William James

Notes

William James (1842–1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher, a founder of both American psychology and pragmatism. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) is still the starting point for the study of mystical states and conversion: it identifies the four marks of mystical experience (ineffability, noetic quality, transience, passivity) and treats conversion as a psychological event with a natural history. His essay "The Will to Believe" (1896) is the respectable ancestor of Pascal's Wager. He appears here for Religious Experience and the Argument from Religious Transformation, and twice in the philosophy of mind: his 1904 essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" is a founding text of neutral monism, and The Principles of Psychology (1890) states the combination problem that panpsychism has still not answered, and makes the evolutionary case against epiphenomenalism.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James

Also see

Linked from

Combination problem

The combination problem is the central objection to panpsychism: if experience is a fundamental property of the smallest physical constituents, how do the many tiny experiences of the particles that make up a brain combine into the single,…

Epiphenomenalism

Evolution. William James raised this in 1890 and it remains the plainest objection. Natural selection acts on what organisms do. If experience does nothing, it was not selected for, and its exquisite fit with behaviour, pain for damage, pl…

Neutral Monism

The lineage. Benedict de Spinoza's single substance, with thought and extension as two of its attributes, is the ancestor. Ernst Mach held that the world is made of "elements" (colours, pressures, sounds) which are physical when considered…

Panpsychism

The combination problem. William James stated it in 1890 and it has not moved. Take a hundred feelings and pack them together as closely as you like; they remain a hundred feelings, and no hundred-and-first feeling of the whole appears, an…

Argument from Religious Transformation

William James

Religious Experience

The shape of the thing. William James identified four marks of the mystical experience in 1902: it cannot be put into words, it feels like knowledge, it is brief, and it feels as if it happens to you. The second of these, the "noetic quali…

Mentioned in

Pragmatism

…Pragmatism is the American philosophical tradition founded by and developed by William James and John Dewey, with as its best-known recent voice. Its central idea is that t…

Faith

…ecause beliefs are not private: they issue in actions, and they are contagious. William James replied that in some cases one must choose without evidence. I side with Cliffo…