William James Final paper in progress

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist who also trained as a physician. He was one of the first educators to offer a course in psychology in the US and was thought to be one of the most influential American philosophers. Many called him the "Father of American psychology" and he is aligned with both pragmatism school of philosophy and is one of the founders of the psychology school called functionalism. The second began when he started to investigate which parts of the brain controlled which parts of the body in 1980.

 He is credited with writing the first psychology textbook called “The Principles of Psychology”, as well as “Essays in Radical Empiricism” which was an important textbook in philosophy, and later gathered his many Gifford Lectures into a book called “The Varieties of Religious Experience”. In this book he investigates different forms of religious experience and goes into great detail about theories of Mind cure. (“William James”,2016)

Throughout his life he developed several opinions on different aspects on religion and belief. Belief originally was based on three things: what each person saw/experienced, what was customary in their culture, and what was taught to them by the church and through scripture. But with the age of modernism in 1860 everything began to change as science was the supreme way of thinking. James taught a compromise in the two ways pf thinking. Post modernism attempted to bridge the gap between faith and science, James aligning with this way of thinking said that although we could come closer and closer to the truth, through science for example, but that we could never know the absolute truth – therefor having to rely on faith and belief. This way of thinking was called empericalism.  James later wrote an essay called “The Right to Believe” in which he justifies people holding certain beliefs within particular circumstances  - not that people could or should believe things by an act of will (Goodman,2000).  He said that any belief was a hypothesis and if there was any possibility of it being true then the hypothesis was “live”.  How lively it was depended on how willing each person was to live accordingly and act on their hypothesis – the willingness to act becoming the belief. He said that religious beliefs were justified by using the result of hypothetical ventures as evidence to support the hypothesis’ truth. Therefor the doctorine allowed people to belief in god and prove his existence by how they acted on that belief. (“William James”, 2016)

As opposed to his way of thinking, empericalist thinking, there were skeptics and absolutists. Absolutists believed that  “we not only can attain to knowing the truth, but we can know when we have attained knowing it”. Essentially they believe that things can be known with absolute certainty, where as “empericists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know” (“The Will to Believe”, 2016). The other way of thinking that challenged his was skepticism. A skeptic believed that in no way was it possible to know the truth – he believed that most skeptics had just not decided what to believe at that point in time, thus they said they believed in nothing.  Most skeptics used reductionism, which tried to explain away any religious phenomena organically. James critized reductive forms for “denying “our most intimate powers…all relevancy in universal affairs.” (Goodman, 2000)