William James : my reading / Philip Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Philip, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Intellectuals.

Philosophers.

Psychologists.

Philosophy--History.

Philosophy.

Psychology--History.

Psychology.

Psychology--History--19th century.

James, William, 1842-1910.

James, William.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 pages) : illustrations (colour).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2022]

Summary:

William James (1842-1910) was elder brother to the novelist Henry James and a founder of the study of psychology. But he was also a thinker who sought to work across conventional boundaries, and did not believe in separate disciplines or over-professionalized ways of thinking. Not a formal, academic philosopher, James was above all interested in those moments when thoughts suddenly come into being, 'hot' and 'alive'. William James is for anyone who has experienced the personal need for such thinking and feels the excitement of ideas. It concerns the personal experience of reading James, involving extensive quotation from his work in relation to Philip Davis's own inner life and the lives of other readers of James-a thinker who is defiantly convinced of the fundamental validity of the inner life in the perception and the making of the Real. William James is about William James's life-writing, writing for the sake of existence, that puts together a mix of literature, psychology, philosophy, and biography in the search for purpose and human flourishing, in place of formal religion. Philip Davis is a reader of literature who feels that readers of novels and poems also need the help of psychology and philosophy, to get the thinking out, to make it into a working part of a life. His book is for readers, especially readers of literature, seeking to create, like William James, a literary way of thinking outside the realm of literature.

Contents:

1. The Start: 'I Am a Motor'

2. The Pragmatic Grammar of William James

3. The Will to Believe

4. James's Field Work

5. 'What Does Not Work'-Thomas Hardy

6. 'Mental Drama'

Further Reading

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on Publisher website; title from home page (viewed on July 01, 2022).

ISBN:

0-19-266311-9

0-19-266310-0

0-19-196456-5

OCLC:

1344112347