- as an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States,[3] 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"
- associated with the philosophical school known as pragmatism, and is also cited as one of the founders of functional psychology.
- 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.[9]
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 (1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:
- Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
- The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
- In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.
- Religious Mysticism is only one half of mysticism, the other half is composed of the insane and both of these are co-located in the 'great subliminal or transmarginal region'.
- He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such. American Philosophy: 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.
- Through his philosophy of pragmatism William James justifies religious beliefs by using the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis' truth. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in a god and prove its existence by what the belief brings to one's life.
- James was most interested in direct religious experiences. Theology and the organizational aspects of religion were of secondary interest. He believed that religious experiences were simply human experiences ("Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance.").[4]He believed that religious experiences can have "morbid origins" [5] in brain pathology and can be irrational but nevertheless are largely positive. Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of a high fever, after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually remain and are often valued for the rest of the person's life.[6]Under James’ pragmatism, the effectiveness of religious experiences proves their truth, whether they stem from religious practices or from drugs ("Nitrous oxide ... stimulate[s] the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree."[7]).James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experiences. Further, despite James' examples being almost exclusively drawn from Christianity, he did not mean to limit his ideas to any single religion. Religious experiences are something that people sometimes have under certain conditions. In James' description, these conditions are likely to be psychological or pharmaceutical rather than cultural.
stanford encycopedia
- His interest is not in religious institutions, ritual, or, even for the most part, religious ideas, but in “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”
- James later wrote that he should have called the essay “the right to believe,” to indicate his intent to justify holding certain beliefs in certain circumstances, not to claim that we can (or should) believe things simply by an act of will.
- ames sets out a central distinction of the book in early chapters on “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” and “The Sick Soul.” The healthy-minded religious person — Walt Whitman is one of James's main examples — has a deep sense of “the goodness of life,” (V, 79) and a soul of “sky-blue tint” (V, 80). Healthy-mindedness can be involuntary, just natural to someone, but often comes in more willful forms. Liberal Christianity, for example, represents the triumph of a resolute devotion to healthy-mindedness over a morbid “old hell-fire theology” (V, 91). James also cites the “mind-cure movement” of Mary Baker Eddy, for whom “evil is simply a lie, and any one who mentions it is a liar” (V, 107). For “The Sick Soul,” in contrast, “radical evil gets its innings” (V, 163). No matter how secure one may feel, the sick soul finds that “[u]nsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy….” These states are not simply unpleasant sensations, for they bring “a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness” (V, 136). James's main examples are Leo Tolstoy's “My Confession,” John Bunyan's autobiography, and a report of terrifying “dread” — allegedly from a French correspondent but actually from James himself. Some sick souls never get well, while others recover or even triumph: these are the “twice-born.”
- he criticizes reductive forms of materialism for denying to “our most intimate powers…all relevancy in universal affairs” (WB 71).
- Varieties' classic chapter on “Mysticism” offers “four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical…” (V, 380). The first is ineffability: “it defies expression…its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Second is a “noetic quality”: mystical states present themselves as states of knowledge. Thirdly, mystical states are transient; and, fourth, subjects are passive with respect to them: they cannot control their coming and going. Are these states, James ends the chapter by asking, “windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world[?]” (V, 428).
Wiki the will to belive
- In section V, James makes a distinction between a skepticism about truth and its attainment and what he calls "dogmatism": "that truth exists, and that our minds can find it". Concerning dogmatism, James states that it has two forms; that there is an "absolutist way" and an "empiricist way" of believing in truth. James states: "The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it, while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when." James then goes on to state that "the empiricist tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way".
Internet encyclopedia
- James states that if we track the dynamic of mental activity, we discern a standard pattern from sensation to perception to imagination to belief. Through sensation, we become acquainted with some given fact. This can, but need not, lead to knowledge about that fact, achieved by perceiving its relations to other given facts. Both sensation and perception involve an immediate intuition of some given objects. Imagination, less immediate, retrieves mental copies of past sensations and perceptions, even when their external stimuli are no longer present. Belief is the sense or feeling that ideas or propositions formed in the imagination correspond to reality.
Skeptic - wiki will to belive
Absolutist - will to believe
Empiricist - will to belive
Reductionism - sanford
Healthy-minded person - sanford
Morbid Minded person - https://www.jstor.org/stable/25670442?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents -53
Conversion Experience - ????
Mystical State - stanford
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Believe
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/#5
http://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/
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