James, William
James, William ( 1842 – 1910 ),American philosopher, the son of Henry James senior (a Swedenborgian philosopher), and elder brother of Henry James . He was at first a student of art and then a teacher of physiology, but turned his attention to psychology. His views are embodied in his Principles of Psychology ( 1890 ), and show a tendency to subordinate logical proof to intuitive conviction. He was a vigorous antagonist of the idealistic school of Kant and Hegel , and an empiricist who made empiricism more radical by treating pure experience as the very substance of the world. Yet he was not a monist but a pluralist, ‘willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected…and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form, is as acceptable as the all-form’ (Pluralistic Universe, 34). Pragmatism, for which he...
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