Hochoy charles biography of william james

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of physiology, psychology and philosophy. It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology, and influenced generations of thinkers in Europe and America, including Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Hochoy Charles, former Chief. Secretary of

James studied at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School and the School of Medicine, but his writings were from the outset as much philosophical as scientific. James made some of his most important philosophical contributions in the last decade of his life. Taking up Spencer's view that the adjustment of the organism to the environment is the basic feature of mental evolution, James charges that Spencer projects his own vision of what ought to be onto the phenomena he claims to describe.

We are all teleological creatures at base, James holds, each with a set of a priori values and categories. The substance of this essay was first published in Mind in and in the Princeton Review in , and then republished in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy in When he gets the marks, he may know that he has got the rationality.

Sentiments of rationality operate not just in logic or science, but in ordinary life. As in his essay on Spencer, James explores the relations between temperaments and philosophical theorizing. James is sympathetic both to the idea that the universe is something we can be intimate with and to the idea that it is wild and unpredictable. Certainly it is always seen in the philosophy of William James.

Henry James. Boston: Little, Brown, , pp. In fact he takes a number of methodological approaches in the book. But many of James's most important and memorable introspective observations come from his own life. For example:.