The Oxford Handbook of William James (Oxford Handbooks)

William James was a giant of turn-of-the-century intellectual life. He helped found the young science of physiological psychology, produced a series of widely debated texts on religious experience and on the ethics of faith, co-founded the pragmatist movement in philosophy, and at the end of his life, developed a distinctive metaphysics concerning the relationship between mind and matter that is still influential today. In philosophy, James is remembered for his pragmatism, an outlook that ties truth and meaning to practical results, and for his will to believe doctrine, which defends a right to believe even without evidence, in some cases. His landmark contributions to psychology include his theory that emotions are feelings of bodily changes following excitement--that "we feel sorry because we cry, are angry because we strike" and not vice versa. His Varieties of Religious Experience offered an intimate look at intense, personal, and often heterodox religious experiences. Featuring twenty-nine new essays by leading scholars like Gary Hatfield, Philip Kitcher, Cheryl Misak, and Jesse Prinz, this Oxford Handbook provides an organized, chapter-by-chapter presentation of key themes in James's thought. These themes include attention, emotion, consciousness, evolution, intentionality, truth, religion, ethics, pragmatism, mathematics, and radical empiricism. James was an extraordinarily dialectical thinker, and his engagement with figures from Hume and Hegel to Peirce and Dewey are covered along with his influence on later phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Each chapter provides those new to James with an accessible route into a topic of interest, while also providing seasoned readers sophisticated interpretations by the best living scholars working on James today. Cover The Oxford Handbook of William James Copyright Contents List of Contributors Primary Sources Editor’s Introduction Part I: Mind 1. James and Attention: Reactive Spontaneity 2. James’s Revolutionary Theory of Emotions 3. James on the Perception of Space 4. James and Consciousness Part II: Science 5. James and Evolution 6. James and Medicine: Reckoning with Experience 7. James and Psychical Research in Context 8. Psychology and Philosophy in the Work of William James: Two Good Things Part III: Value 9. Hortatory Ethics 10. James and Religion 11. Pluralism and Toleration in James’s Social Philosophy 12. James and Politics: The Radical Democracy of a Radical Empiricist Part IV: Meaning, Truth, and Pragmatism 13. James on Percepts, Concepts, and the Function of Cognition 14. James, Intentionality, and Analysis 15. What Was James’s Theory of Truth? 16. James and Pragmatism: The Road Not Taken 17. James and Epistemic Pluralism Part V: Later Metaphysics 18. James’s Radical Empiricism: Sensation and Pure Experience 19. James and the Metaphysics of Intentionality: Royce, Bergson, and the Miller-Bode Objections 20. James and Math: On Infinite Totalities Part VI: Conversations, Past 21. James and Hume: Radical Empiricism and the Reality of Relations 22. James and Hegel: Looking for a Home 23. James and Emerson: On the Pragmatic Use of Terms Part VII: Conversations, Present 24. William James and Renouvier’s Neo-Kantianism: Belief, Experience and Consciousness 25. James and Peirce 26. James’s and Dewey’s Radical Rationalism Part VIII: Conversations, Future 27. James and British Philosophy 28. James and Wittgenstein 29. James and Phenomenology Index This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online "This Handbook provides a structured overview of William James's intellectual work. James was a pioneer of the "new" physiological psychology of the late nineteenth century. He was also a founder of the pragmatist movement in philosophy and made influential contributions to metaphysics and to the study of religion as well. This Handbook's chapters are organized either around major themes in James's writing or around his conversations with interlocutors"--