The Letters of William James, Vol. II

Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime.

• See a Problem?.
• ULTRAS (Yaoi Manga)!
• Follow the Author.
• Challenging the More Able Language User (Nace/Fulton Publication);
• Teaching With Author Web Sites, K–8.
• The Correspondence of William James | The University of Virginia Press.

Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web.

AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally.

Letters of William James by William James

Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. As his first act of freedom, he said, he chose to believe his will was free. He was encouraged to do this by reading Charles Renouvier , whose work convinced James to convert from monism to pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, , James wrote,.

The letters of William James

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion.

At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. In James set the terms for all future discussions of determinism and compatibilism in the free will debates with his lecture to Harvard Divinity School students published as "The Dilemma of Determinism. Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like.

Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. James called compatibilism a "quagmire of evasion", [37] just as the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume —that free will was simply freedom from external coercion—were called a "wretched subterfuge" by Immanuel Kant.

James described chance as neither hard nor soft determinism, but " indeterminism ". The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance. James asked the students to consider his choice for walking home from Lowell Lecture Hall after his talk. What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen.

With this simple example, James laid out a two-stage decision process with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice of one possibility that transforms an ambiguous future into a simple unalterable past. James' two-stage model separates chance undetermined alternative possibilities from choice the free action of the individual, on which randomness has no effect. James did important work in philosophy of religion. In his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings.

Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:. James investigated mystical experiences throughout his life, leading him to experiment with chloral hydrate , amyl nitrite , nitrous oxide , and peyote An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world. William James provided a description of the mystical experience, in his famous collection of lectures published in as The Varieties of Religious Experience.

James is one of the two namesakes of the James—Lange theory of emotion , which he formulated independently of Carl Lange in the s. The theory holds that emotion is the mind's perception of physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. In James's oft-cited example, it is not that we see a bear, fear it, and run; we see a bear and run; consequently, we fear the bear.

Our mind's perception of the higher adrenaline level, heartbeat, etc. This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of aesthetics as well as to the philosophy and practice of education. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part. The more classic one's taste is, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be, in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in.

Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this point. The theory of emotion was also independently developed in Italy by the Anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi,. Why do we run away if we notice that we are in danger? Because we are afraid of what will happen if we don't. This obvious answer to a seemingly trivial question has been the central concern of a century-old debate about the nature of our emotions.

It was important, not because it definitively answered the question it raised, but because of the way in which James phrased his response. He conceived of an emotion in terms of a sequence of events that starts with the occurrence of an arousing stimulus the sympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic nervous system ; and ends with a passionate feeling, a conscious emotional experience.

A major goal of emotion research is still to elucidate this stimulus-to-feeling sequence—to figure out what processes come between the stimulus and the feeling.

James set out to answer his question by asking another: He proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid, was wrong , and instead argued that we are afraid because we run:. Our natural way of thinking about My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion called 'feeling' by Damasio. The essence of James's proposal was simple. It was premised on the fact that emotions are often accompanied by bodily responses racing heart, tight stomach, sweaty palms, tense muscles, and so on; sympathetic nervous system and that we can sense what is going on inside our body much the same as we can sense what is going on in the outside world.

According to James, emotions feel different from other states of mind because they have these bodily responses that give rise to internal sensations, and different emotions feel different from one another because they are accompanied by different bodily responses and sensations.

For example, when we see James's bear, we run away. During this act of escape, the body goes through a physiological upheaval: Other kinds of emotional situations will result in different bodily upheavals. In each case, the physiological responses return to the brain in the form of bodily sensations, and the unique pattern of sensory feedback gives each emotion its unique quality.

Fear feels different from anger or love because it has a different physiological signature the parasympathetic nervous system for love. The mental aspect of emotion, the feeling, is a slave to its physiology, not vice versa: One of the long-standing schisms in the philosophy of history concerns the role of individuals in social change.

One faction sees individuals as seen in Dickens ' A Tale of Two Cities and Thomas Carlyle 's The French Revolution, A History as the motive power of history, and the broader society as the page on which they write their acts. The other sees society as moving according to holistic principles or laws, and sees individuals as its more-or-less willing pawns.

James introduces a notion of receptivities of the moment. The societies ' mutations from generation to generation are determined directly or indirectly mainly by the acts or examples of individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the moment or whose accidental position of authority was so critical that they became ferments, initiators of movements, setters of precedent or fashion, centers of corruption, or destroyers of other persons, whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another direction.

The Letters of William James, Vol. II (Paperback)

James studied closely the schools of thought known as associationism and spiritualism. The view of an associationist is that each experience that one has leads to another, creating a chain of events. The association does not tie together two ideas, but rather physical objects. Small physical changes occur in the brain which eventually form complex ideas or associations. Thoughts are formed as these complex ideas work together and lead to new experiences. Isaac Newton and David Hartley both were precursors to this school of thought, proposing such ideas as "physical vibrations in the brain, spinal cord, and nerves are the basis of all sensations, all ideas, and all motions He referred to associationism as "psychology without a soul" [54] because there is nothing from within creating ideas; they just arise by associating objects with one another.

On the other hand, a spiritualist believes that mental events are attributed to the soul. Whereas in associationism, ideas and behaviors are separate, in spiritualism, they are connected. Spiritualism encompasses the term innatism , which suggests that ideas cause behavior. Ideas of past behavior influence the way a person will act in the future; these ideas are all tied together by the soul. Therefore, an inner soul causes one to have a thought, which leads them to perform a behavior, and memory of past behaviors determine how one will act in the future.

James had a strong opinion about these schools of thought. He was, by nature, a pragmatist and thus took the view that one should use whatever parts of theories make the most sense and can be proven. James believed that each person has a soul, which exists in a spiritual universe, and leads a person to perform the behaviors they do in the physical world. James stated that, although it does appear that humans use associations to move from one event to the next, this cannot be done without this soul tying everything together.

For, after an association has been made, it is the person who decides which part of it to focus on, and therefore determines in which direction following associations will lead. Spiritualism, however, does not demonstrate actual physical representations for how associations occur. James combined the views of spiritualism and associationism to create his own way of thinking. James was a founding member and vice president of the American Society for Psychical Research. In , the year after the death of his young son, James had his first sitting with Piper at the suggestion of his mother-in-law.

He expressed his belief in Piper by saying, "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. After evaluating sixty-nine reports of Piper's mediumship he considered the hypothesis of telepathy as well as Piper obtaining information about her sitters by natural means such as her memory recalling information. According to James the "spirit-control" hypothesis of her mediumship was incoherent, irrelevant and in cases demonstrably false.

Piper's knowledge of the James family was acquired from the gossip of servants and that the whole mystery rests on the failure of the people upstairs to realize that servants [downstairs] also have ears. James was convinced that the "future will corroborate" the existence of telepathy.

Similar Books

Titchener took issue with James's support for psychical research and considered his statements unscientific. James' theory of the self divided a person's mental picture of self into two categories: The "Me" can be thought of as a separate object or individual a person refers to when describing their personal experiences; while the "I" is the self that knows who they are and what they have done in their life.

He linked this part of the self to the soul of a person, or what is now thought of as the mind.

• Customers who viewed this item also viewed.
• Kleidung und Identität: Zur Symbolik des Kopftuchs in der Türkei (German Edition).
• Item Preview?
• The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War?
• Guten Tag, fröhliche Stunde (Besinnung 3) (German Edition).
• William James!
• DIETING SUCKS! Eat Anything & Lose Weight.

James further divided the "Me" part of self into: The material self consists of things that belong to a person or entities that a person belongs to. Thus, things like the body, family, clothes, money, and such make up the material self. For James, the core of the material self was the body. He believed a person's clothes were one way they expressed who they felt they were; or clothes were a way to show status, thus contributing to forming and maintaining one's self-image.

James felt that if one lost a family member, a part of who they are was lost also. Money figured in one's material self in a similar way. If once a person had significant money then lost it, who they were as a person changed as well.

Our social selves are who we are in a given social situation. For James, people change how they act depending on the social situation that they are in. James believed that people had as many social selves as they did social situations they participated in. James also believed that in a given social group, an individual's social self may be divided even further.

For James, the spiritual self was who we are at our core. The spiritual self is more concrete or permanent than the other two selves. Proud member of the Association of University Presses. Skip to main content. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Interested in this topic? Stay updated with our newsletters: