 William James came into the American philosophical tradition during a time period where it yearned for an intellectual voice which he could call its own. It's not that there were no other great philosophical minds present at the time of his ascension, but that no other carried within them, so genuinely, the American spirit. He spoke in a racy vernacular and with a force and directness which made his philosophy of pragmatism and reserve energy the mental correlate of the practical and strenuous Roosevelt. He was born in New York City on January 11, 1842, and though his early adolescent years were spent in American schools, he, along with his brother Henry, would be sent away to study in France. This was a choice made by their father, likely secondary to the rising tensions caused by the impending American Civil War. While here, he and Henry would eventually fall in with the works of the French psychopathologists such as Charcot. Upon his return to America, shortly after the end of the war, James would seek and gain employment at Harvard in 1870. He taught many different subjects including anatomy and physiology, psychology, and philosophy. Of his many works it was The Principles of Psychology which he is primarily remembered for, though in this video we will focus on the works of his later years. These include the will to believe, pragmatism, a pluralistic universe, the meaning of truth, and essays in radical empiricism. It would be difficult to cover so much material in such a short time, so I will give to the best of my ability a comprehensive summary of these later works. The basic principles of his philosophy may be most clearly uncovered in the only work to be published after his death, essays in radical empiricism, 1912. The development of this new empiricism was primarily brought on by the tendency of old empiricists to overlook connections, causality, and meaning, thus, in James's view, missing the mark. What radical empiricism is, is defined by James in his 1909 work, The Meaning of Truth. It is comprised of a postulate, a statement of fact, and a generalized conclusion. The postulate is that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. The fact is that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so, nor less so, than the things themselves. The conclusion is that the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves part of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure. This form of empiricism is different from, but based on, his metaphysical principle of pure experience, which states that the relations between distinct things are as real as the things themselves. It is a mistake, James thought, to suppose that there must be an underlying cause, a guiding force, that stands outside of the natural world. Our consciousness is but a system of relations. What we perceive in thought is reality itself, not some Kantian phenomenon. So, for James, there is no inquiporial soul lying beneath the inquiporial body. The soul, in his view, is simply the grand total of our experience. It is clear that James was not so enamored as his contemporaries with the German metaphysics which made its way into the American philosophical scene. He would endeavor to show that these abstractions, which were espoused so irrefutably, perhaps because so unintelligibly, were but the ramblings of madmen. The way in which he would demonstrate this novel conclusion came to him courtesy of Charles Pierce. It was in his essay, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, that Pierce said that to find the meaning of an idea, we must examine the consequences to which it leads in action. From this premise, James wrote his 1907 book, Pragmatism. Among his numerous books, Pragmatism is perhaps the easiest read. Inside are six basic tenets which he discusses. Here we will briefly review each of them, these being a philosophical temperament, a theory of truth, a theory of meaning, a holistic account of knowledge, a metaphysical view, and a method of resolving philosophical arguments. Being in the first chapter, James looks to separate philosophers according to their individual temperament. He said the history of philosophy is, to a great extent, that of a certain clash of temperaments. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. He thought that philosophers are more likely to choose their beliefs based upon this individual temperament rather than objective truth or logical reasoning. He classifies them as either tough-minded or tender-minded, while the pragmatist is a sort of mediator which stands between the two. He said that the pragmatist will have a scientific loyalty to facts, as well as the old confidence in human values and the result in spontaneity, whether of the religious or romantic type. James defined meaning as, the conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve. This can be seen in an argument James brings up about whether or not a man chasing a squirrel around a tree, going the same way, goes around the squirrel as well. What James points out about this argument is that whether or not the man goes around the squirrel or not, there is no observable difference in their consequence and thus have the same meaning. We must, as James so forcibly put, make the distinction of whether or not the outcome is different or the same. If we can do this, then there is no occasion for any further dispute. In chapter 6 James uncovers his theory of truth. In this theory he asks the question of whether truth comes in the form of objective relations or whether it may be relative to human judgment and need. It was his thought that the truth was the cash value of an idea, or rather the truth of an idea is strongly correlated with its practical value in the lives of men. He puts it clearly here. Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good and coordinate with it. The truth is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief. James's view on epistemology does not fall far from what has been traditionally accepted by most of the western philosophers of history. He believed that there could be only three conclusions to any particular investigation. Either it must conclude in belief, disbelief, or doubt. He classifies disbelief as negative belief and doubt as the opposite of both belief and disbelief. In the process of our investigation, if we come about something which contradicts what we believe to be real, it is constituted as disbelief. Though if something comes about which, though fundamental and valuable, does not meet the requirements to be justified as known, we categorize this as doubt. These unknowable beliefs thought James were God, immortality, freedom, and moral duty. In his essay, The Will to Believe, James expounds upon what he calls a genuine option, this being a choice between hypotheses. We can categorize this genuine option as living, personally meaningful, forced, mutually exclusive or involving social relations, and momentous, involving potentially important consequences. A genuine option cannot be known by factual inquiry, and he states that we can and do believe things that are devoid of objective justification, take political and moral judgments for instance. The evidence in these situations will likely be perpetually lacking, and though this be the case, we nevertheless find it difficult to refuse to believe what seems naturally good. If we were to refuse these beliefs, the consequences to our life would be of the negative sort. In turn, James' thought was that when our intellect cannot solve a genuine option, emotionally we must decide. When applied to something like, say, religious conviction, we can say that if the hypothesis of God works satisfactory in the widest sense of the word, it is true. This is important because the simple belief in a fact can help the fact come true. If we remain passive, then the fact in question does not even become possible. Let us view pluralism in terms of how it contrasts with monism and why James believed it to be, regardless of lack and objective evidence, the obvious pragmatic choice between the two. To begin, James abhorred a deterministic universe, which is the typical corollary of monism taken to his extreme. Everything here is fixed, and individuality and illusion. There is no human element, there is no freedom in the sense that what we choose can change what has already been said. While in pluralism, on the other hand, in its different spans and wavelengths, exclusions and developments, is everywhere alive and conscious. Everything is irreverently settled, and what we choose may help to decide the course of our own fate. He said that if there be any life that it is really better that we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless indeed belief in it incidentally clashed with our other greater vital beliefs. But simply, when we can find no conclusive evidence of a thing, we should side with what we find to be good and practically useful in our lives, in this case, pluralism. The God of James was finite in nature, one helper, primus interparis, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. He thought that there lies beyond human experience a spiritual world, a world which, when thought of in relation to our own personal consciousness, is not so different from how our world must seem to the lesser animals. In general, he thought that religious experience points with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness, with a greater spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential man is shut off. James has been perhaps America's greatest, or at least objectively speaking, his most influential philosopher. The sheer number of works that he produced in his 68 years, and the artfulness by which he weaved them together like a heraldic tapestry, is enough to earn him a place among America's heroes. He was a man who came back from crippling depression and near insanity, a man who believed that humanity, though flawed, has the capacity for greatness. He saw in every individual what he called reserve energies, and often extended his hand in an effort for the betterment of all. He was always helping somebody, lifting men up with a contagion of his courage. His influence extends into not only the field of philosophy, but also psychology and religious studies. Among his admirers stand immensely influential names such as Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and even Wittgenstein. If you too have found something admirable in the philosophy of William James, then let me know in the comments below. And as I know this was not an in-depth view, I have left the various books and sites that I utilized in the making of this video down in the description box. And last, make sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell to see more videos covering various topics related to Eastern and Western philosophy. As always, thank you for talking philosophy with me. Until next time.