Product Description

ON JAMES, like other titles in the Wadsworth Philosopher's Series, offers a concise, yet comprehensive, introduction to this philosopher's most important ideas. Presenting the most important insights of well over a hundred seminal philosophers in both the Eastern and Western traditions, the Wadsworth Philosophers Series contains volumes written by scholars noted for their excellence in teaching and for their well-versed comprehension of each featured philosopher's major works and contributions. These titles have proven valuable in a number of ways. Serving as standalone texts when tackling a philosophers' original sources or as helpful resources for focusing philosophy students' engagements with these philosopher's often conceptually daunting works, these titles have also gained extraordinary popularity with a lay readership and quite often serve as "refreshers" for philosophy instructors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2117615 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 104 pages

Customer Reviews

Step by Step Through William James!
Drs. Talisse and Hester have here written a very good introduction to a very worthy thinker - American philosopher William James. These two writers, of course, had their work cut out for them. James, after all, wrote what would be known as 'classics' in no less than three fields: psychology [Principles of Psychology], religious anthropology [Varieties of Religious Experience] and, of course, philosophy [Pragmatism].

Considering that anyone writing a 90 page book on such a prolific thinker has a lot to deal with, our authors' focus almost exclusively on James' philosophical, rather than psychological, essays. And they succeed beautifully in breaking James's amazingly pluralistic and robust philosophy in to bite-size chunks that, while easy to chew for the layperson, also retain much of the 'flavor' of James.

The sections are as follows:

(1) The first chapter (as is the standard in the Wadsworth series) is devoted to biography of James, focusing on how his life layed the groundwork for his philosophy.

(2) Next, we are treated to a chapter on James's metaphysics of radical empiricism (decidedly the most difficult of James's ideas to get ones head around, but explained well here).

(3) The next chapter is a nice explanation of James's theory of truth and belief - James's pragmatism. This was easily the most contreversial of James's ideas and the two authors devote time to handling some of the numerous objections/misunderstandings of James's belief-based pragmatism;

(4) The next chapter is, to me, the most exciting; it is to do with James's moral philosophy, wherein he gives up on the idea that one moral theory can do the job. James was a pluralist who saw social life as a struggle between multiple conceptions of the good and the good life. As moral philosophy is a focus of mine (and James a favorite of mine) I can attest that the two authors explain this section very well indeed.

(5) Finally, we are treated to a discourse on James's defense of the individual's right to believe in a higher power. Throughout James's career he offered a thorough-going defense of theism by pragmatic justification, and an argument that while skepticism can be a virtue, so can belief in the as-yet-unproved.

As I said, the professors manage to take William James - a complex thinker due to his unceasing pluralism and fear of philosophic thinness - and given us a nice step-by-step 90 pager sure to wet anyones appetite for more. After this book, I would reccomend Jacques Barzun's "Stroll With William James," and even Lousis Menand's "Metaphysical Club."