The Essential William James

Full Title: The Essential William James
Author / Editor: John R. Shook (Editor)
Publisher: Prometheus Books, 2011

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Review © Metapsychology Vol. 15, No. 50
Reviewer: Bob Lane, MA

The first thing to say about this book is that it is beautifully produced. The cover picture of William James is striking and the type font used is very readable with proper spacing between lines. It is a hefty 400 pages and contains just about all you need to get a good idea of William James’s contributions to philosophy and letters. James, the well-known American pragmatist, wrote and lectured widely on topics still alive today: consciousness, emotion, self, pure experience, the will to believe, truth, pragmatism, ethics and religion. His “stream of consciousness” is still perhaps the best metaphor to describe our subjective experience of ideas and thoughts. Interestingly his metaphor comes from the natural world and not from the world of computing science that has us running software implanted or loaded into our brain. William James, it has been noted, was a psychologist/philosopher who writes like a novelist while his brother Henry was a novelist who writes like a psychologist. I remember a sentence in The Ambassadors that went on for three pages, winding around through innumerable qualifying phrases before tumbling down to a verb. William writes and lectures with a considerable economy and spirited voice.

The second thing to say is that the editor provides us with an excellent introductory essay which tells the reader enough about William James to make the book useful for undergraduates and the “man on the Clapham Omnibus.” He outlines the major contributions from James’s Principles of Psychology, presents the Jamesian notion of experience and philosophy of mind, analyzes the work James did on truth, and introduces the reader to his philosophy of religion. Shook emphasizes that for James “Human  experience is not only a process; it is also creative.”

At risk of over-generalization, one very general trend in philosophy of mind today is that the focus has shifted over the past decade or so from general metaphysical issues (e.g. physicalism and dualism, mental causation) to issues about the nature of particular mental phenomena and their inter-relations (e.g. perception, introspection, attention, unity of consciousness, etc.). One reason for this is that the metaphysical issues have been pretty well worked over, whereas some surprisingly central mental phenomena have been relatively neglected in philosophy (attention is a great example). Another is that general metaphysical issues tend to be co-opted by other areas, e.g. the debate between physicalism and dualism depends on fundamental issues in metaphysics and philosophy of language (e.g. the nature of modality, the foundations of 2-D semantics), while the mental causation debate has been stimulated by new developments in philosophy of science, e.g. interventionist and mechanistic theories of causation and explanation. But still, a good starting point is reading William James.

The third point is that the selection of works is comprehensive and sufficient to allow development of the basic ideas James contributed to the ongoing discussion of philosophy of mind and his many other interests. The book is divided into three major sections presented between the introduction and the copious notes and bibliography.

1.    Part One: Experience and Mind

2.    Part Two: Knowledge and Action

3.    Part Three: Ethics and Religion

James is often used by the religious minded to defend religion against the scientific attacks of today. What he has to say about religious belief is worth reading and thinking about. The current clash between religion and science turns on basic philosophical concerns with epistemology and ontology. Can we employ the scientific method of  hypothesis, fact gathering, and falsification to religious claims? How does faith fit into the analysis? James attempts to deal with all of those questions in the essays in part three.

A good book for undergraduates, the general reader, and for anyone who wants a sense of the range of contributions made by America’s foremost pragmatist.

 

© 2011 Bob Lane

 

Bob Lane is an Honorary Research Associate in Philosophy and Literature at Vancouver Island University in British Columbia.