Download or read book William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin written by Eugene Taylor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, William James was America's most widely read philosopher. In addition to being one of the founders of pragmatism, however, he was also a leading psychologist and author of the seminal work, The Principles of Psychology (1890). While scholars argue that James withdrew from the study of psychology after 1890, Eugene Taylor demonstrates convincingly that James remained preeminently a psychologist until his death in 1910. Taylor details James's contributions to experimental psychopathology, psychical research, and the psychology of religion. Moreover, Taylor's work shows that out of his scientific study of consciousness, James formulated a sophisticated metaphysics of radical empiricism. In light of historical developments in psychology, as well as the current philosophic implications of the neuroscience revolution related to the biology of consciousness, Taylor argues that both the subject matter of James's investigations and his metaphysics of radical empiricism are just as important for psychology today as James believed they were in his own time. This book represents a major new contribution both to James scholarship and to the history of American psychology. Although philosophers have analyzed radical empiricism, this book is the first to trace the development of radical empiricism as a metaphysics addressed to psychologists. It is also the first to show James's involvement in depth-psychology and psychotherapeutics and to trace historical continuity between James's work on consciousness and subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, personality theory, and humanistic psychology.
Download or read book William James on Consciousness Beyond the Margin written by Eugene J. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, William James was America's most widely read philosopher. In addition to being one of the founders of pragmatism, however, he was also a leading psychologist and author of the seminal work, The Principles of Psychology (1890). While scholars argue that James withdrew from the study of psychology after 1890, Eugene Taylor demonstrates convincingly that James remained preeminently a psychologist until his death in 1910.Taylor details James's contributions to experimental psychopathology, psychical research, and the psychology of religion. Moreover, Taylor's work shows that out of his scientific study of consciousness, James formulated a sophisticated metaphysics of radical empiricism. In light of historical developments in psychology, as well as the current philosophic implications of the neuroscience revolution related to the biology of consciousness, Taylor argues that both the subject matter of James's investigations and his metaphysics of radical empiricism are just as important for psychology today as James believed they were in his own time.This book represents a major new contribution both to James scholarship and to the history of American psychology. Although philosophers have analyzed radical empiricism, this book is the first to trace the development of radical empiricism as a metaphysics addressed to psychologists. It is also the first to show James's involvement in depth-psychology and psychotherapeutics and to trace historical continuity between James's work on consciousness and subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, personality theory, and humanistic psychology.
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience written by William James and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1902, The Varieties of Religious Experience initiated the psychological study of religion, paving the way for Freud and Jung as well as for clinical and paranormal branches of psychology. Written with humour and erudition, its theories of conversion, saintliness, ecstasy and mysticism continue to provoke controversy and inquiry. The book remains the best introduction to James's thought, demonstrating his characteristic insistence upon the importance of personal experience and his almost devotional respect for the mysteries of the human mind. Richly illustrated with personal accounts of belief and possession, intoxication and near-death experience, it is of central importance not simply to an understanding of religions, but to modern psychology and psychiatric medicine. The Routledge Centenary Edition, entirely reset from the original 1902 edition, is prefaced with a specially commissioned foreword by the author's grandson, Micky James, and with new introductions from James specialists Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette. It also includes a new and expanded index.
Download or read book William James written by Krister Dylan Knapp and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-03-08 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this insightful new book on the remarkable William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, Krister Dylan Knapp provides the first deeply historical and acutely analytical account of James's psychical research. While showing that James always maintained a critical stance toward claims of paranormal phenomena like spiritualism, Knapp uses new sources to argue that psychical research held a strikingly central position in James's life. It was crucial to his familial and professional relationships, the fashioning of his unique intellectual disposition, and the shaping of his core doctrines, especially the will-to-believe, empiricism, fideism, and theories of the subliminal consciousness and immortality. Knapp explains how and why James found in psychical research a way to rethink the well-trodden approaches to classic Euro-American religious thought, typified by the oppositional categories of natural vs. supernatural and normal vs. paranormal. He demonstrates how James eschewed these choices and instead developed a tertiary synthesis of them, an approach Knapp terms tertium quid, the third way. Situating James's psychical research in relation to the rise of experimental psychology and Protestantism's changing place in fin de siecle America, Knapp asserts that the third way illustrated a much broader trend in transatlantic thought as it struggled to navigate the uncertainties and religious adventurism of the modern age.
Download or read book William James written by Krister Dylan Knapp and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A relish for the non-normal -- Moral heroes -- Out of the egg -- A human rat hole -- Dramatic possibilities -- Consciousness beyond the margin -- The unseen world
Download or read book William James and a Science of Religions written by Wayne Proudfoot and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-04 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "science of religion" is an important element in the interpretation of William James's work and in the methodology of the study of religion. An authority on pragmatism and the philosophy of religion, Wayne Proudfoot and a stellar group of contributors from a variety of disciplines including religion, philosophy, psychology, and history, bring innovative perspectives to James's work. Each contributor focuses on a specific theme in The Varieties of Religious Experience and suggests how James's treatment of that theme can fruitfully be brought to bear, sometimes with revisions or extensions, on current debate about religious experience.
Download or read book William James on the Stream of Consciousness written by Frederick Bauer and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James (1842-1910) was "a towering figure in the history of American thought"without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced." That was the opinion of Gordon Allport, a Harvard professor and one-time president of the American Psychological Association. However, few Americans living in this third millennium have ever heard of James, despite the fact that his profound insights into the human psyche are now more urgently needed than ever before. But before James' insights can once more become available, a barrier to their reception must be removed. What barrier? The pervasive contradictions in his writings. To rescue his insights from their entangling contradictions, the first step was to draw attention to common sense, the foundation of all 'scientific' learning. William James on Common Sense accomplished that. The next step is to use that common-sense philosophy and James' psychology to present a fully adequate Jamesian account of the stream of consciousness. This book, a sequel to William James on Common Sense, expands his radical-empiricist, two-part model of the stream of consciousness to the one that allows for all three of its components: sensed phenomena, memory-images, and partless thought.
Download or read book William James on Exceptional Mental States written by Eugene Taylor and published by Jetty House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James's pioneering work in psychology revolutionized the science. What is less well known is his notable contribution to experimental psychopathology and psychotherapeutics and his role in introducing a dynamic psychology of subconscious states to an American audience. James was instrumental in the development of the so-called Boston School of Psychopathology. Academically, his efforts were also foundational in launching personality, abnormal, social, and clinical psychology. James's broad-minded perspective and novel insights into human nature were embodies in the eight Lowell Lectures he delivered in 1896. This book is the first reconstruction of those lectures, and hence a new and important addition to the body of James's work on the psychology of the subconscious. His account deals with dreams and hypnotism, automatism hysteria, multiple personality, demoniacal possession witchcraft, degeneration, and genius. , and develops the theme that any healthy life to some degree contains its morbid elements. Also included is Eugene Taylor's enlightening historical introduction to James, his work, and the psychological community that he influenced so profoundly."With great judgment and resourcefulness in research, Dr. Taylor has made a readable and important work from William James's lecture notes. It supplies the links it supplies the link in James 's thought between his Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience and shows his genius for seeing the point and uttering original ideas in vivid prose. Besides the striking case histories, the work records often to our surprise how much was known and anticipated in [psychology and] psychiatry at the turn of the century." --Jacques Barzun, author of A Stroll with William James.
Download or read book Contemporary Varieties of Religious Experience written by Lynn Bridgers and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1902, William James's Varieties of Religious Experience is considered a classic in religious studies and the psychology of religion. But how has James's classic study weathered decades of development in psychology and behavioral sciences? Do the assertions about religious experience in the Varieties still ring true in light of neuro-cognitive and neuro-hormonal research, resiliency studies, studies of temperament, and traumatic studies? By extending William James's own research throughout the century since its publication this volume seeks to answer those questions. In doing so, it revolutionizes our understanding of James's own view of psychology and reveals the extraordinary value of James's perspective for religion, psychology, and spirituality today. In doing so, it offers vital insights for pastoral care and faith development at both the individual and congregational level. From the Introduction by James Fowler: Drawing on the authenticity of her own experience, Bridgers carries us into a remarkably clear and well documented account that traces William James's evolution as a psychologist, philosopher, and a deeply engaged inquirer into the dynamics of spiritual development and transformation... This book has a major contribution to make. Bridgers's study illumines the horizons of contemporary research in the study of religious experience, in all its varieties, and in the context of globalization.
Download or read book William James at the Boundaries written by Francesca Bordogna and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Columbia University in 1906, William James gave a highly confrontational speech to the American Philosophical Association (APA). He ignored the technical philosophical questions the audience had gathered to discuss and instead addressed the topic of human energy. Tramping on the rules of academic decorum, James invoked the work of amateurs, read testimonials on the benefits of yoga and alcohol, and concluded by urging his listeners to take up this psychological and physiological problem. What was the goal of this unusual speech? Rather than an oddity, Francesca Bordogna asserts that the APA address was emblematic—it was just one of many gestures that James employed as he plowed through the barriers between academic, popular, and pseudoscience, as well as the newly emergent borders between the study of philosophy, psychology, and the “science of man.” Bordogna reveals that James’s trespassing of boundaries was an essential element of a broader intellectual and social project. By crisscrossing divides, she argues, James imagined a new social configuration of knowledge, a better society, and a new vision of the human self. As the academy moves toward an increasingly interdisciplinary future, William James at the Boundaries reintroduces readers to a seminal influence on the way knowledge is pursued.
Download or read book Pure Experience written by Eugene Taylor and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The radical empiricism of William James was first formally presented in his seminal papers of 1904, "Does Consciousness Exist?" and "A World of Pure Experience". In James's view, pure experience was to serve as the source for psychology's primary data, and radical empiricism was to launch an effective critique of experimentalism in psychology, a critique from which the problem of experimentalism within science could be addressed more broadly. This collection of papers presents James's formal statements on radical empiricism and a representative sample of contemporary responses from psychologists and philosophers. With only a few exceptions, these responses indicate just how badly James was misread -- psychologists ignoring the heart of James's message and philosophers transforming James's metaphysics into something quite unintelligible to the emerging generation of experimental psychologists.
Download or read book William James and the Transatlantic Conversation written by Martin Halliwell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James and the Transatlantic Conversation focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James's encounters with European thinkers and ideas ran throughout his early life and across his distinguished international career, in which he participated in a number of transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. This volume explores and extends these conversations by drawing together twelve scholars from a range of disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic to assess James's work in all its variety, to trace his multidisciplinary reception across the twentieth century, and to evaluate his legacy in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book considers James's many intellectual influences and the second half focuses on A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the published text of his 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, as a key text for assessing James's transatlantic conversations. The pluralistic transatlantic currents addressed in the first part of the volume enable a fuller understanding of James's philosophy of pluralism that forms the explicit focus for the second part. Taken as a collection, the volume is unique in scholarship on James in generating transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational dialogues, and it repositions James as an important international thinker and arguably the most distinctive American intellectual figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Download or read book William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience written by Jeremy Carrette and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-05 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new companion to William James The Varieties of Religious Experience offers contemporary responses to James's seminal book from key international experts.
Download or read book William James s Hidden Religious Imagination written by Jeremy Carrette and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’
Download or read book William James Sciences of Mind and Anti Imperial Discourse written by Bernadette M. Baker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past few decades, the humanities and social sciences have developed new methods of reorienting their conceptual frameworks in a 'world without frontiers'. In this book, Bernadette M. Baker offers an innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind as they formed at the turn of the twentieth century, via the concerns that have emerged at the turn of the twenty-first. The less-visited texts of Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James provide a window into contemporary debates over principles of toleration, anti-imperial discourse and the nature of ethics. Baker revisits Jamesian approaches to the formation of scientific objects including the child mind, exceptional mental states and the ghost to explore the possibilities and limits of social scientific thought dedicated to mind development and discipline formation around the construct of the West.
Download or read book Experiencing William James written by James Campbell and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-11-17 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James’s thought or aspects of his vision, often in an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James’s own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man’s thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual.
Download or read book William James MD written by Emma K. Sutton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-12-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to map William James’s preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the breadth of his work. William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known is how his interest in medicine influenced his life and work, driving his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, MD offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James’s ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically “normal” and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises that warned against humanity’s decline, these ideas were part of the eugenics movement and reflected a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James’s life have portrayed a distressed young man, who then endured a psychological or spiritual crisis to emerge as a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma K. Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether.
