Explore the vast range of titles available.

This essay examines the cross-cultural philosophical exchange between Swami Vivekananda and William James beginning with their interactions in the summer of 1896. It explores the initial divergence between Vivekananda's Vedantic Monism and James's pragmatic pluralism, despite their shared values such as the importance of pragmatic verification, the validity of mystical experiences, fideism, and panpsychism. Nevertheless, by the end of their lives both philosophers developed more compatible views. This convergence will be explained through the work of Henry Samuel Levinson and Swami Medhananda, who illustrate how each thinker, in their maturity, embraced a more inclusive view that transcends traditional dualities. Ultimately, James’s pantheistic pluralism and Vivekananda’s pantheistic cosmopsychism blur the theoretical distinctions between their mature philosophies. It concludes by discussing the convergence of James's and Vivekananda's later works towards similar spiritual inquiries, suggesting that their paths, while initially parallel, rapidly converge into a shared vision of spiritual and philosophical inquiry. Furthermore, this essay also contextualizes this affinity between Vivekananda and James within the broader story of Indian philosophy on American pragmatism beyond James and Vivekananda. By noting the influence of Vedānta on earlier thinkers, like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, as well as Vivekananda’s influence on James, a richer tapestry of the multicultural influences on Classical Pragmatism emerges.

I provide a transcription of an inscription written by Josiah Royce in a copy of his The Spirit of Modern Philosophy which pertains to William James’ opinion of that book and of Royce’s work in general, followed by some brief remarks thereon.

Using a close reading of a single clause and its context in a section in A Pluralist Universe, we see the moral dangers James saw in traditional ontology, in particular its relation to war and peace. This analysis opens up James’s combining the personalist philosophy of his friend Borden Bowne (and others) with the pluralism he developed late in his career. This leads, further, to reflection of James’s performative philosophizing. Finding in James a theory of “pluralistic personalism” gives us a fresh look at the far-reaching power of his basic concepts of moral philosophy.

This essay explains William James’s conception of happiness. While much has been written about James's conception of emotions, surprisingly little has been written about his conception of happiness. The few scholars who have addressed James’s conception of happiness have either failed to provide sufficient context or have taken too narrow a view of the matter. This essay combines a close reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) with examples from James's personal life to demonstrate how James developed a functionalist conception of happiness. James believed that unhappiness motivates the individual to adopt new mental habits and transform themselves until they can regain their happiness. This framework permits a considerable degree of flexibility, plurality, and experimentation. Although James believed that some strategies worked better than others, he was open to the possibility that individuals could attain happiness by many means.

While most classical pragmatist scholars who work on William James appreciate radical empiricism, little has been said up to now about the ontological status of relations in James’s radical empiricism. As is the case here, I wish to rectify this neglected trend and briefly sketch the onto-relational concepts as they appear in James’s “Does Consciousness Exist” and “A World of Pure Experience.” For the reasons contained in this essay, James’s Essays on Radical Empiricism stands out as one of the first times in Western philosophy, though certainly not in all philosophy, that a processive conception of experience is privileged over rationalist conceptions of experience. This posits both privileged access to some previously inaccessible domain of knowledge and erroneously characterizes experience as ontologically dualistic. The reification of philosophical nouns like “consciousness” and “body” can be explained when we consider the metaphysical status of relations in James’s thought.

What did William James mean when he claimed that the history of philosophy is “to a great extent” a “clash of human temperaments”? Did this mean that philosophers, in his estimation, are bound to represent one or the other type, or orientation, associated with various generalized philosophical positions? Did it mean that philosophers were necessarily, in his terminology, either “tender-minded” or “tough-minded”? And if philosophical arguments are, in fact, expressions of physiological factors, through what means do these factors achieve expression? What, in sum, did James mean to imply when he invoked the concept of “temperament” and used the related notion of categorical “type”? How are we to understand and apply whatever insights he had to offer?

Since the first publication of The Principles of Psychology, readers have troubled over James’s assertion that the task of psychology is to “[ascertain] the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain.” This program for psychology appears to conflict with the general tenor of James’s thought, as well as his particular philosophy of radical empiricism and his actual accomplishments in Principles, which might be better summarized by the line “the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life.” Looking closely at James’s engagement with cerebral psychology in the opening chapters of Principles, I argue both that vagueness operates in concert, not in conflict, with the premise of psychology “as a natural science,” and that that premise is more central to James’s broader intellectual project than scholars have allowed.

This article argues that perception, like habit, for James, is both an automatic process and susceptible of formation. It considers how he defines and situates perception in relation to sensation as well as other related processes in Principles. It underlines the continuity between the centrality of perception in Principles and in Varieties, where an individual’s habitual mode of perception, as James categorizes it, becomes the basis for a differentiation into two different religious “types.” By focusing on the type distinguished by what it does not see—what he calls “healthy-mindedness”—we can gain insight into perception as a moral behavior and explore ways we might become better perceivers. The implications of this work are far-reaching and profound—not only for ethical formation but for advancing a politics of inclusion rather than exclusion, which, if taken seriously, could further movements toward racial and economic justice.