Dionysius the elder biography of william james

William James was born in , the eldest son in a remarkable family which contained his Swedenborgian father Henry senior, the novelist Henry junior, and a sister, Alice, who became known subsequently as a diarist. He taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard from —, was made a Professor of physiology in and of philosophy in Throughout the s and s he published work on psychology and philosophy which culminated in the publication of the two-volume Principles of Psychology in Subsequently his work was associated with the American Pragmatist movement and its other chief founders, C.

Peirce and J. Well known throughout Continental Europe and Britain at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, he gave the Gifford lectures in Edinburgh in —2, subsequently published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. After a trip to Britain to see his brother Henry, he fell ill on the return journey and died at his country home in Chocorua in Nevertheless Whitehead and James approached philosophy from very different positions.

As William James took part in a professional dialogue with Royce and Peirce and exchanged ideas with the great and near-great throughout the Atlantic community.

Whitehead came to his most general philosophical interests from a background in mathematics and contemporary physics. One of his deepest metaphysical convictions was that new developments in mathematics and physics entailed a radical revision of traditional philosophy and our understanding of reality. James, by contrast, came to philosophy through a background in natural science and an interest in psychology, and his initial reputation was fixed by the publication in of his two-volume Principles of Psychology James The Principles has been evaluated in many ways.

On the other, J. Although James invoked technicalities in neuro-physiology and canvassed apparently counter-intuitive views such as the James-Lange theory of the emotions, his work could still be read and appreciated without a technical background. James himself was hostile to over-technical appeals in both psychology and philosophy, and to what he regarded as an undue enthusiasm for detailed experimental work.