William James

<aside> đź’ˇ Quotes

  • “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help the create the fact” </aside>

<aside> ✏ Notes:

  • pragmatism

    • emphasizes practice and action

    • it is best understood as a method

    • the focus of pragmatism is on the prcess of solving problems

    • key in its appearance was Charles Sanders Peirce’s publication of “How to make our ideas clear” in 1878 where he laid out the prafmatic maxim as follows: “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

  • William James(1842-1910) was a professor at Harvard specializing in psychology and philosophy(in fact he is ofrent refered to both the father of modern psychology and the founding father of pragmatism)

  • his focus was on how philosophy can help us live better through practical means

  • james would have us solve problems by asking practical difference this and that answer might have and when there is none, this would mean that the dispute is nonesense

  • defined his position as that of “radical empiricism” which as it highlights, emphasizes experience in an anti-dualist stance of the self and the world in a continuum of experienced relations

  • he is an anti-evidentialist but this does not imply zero verification; rather it implies different forms and types of verification such as how a belief may affect how a person lives his or her life

  • the will to believe

    • essay “The Will to Believe” is one of his best-known and most-read where he tersely stated expounds upon the view that one can reasonably believe something before having evidence for doing so

    • the belief in god is one such example of this

    • james is not arguing for no use evidence rather he is lowering the standards regarding how much and what type of evidence is required for reasonable belief. his standards are less rigorous and more prudential as he focuses on the practical and beneficial bearing beliefs may have on one’s life

    • this is radication empiricism: all beliefs must be verified but it is the verfication that he has expanded broadly that in sum considers how a belief plays out in one life

    • lowers the standards for empirical verifications, he includes passional evidence especially on the topic of religious belief—not on the question of God’s existence but rather on the role of God’s presumed existence in one’s life </aside>