Pragmatism and Other Writings

Written with cordiality and candour, James's essays seek to bring his readers into the processes and play of his own reflections. Ranging across the intellectual terrain from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging and enduring articulation of that distinctly American contribution to world thought, pragmatism. This collection presents in its entirety, Pragmatism, the seminal set of lectures in which James argues for the "reasonableness of ordinary experience" in his inimitably limpid and witty style. Also gathered here are selections from James's other formative works, including The Meaning of Truth, Psychology, The Will to Believe, and Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Throughout these essays the fecund power of imagination is restored to the operations of rationality by James, whom George Santayana hailed as "an impulsive poet: a master in the art of recording or divining the lyric quality of experience."

Older brother of novelist Henry James, William James (1842-1910) was a philosopher, psychologist, physiologist, and professor at Harvard. James has influenced such twentieth-century thinkers as Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermans, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.