . Longmans, Green & Co., New York 1897.
  • Talks to teachers on psychology: and to students on some life's ideals . Holt and Longmans, Green & Co., New York / London 1899.
  • The Varieties of Religious Experience . Longmans, Green & Co., New York / London 1902.
  • Pragmatism: a new name for some old ways of thinking . Longmans, Green & Co., London / New York 1907.
  • A pluralistic universe. Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the present situation in philosophy . Longmans, Green & Co., New York / London 1909.
  • The meaning of truth, a sequel to “Pragmatism” . Longmans, Green & Co., New York / London 1909.
  • Essays on radical empiricism . Longmans, Green & Co., New York / London 1912.

Work editions

  • The Works of William James. 17 volumes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1975–1988.
  • The Writings of William James. A comprehensive edition. Edited by John J. McDermott. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1977.
  • Frederick J. Down Scott (Ed.): William James: Selected Unpublished Correspondence, 1885-1910 . Ohio State University Press, Columbus OH 1986, ISBN 0-8142-0379-5 ( full-text digitized at kb.osu.edu).

Translations

  • The will to believe and other philosophical essays by William James , translated by Ch.Lorenz, Fromanns, Stuttgart 1999 ( excerpt from Gleichsatz.de )
  • Psychology . Translated by Marie Dürr with notes by Ernst Dürr (1909), 2nd edition, Quelle & Meyer, Leipzig 1920 ( excerpt from Gleichsatz.de)
  • The diversity of religious experience. A study of human nature. , translated by Eilert Herms and Christian Stahlhut, Insel Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-458-33484-X .
  • The pragmatism. Translated by Wilhelm Jerusalem , ed. by Klaus Oehler , 2nd ed. Meiner, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-7873-1150-5 .
  • Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. Translated and edited with an introduction. by Klaus Schubert and Axel Spree, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2001, ISBN 978-3-534-12999-7 .
  • The will to believe . In: Philosophy of Pragmatism: Selected Texts . Edited and introduced by Ekkehard Martens, Reclam, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 978-3-15-009799-1 .
  • Pragmatism and radical empiricism. ed. with an afterword by Claus Langbehn, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-518-29375-3 .
  • The pluralistic universe: lectures on the contemporary state of philosophy. Translated by Julius Goldstein, with a new introduction ed. by Klaus Schubert and Uwe Wilkesmann, WBG, Darmstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-534-18974-8 (special edition of the 1994 reprint of the Leipzig 1914 edition).
  • Felicitas Krämer, Helmut Pape (ed.): The meaning of life. Selected texts. Translated by Andreas Hetzel. WBG, Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-534-22055-7 .

literature

  • Émile Boutroux : William James. Longman, New York 1912. ( archive.org )
  • Robert B. MacLeod : William James: unfinished business . American Psychological Association: Washington 1969.
  • Gerald E. Myers: William James, his life and thought. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 1986.
  • Richard M. Gale: The Divided Self of William James. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999.
  • Johannes Linschoten: On the way to a phenomenological psychology. The Psychology of William James. de Gruyter, Berlin 1961.
  • Rainer Diaz-Bone , Klaus Schubert: William James for an introduction. Junius, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-88506-927-X .
  • Helmut Pape: The dramatic richness of the concrete world. The origin of pragmatism in the thinking of Charles S. Peirce and William James. Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswirst 2002.
  • Felicitas Krämer: Diversity of experience and reality. On William James' understanding of reality . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 978-3-525-30520-1 (also dissertation, University of Heidelberg 2004). ( revised and abridged version of the 3rd chapter )
  • Heidi Salaverría: Scope of the Self. Pragmatism and creative action . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2007.
  • Christoph Seibert: Religion in thinking by William James. An interpretation of his philosophy. Verlag Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2009, ISBN 978-3-16-150022-0 . ( Review by Hans Joas on FAZ.net)
  • Katja Thörner: William James' concept of a reasonable belief based on religious experience. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-17-021718-8 .
  • Bernd Wildermuth :  JAMES, William. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 1524-1534.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )

Web links

Wikisource: William James  - Sources and full texts (English)
Commons : William James  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: William James  - Quotes
Works
Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ E. Aronson , TD Wilson, RM Akert: Social Psychology . 6th edition. Pearson Studium, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8273-7359-5 , p. 127.
  2. ↑ See Christopher Hookway, article Pragmatism , in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( text ).
  3. ↑ On Henry James cf. z. B. John Carlos Rowe, Eric L. Haralson (Eds.): A Historical Guide to Henry James . New York 2012.
  4. ↑ Short biography on fembio.org.
  5. ^ Members: William James. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 5, 2019 .
  6. ^ Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States . Harper Perennial, New York 2005, ISBN 0-06-083865-5 , p. 314.
  7. ↑ See the overview in: Claus Langbehn: Afterword in the text volume published by him William James. Pragmatism and radical empiricism, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006, 155-196
  8. ↑ Is Theosophy a religion? ( Memento of December 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on austheos.org.au.
  9. ^ Robert D. Richardson: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: a Biography . Mariner Books, New York 2007, ISBN 0-618-91989-9 , pp. 257-264.
  10. ↑ See Louis Menand: The Metaphysical Club . Farrar, Louis and Giroux, New York 2002.
  11. ↑ See William James: The Will to Believe . In: ders .: The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy . New York 1956, p. 6.
  12. ^ William James: The Will to Believe . In: ders .: The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy . New York 1956, p. 29.
  13. ↑ See William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience . Lecture 18.
  14. ↑ See William James: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth . Cambridge (MA) 1975, p. 29.
  15. ↑ See William James: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge (MA) 1975, p. 27 f.
  16. ↑ See William James: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge (MA) 1975, pp. 66-72.
personal data
SURNAME James, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychologist and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1842
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH August 26, 1910
Place of death Chocorua , New Hampshire