Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James as Public Philosophers

of little minds — Ralph Waldo Emerson Lecture 8 DEGENERACY AND PERTURBATION

The inputs that satisfy these assumptions may be said to be non-degenerate; otherwise they are degenerate. Implementors are left to their own devices to handle degenerate cases. Some papers may not even list the degenerate inputs. Thus, Forrest [2] deplores the “plethora of special cases ... glossed over by theoretical algorithms”. Forrest, and also Sedgewick [6], calls this the “bugbear” of ge...

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...

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 ...