William James on Truth and Invention in Morality

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 ...

Truth and Error in Morality

Roughly speaking, the moral error theory concludes that all moral utterances are false. The argument for the error theory is simple and compelling. As the standard argument goes, moral error theory requires only two premises: that moral terms refer, in some sense or other, to the world–moral sentences say something about what is the case, and that the world is not, after all, the way the moral ...

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 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...