20th Century
William James
1842–1910
“We are once for all so made that when certain impressions come before our mind, one of them will seem to call for or repel the others as its companions.”
William James taught psychology and philosophy at Harvard. describes consciousness as a continuous stream rather than a bundle of isolated sensations. Experience comes first. In and the he treats truth as what ideas do within experience, and experience itself as the primary stuff of reality, prior to the split between mind and matter. studies faith from the side of lived conversion and temperament. Later pragmatists and philosophers of mind inherit these moves.
In the Conversation
23 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Desire
Desire is the felt consciousness of what is wanting; volition follows whenever the idea of the act fills the mind without competitor.
Emotion
Emotion is the feeling of bodily changes that follow perception of an exciting fact; we are afraid because we tremble.
Habit
Habit is the flywheel of society and the nervous system's most important fact — character formation is a physical process.
Theology & Metaphysics
Metaphysics
Epistemology
Truth
Truth is what works: an idea proves itself true through its guidance of experience.
Knowledge
An idea is true if it works, if it guides us successfully through experience.
Mind
Consciousness is not a thing but a stream: personal, continuous, selective, and always about something.
Experience
Radical empiricism: experience is the fundamental stuff of reality, a continuous stream prior to any division into subject and object.
Memory and Imagination
Retention depends on neural pathways; memory and habit share a common basis in the plasticity of brain tissue.
Opinion
Beliefs are tools for navigating experience; truth is what works, and the will to believe is legitimate where evidence is insufficient but the option is genuine and momentous.
Judgment
Judgment is a selective, interested act; the mind picks what to attend to and what to affirm based on its purposes.
Sense
Sensation is the stream of immediate experience before thought carves it into objects; attention and interest shape what we perceive.
Logic & Method
Dialectic
Hegelian synthesis is an emotional posture, not a logical method; concrete experience resists such tidy reconciliations.
Induction
The validity of any inductive inference is its practical payoff: hypotheses earn their credentials by guiding successful action in the world.
Definition
Essences are not features nature stamps on things but selections we make among their properties for the sake of our practical and theoretical interests.
Aesthetics & History
Life & Nature
Life and Death
Consciousness accompanies life at every level; the evolutionary continuity of living things does not reduce mind to mechanism.
Animal
Instinct and intelligence are not alternatives in animals; once an instinct has been performed and its results experienced, it is accompanied by memory and expectation and is no longer truly blind.