This Day in Philosophy — 26 August: the death of William James

William James died of heart failure on 26 August 1910, at his house in the New Hampshire village of Chocorua. He was sixty-eight.

He had been born in New York on 11 January 1842. His brother Henry James would become one of the great novelists of the age.

Yesterday this column marked Hume and Nietzsche. The calendar has arranged an interesting sequence: after two thinkers who showed that reason cannot ground itself comes a third who asks what is to be done in the space they left.

Physician first, then psychologist, philosopher last#

James's route was not a straight one. He read medicine at Harvard and took his doctorate, but never practised. After a long period of depression he began teaching physiology at Harvard; from there he moved into psychology, and from psychology into philosophy.

The Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, was a work of two volumes written over twelve years, and it very nearly founded a discipline single-handed. It is still read — partly for what is in it, partly for the extraordinary prose.

The stream of consciousness#

One of the concepts James set out in that book spilled well beyond philosophy: the stream of consciousness.

Classical psychology broke consciousness into parts — sensations, impressions, ideas. James said this ran against observation. Consciousness is not made of discrete pieces; it flows without interruption. Between one thought and the next there is no gap but a transition.

The concept passed directly into the narrative technique of the modern novel, from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce. There are few examples in the history of philosophy of a concept crossing into literature so quickly.

Pragmatism#

James's real contribution to philosophy is pragmatism. He took the idea from Charles Sanders Peirce but widened Peirce's narrow sense of it — Peirce, unhappy with the result, renamed his own position "pragmaticism".

James's criterion is this. The meaning of a belief is the difference it would make to our experience if it were true. A dispute between two theories that yields no practical difference is a dispute in name only.

The account of truth he drew from it became his most criticised thesis: truth is the "cash value" of an idea — whether the belief pays off where it leads us. Critics read this as "whatever works is true"; James insisted, repeatedly, that he had said nothing of the sort. A belief's working, for him, is an indication that it accords with reality, not a substitute for it.

The argument has been running for a hundred years. Richard Rorty's revival of pragmatism at the end of the twentieth century came out of the same line.

The will to believe#

The lecture of 1896, The Will to Believe, is the most contested text James wrote.

Its question: what is to be done where the evidence is insufficient but suspending judgement is not an option either?

James's criterion has three conditions. The option must be live (genuinely possible for the person facing it), forced (indecision must itself count as a choice) and momentous (the consequences must matter). Where all three hold, we have a right to believe even when the evidence falls short.

The text was an answer to the strict evidentialism of the day — in particular to W. K. Clifford's thesis that it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. It remains a reference point in the philosophy of religion and in arguments about epistemic responsibility.

The varieties of religious experience#

The Varieties of Religious Experience, of 1902, is James's most widely read book.

Its method is peculiar to him. He does not argue about whether religion is true; he examines religious experience as a fact. Mystical states, conversion narratives and conditions of saintliness are handled as psychological material, and then he asks: what function do these experiences serve in a human life?

The book is taken to be the founding text of the psychology of religion.

Radical empiricism#

James's late position is radical empiricism. The claim here is that experience contains not merely objects but relations, and contains them directly. Connectives such as "and", "with" and "between" are not something the mind adds afterwards; they are present in experience itself.

The thesis is a direct objection to Hume's atomistic empiricism. Hume sees discrete impressions and puts the link between them down to habit; James says that the link is experienced too.

James's A Pluralistic Universe, of 1909, carries the same line forward: reality is not a single whole but a plural structure whose parts hold to one another loosely.

Why his name is coming up now#

James turned up this month in an unexpected place. In the dispute over artificial intelligence and philosophy we covered, as the origins of functionalism in the philosophy of mind were being argued over, a reader recalled that functionalism was not born in the age of artificial intelligence: Ernst Mach and William James were functionalists of a sort a good deal earlier.

The point is a fair guide to where James stands. The idea of defining the mind not by its substance but by what it does was in his thought already.

1728: Johann Heinrich Lambert#

On the same date in 1728, Johann Heinrich Lambert was born at Mulhouse. Mathematician, astronomer, physicist and philosopher, he died in 1777.

Two of his contributions matter to philosophy.

The first is the proof he gave in 1761: he was the first to show conclusively that the number π is irrational. It closed a question two thousand years old.

The second is the Theorie der Parallellinien of 1766. There Lambert supposed Euclid's parallel postulate to be false and examined what would follow; instead of a contradiction he obtained a consistent series of results. These would later be recognised as basic propositions of non-Euclidean geometry.

The philosophical weight of that detail is considerable. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had used the Euclidean structure of space as his example of synthetic a priori knowledge. When the road Lambert opened was completed a century later with the construction of non-Euclidean geometries, that example became one of the most disputed claims in philosophy.

It should be added that Lambert and Kant corresponded. Kant had a high respect for Lambert's mathematical sharpness.