James Delphi Complete Works of William James (Illustrated)

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78656-403-0
Verlag: Delphi Classics Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 22, 4239 Seiten

Reihe: Delphi Series Nine

The philosopher and psychologist, William James (brother to the famous novelist Henry James) was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century and one of the most influential American philosophers, regarded by many as the father of American psychology. James established the philosophical school known as pragmatism and is also cited as a founder of functional psychology. Noted for his rich and vivid literary style, James developed the philosophical perspective known as radical empiricism, while his work went on to influence intellectuals such as Émile Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. For the first time in digital publishing, this eBook presents James' complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)
* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to James' life and works
* Detailed introductions to the major texts
* All the published books by William James, with individual contents tables
* Features rare essays appearing for the first time in digital publishing, including the posthumous collection: 'Collected Essays and Reviews'
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts, with original footnotes
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the essays
* Easily locate the essays you want to read
* Includes James' letters - spend hours exploring the philosopher's personal correspondence
* Features James' brother Henry's seminal biography 'Notes of a Son and Brother'
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and genres
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CONTENTS:
The Books
The Principles of Psychology
Psychology (Briefer Course)
The Will to Believe and Other Essays
Human Immortality
Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Pragmatism
A Pluralistic Universe
The Meaning of Truth
Some Problems of Philosophy
Memories and Studies
Essays in Radical Empiricism
Collected Essays and Reviews
The Essays
List of Essays in Chronological Order
List of Essays in Alphabetical Order
The Letters
The Letters of William James
The Biography
Notes of a Son and Brother by Henry James
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Autoren/Hrsg.

James, William

Leseproben

The Principles of Psychology
The Principles of Psychology was published in 1890 by Henry Holt & Co. of New York, with 1,200 pages divided into two volumes. James was confident his huge work would be well received, as portions of it had already been published as articles in journals and they had been positively reviewed. However, James was not an ebullient man — he could lack confidence in himself and be introspective, even depressive and on handing over the manuscript to the publisher he gloomily described it as a ‘loathsome, distended…bloated, dropsical mass’. However, to his brother Henry (the novelist and author of such classics as The Portrait of a Lady) he said his Principles was ‘good’ as far as it went. After fifteen months, at the end of 1891, the book was in its third printing and 1,800 copies had been distributed. James writes eloquently and elegantly, but this work in particular is not verbose and his style makes his ideas accessible to the lay person, as well as his colleagues. This is partly due to his use of gentle humour and analogy, placing everyday scenes in the narrative to illustrate a point of psychology. To some peers, this accessible style was seen as too personal, whilst others even claimed he had broken with the accepted rules of psychology. The book was to become an enduring classic for psychology students and professionals alike and equally today is read by those who have had no experience of such texts before, such is its reputation. This is perhaps because it also had an influence on philosophical studies and is even seen in general terms as an important piece of literature. James did not have a straightforward route to the point of writing The Principles of Psychology. He had difficulty choosing a career, firstly exploring what he saw as his calling to be an artist before eventually deciding on medicine, although he never intended to practise it. He spent his academic career entirely at Harvard, firstly as Instructor in Physiology and Anatomy, but later settling on Psychology or Philosophy after the mid-1870s — he was later to claim he ‘drifted’ into the study of these two latter subjects. His influence as teacher alone is significant — he taught some of the future great intellects and figures of America, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gertrude Stein, whilst the first PhD student James supervised, G. Stanley Hall, served twice as President of the American Psychological Association (but was to turn on his former mentor by claiming that in Principles, James was far too impressionistic, even spiritual). James was promoted to Professor of Psychology in 1889, only a year before Principles was published. Before graduating, he had suffered prolonged mental illness, his deep lingering depressions leading to thoughts of suicide. Undoubtedly, the soul searching he had to undertake to improve his mental state, his wide ranging academic interests, his other life experiences and his studies in Germany as a young man, all informed Principles of Psychology. In addition, the study of psychology had become increasingly popular in America from the 1870s, which offered a ready audience for his work. Though it was not the first psychological treatise by any means, it came not long after the publication of works which to an extent, brought philosophy into psychology almost in a cross-disciplinary way — such a melding of subjects was to be reversed in the coming decades. James’ narrative in his first book also reflects the contemporary interest in and use of, mind altering drugs such as cocaine, cannabis and peyote (which contains the hallucinogenic drug mescaline) and James refers to hallucinogenic influences in this work. It is impossible here to convey every hypothesis put forward by James in this huge book. It is a wide ranging yet comprehensive introduction to the subject and the long list of chapters includes such topics as Habit, Methods of Psychology, Attention and Association. What follows here are a few of the concepts James explores, which may resonate even with a twenty-first century reader unfamiliar with James’ oeuvre, as they are ideas that have since become part of common knowledge. In Volume One, he discusses the strange sensation of trying to remember the name of a person or object and how the name flits through the mind, but one cannot quite grasp it: ‘There is a gap (in our consciousness) …that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction…then letting us sink back without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit into the mould.’ — this quotation is a beautifully expressed description of the frustrating ‘tip of the tongue’ feeling when a name eludes us, a unique gap in our thought process that when the right name (and only the right one will do) is brought forward, we feel nothing short of a sense of delight and relief. Also familiar to twenty-first century readers will be the concept of the Stream of Consciousness, described by James as the Stream of Thought: ‘Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits…A “river” or “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.’ In the chapter devoted to this, James begins by outlining his five key elements to thought — the thoughts of each ‘self’ are unique to that self; thought changes constantly; within each consciousness, thought is ‘sensibly’ continuous; human thought possesses the function of knowing, that is, apparently dealing with objects independent of itself; the mind is selective in choosing parts or elements of an object to be interested in. Thus, James saw the stream of thought/consciousness as an unending ‘river’ of thoughts, feelings, images, emotions and so on, pass before our consciousness and move on. This stream is not a random flood of impressions and ideas; however, we can link both the last thought we had to the current thought, creating a form of thought-based continuity, on ongoing process by which we have an endless procession of overlapping thoughts, with new thoughts just starting to attach to the front end of the flow of awareness. Central is our awareness of ‘now’, but of equal importance are the past thoughts that are receding into the background and the thoughts imminently about to become part of the stream. Admirers of literary fiction will be familiar with the stream of consciousness and the related interior monologue, as narrative devices, offering a written account of a character’s thought processes. This specific form of interior monologue is characterised by inter-connected thoughts, expressed in writing with limited or even no punctuation. It came into its own in the twentieth century and novels exploiting the device include Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce), Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) and Under the Volcano (Malcolm Lowry). James’ chapter on Self opens with a definition of what that ‘self’ is: ‘In its widest possible sense… a man’s self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account. All these things give him the same emotions.’ Thus, the self is made up of numerous constituent parts or fragments and these he names the material self, the social self, the spiritual self and the pure ego. The material self comprises not only the body, but one’s most important belongings such as property and wealth, achievements and family. James suggests that family is a part of the individual, which is why when a loved one dies, we often do feel as if a part of ourselves has been lost too. James places equal importance on the social self, pointing out that experiments have shown that to be completely isolated from other humans — having one’s sense of existing as a ‘being for others’ negated- can feel like a terrible punishment. He also reminds the reader that humans have different social selves for different situations and different groups of people: ‘Nothing is commoner than to hear people discriminate between their different selves of this sort: “As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you no mercy; as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him.”’ James also reflects on a word little used today in the context of human behaviour — honour. He sees this state of mind as another reflection on the multi-faceted social self — ‘The thief must not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay no other debts in the world’ — in other words, as an example, the concept of honour amongst thieves. Yet, James approaches the definition of the spiritual self with some caution. This is a part of self that is difficult to define and he concludes that the spiritual self is the core of a person, more fixed and long lasting than the material and social selves. The spiritual self includes personality, core values and conscience that may remain largely unchanged throughout a lifetime. This core self can look...