2019年9月4日 星期三

The Cambridge Companion to William James/ The Jameses: a family narrative

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”
“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.”
-William James
January 11, 1842 – August 27, 1910,
was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James was a leading thinker of the late nineteenth century, one of the most influential U.S. philosophers, and has been labeled the "Father of American Psychology.”
Though one of America’s greatest psychologists and philosophers, James, himself, suffered periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. John McDermott, editor of The Writings of William James, reports that “James spent a good part of life rationalizing his decision not to commit suicide.” In The Thought and Character of William James, Ralph Barton Perry’s classic biography on his teacher, in the chapter “Depression and Recovery,” we learn that at age 27, James went through a period that Perry describes as an “ebbing of the will to live . . . a personal crisis that could only be relieved by philosophical insight.”
James’ Antidotes: James’s transformative insight about his personal depression also contributed to his philosophical writings about his philosophy of pragmatism, as James came quite pragmatically to “believe in belief.” He continued to maintain that one cannot choose to believe in whatever one wants (one cannot choose to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 for example); however, he concluded that there is a range of human experience in which one can choose beliefs. He came to understand that, “Faith in a fact can help create the fact.” So, for example, a belief that one has a significant contribution to make to the world can keep one from committing suicide during a period of deep despair, and remaining alive makes it possible to in fact make a significant contribution. James ultimately let go of his dallying with suicide, remained a tough-minded thinker but also came to “believe in my individual reality and creative power” and developed faith that “Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.”


"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook."

—William James



 “Royce, you're being photographed! Look out! I say, Damn the Absolute!” —William James. http://tpr.ly/1KXWH3O






















William James Hated to Be Photographed


“I abhor this hawking about of everybody’s phiz,” he wrote to his publisher about author photos, which were then a novelty.


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Ruth Anna Putnam


Cambridge University Press, Apr 13, 1997 - Philosophy - 406 pages

William James (1842-1910) was both a philosopher and a psychologist, nowadays most closely associated with the pragmatic theory of truth. The essays in this companion deal with the full range of his thought as well as other issues, including technical philosophical issues, religious speculation, moral philosophy and political controversies of his time. New readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to James currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of James.

Contents


December 1910


William James


by James JacksonPutnam

The Jameses: a family narrative

封面

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991 - 695 頁
Even if the James family hadn't given us both William the philosopher and psychologist, and Henry the novelist, the story of this quirky, wealthy, socially prominent clan would still be riveting. Full of incidents that would become legendary, The Jameses brings to life 150 years of unforgettable American history. Four 8-page inserts.

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1993無預覽
1991無預覽關於作者 (1991)Chicago native Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, the son of Leicester and Beatrix (Baldwin) Lewis, was born on November 1, 1917. Lewis was educated in Switzerland, at Phillips Exeter Academy, at Harvard University, at the University of Chicago, where he received his M.A. in 1941. Lewis spent World War II engaged primarily in intelligence work for the British. Following the war, he began a long academic teaching career, focused mainly on American literature and social studies, at Bennington College and Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale universities. Lewis has created such critical and biographical books on authors and 19th-century United States history as The American Adam (1955), Edith Wharton (a 1975 biography that won the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft, and Critics Circle awards), and The Jameses: A Family Narrative, about author Henry James and his family.

書目資訊書名The Jameses: a family narrative
作者Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis
版本圖解出版者Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991
ISBN0374178615, 9780374178611
頁數695 頁

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