Isaiah Berlin and William James: Tragedy, Tragicomedy, Comedy

Reading Isaiah Berlin in China1

A year before his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin was invited by a Chinese scholar named Ouyang Kang to write a summary of his thought for the Chinese reading public. Berlin, as Dr Henry Hardy recalls, much valued this new readership, and therefore wrote his last essay, ‘My Intellectual Path’. It was first published in English in the New York Review of Books, and then included in The Power of Idea...

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE William James Symposium WILLIAM JAMES AND HYPNOSIS; A Centennial Reflection

Like many other early psychologists, William James was fascinated by hypnosis and related phenomena. For James, hypnosis was both an experimental technique for creating divisions of consciousness, and a laboratory model of naturally occurring disorders of awareness. James' treatment of consciousness in hypnosis presages contemporary interests in dissociation and implicit cognition, and undersco...

William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (review)

William James on the Self

In the late nineteenth century William James pieced together a theory of self that is remarkably modern, some might say 'post-modern.' In Chapter X of his magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology (1890), entitled "The Consciousness of Self," James discusses the manifold nature of the self treating it in its native complexity. Among other things, he proposes a notion of identity and experience ...

William James as American Plato ?

Alfred North Whitehead wrote a letter to Charles Hartshorne in 1936 in which he referred to William James as the American Plato. Especially given Whitehead’s admiration of Plato, this was a high compliment to James. What was the basis for this compliment and analogy? In responding to that question beyond the partial and scattered references provided by Whitehead, this article briefly explores t...