Tilda rejwan 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.

William James was an original thinker in and between the disciplines of Missing: tilda rejwan.

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.

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.

William James (January 11, – August 26, ) was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.

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.

That hostility extended also to a dislike and suspicion of logic—a fact that, again, highlights the significant differences in the backgrounds of Whitehead and James.