William James

American philosopher and psychologist (1842–1910), born in New York into an intellectually exceptional family — his father, Henry James Sr., was an eccentric Swedenborgian theologian, and his brother Henry James would become one of the great novelists of the English language — trained in medicine at Harvard but drawn from an early age to philosophy and psychology, disciplines to which he devoted an academic career of nearly four decades at Harvard, where he founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in the United States. His monumental work The Principles of Psychology (1890), the fruit of twelve years' labour, established psychology as an independent scientific discipline in America and introduced lasting concepts such as the 'stream of consciousness', the idea that mental experience is not a succession of discrete states but a continuous, ever-changing flow, a metaphor that would exert a decisive influence on later modernist literature, particularly on novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Alongside Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, James is regarded as one of the founding fathers of pragmatism, a genuinely American philosophical movement he popularised in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), where he proposed that the truth of an idea or belief lies not in its abstract correspondence to a fixed reality but in its verifiable practical consequences and its capacity to work satisfactorily within lived experience — 'the true is simply the expedient in our way of thinking'. His work The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), based on his celebrated Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, applied a rigorous empirical, psychological method to the study of mystical and religious experience, without seeking to validate or refute its metaphysical content, but documenting with remarkable empathy its transformative function in individuals' lives, and remains today a foundational text of the psychology of religion.

7 works

• Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine
• Pragmatism A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
• Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
• The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
• The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
• The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature
• The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy