William James (1842-1910)

William James (1842-1910) was a person.

• Context:
  • He is know for quotes, such as:
    • “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.”
    • “If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.”
    • “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
    • “All natural goods perish. Riches take wings; fame is a breath; love is a cheat; youth and health and pleasure vanish.”
    • “Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
    • “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”
    • “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits.”
• See: Physician, Religious Experience, Pragmatism, Functional Psychology, Radical Empiricism, Philosophy of Religion, Stream of Consciousness.

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References

2015

• (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James Retrieved:2015-4-18.
  • William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology". Along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, he is considered to be one of the major figures associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology. He also developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism. James' work has influenced intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Born into a wealthy family, James was the son of the Swedenborgian theologian Henry James Sr and the brother of both the prominent novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James. James wrote widely on many topics, including epistemology, education, metaphysics, psychology, religion, and mysticism. Among his most influential books are The Principles of Psychology, which was a groundbreaking text in the field of psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism, an important text in philosophy, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, which investigated different forms of religious experience, which also included the then theories on Mind cure.

1910

• (James, 1910) ⇒ William James. (1910). “The Moral Equivalent of War.” In: Popular Science, 77.

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