phenomenology online logo
Home 9 Scholars 9 James, William

James, William

William James (1842-1910) was born in New York City on January 11, 1842. His father, Henry James was a Swedenborgian theologian. William James received very good education when he was young and travelled a lot. After graduating from school, he worked at Harvard University, first as an instructor of anatomy and physiology, then professor of philosophy and psychology.

In psychology James is best known for the “stream of consciousness” approach to mental phenomena which he held in opposition to the then dominant structuralism. James believed that mental processes ought to be studied as processes and not as static bits of consciousness as the structuralists had suggested. In philosophy, he is best known for his pragmatistic philosphy.

Some of William James’s works are The Principles of Psychology (1890). A Textbook of Psychology (1892), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Some Problems of Philosophy (1911), Memories and Studies (1911), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

Related:

Arendt, Hannah

In The Human Condition, Arendt develops a phenomenological account of action that is provocative and of practical import. She makes a distinction between a hierarchy of human activity (vita active) labor, work, and action. Labor is the most basic human activity that...

Bachelard, Gaston

In his evocative text The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard employs the notion of the “poetic image” to refer to that special epiphanic oneiric quality of language that brings about in the reader a vocative response. The power of a phenomenological text resides in...

Barthes, Roland

What makes phenomenology rewarding is that it is pleasurable to read about existential insights: to passively and actively read and write insightful sources. In his book The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes (1975) reminds us that the act of reading and writing...

Bergson, Henri Louis

The hands of a clock go around and round. They move unendingly along the circumference of the clock-face in a continuous repetition or they move eternally along an infinite line. But that is not how we experience time. While clock-time tends to be seen as a steady,...

Binswanger, Ludwig

Binswanger was a founder of the existential school of psychiatry as he ventured to apply philosophical ideas of Heidegger to the psychological understanding and treatment of psychiatric patients. According to the interpretation of Binswanger’s clinical work by Nassir...

Blanchot, Maurice

Blanchot wrote a variety of genres such as novels, essays, and texts that feature a unique fragmentary philosophical style. He wrote extensively and profoundly on the philosophical thoughts of Hegel and Heidegger, yet he rarely explicitly quoted from their work. The...

Bollnow, Otto Friedrich

One of Bollnow’s best-known hermeneutic phenomenological texts is “The Pedagogical Atmosphere” (1988). While the term “pedagogical relation” is a well- known and well-discussed concept, especially in the German theoretical educational literature, interestingly the...

Buytendijk, F.J.J.

The medical doctor Buytendijk was unique in that his philosophical starting point was the healthy human being rather than the ill person. In his wide range of health science publications, Buytendijk preoccupied himself only rarely with methodological issues. A seeming...

Cixous, Hélène

Cixous repeatedly expresses her wariness of reductive language that would simplify her practice of écriture feminine. Still, she makes clear that she wishes to offer new ways of writing and speaking, and that she writes to women: “I write this as a woman, towards...

De Beauvoir, Simone

De Beauvoir’s novels, essays and philosophical works reflect a sustained and critical concern with the art of living and how to self-consciously live a life of personal choices that fully face the challenges and consequences of individual freedom, responsibility, and...

Derrida, Jacques

Derrida is now considered one of the most original thinkers, if not the most influential thinker of his time. His development of the idea of deconstruction, his critical reading of classical philosophic texts, and his provocative take on a wide range of issues and...

Descartes, Rene

The thought that the self (soul or mind) is completely distinct from the body has been widely regarded as Descartes’ fundamental mistake: separating the mind from the body. He is the philosopher who is blamed for the legacy of mind–body dualism—an idea that is now...

Dilthey, Wilhelm

What is “lived experience” (Erlebnis)? This is an important question because phenomenological human science begins in lived experience and eventually turns back to it. Dilthey (1985) has suggested that in its most basic form lived experience involves our immediate,...

Diogenes

Legend has it that the youthful Alexander the Great one day went to visit the philosopher Diogenes about whom he had heard such strange stories. He came upon the philosopher while the latter was relaxing in the beautiful sunshine. Alexander: I am Alexander the Great....

Foucault, Michel Paul

Foucault finds a foothold for prioritizing the question of self-care in Plato’s Alcibiades. In this dialogue Socrates becomes the spiritual teacher of Alcibiades in the latter’s quest for self-knowledge. And Foucault asks: “In that relationship, why should Alcibiades...

Gadamer, Hans-Georg

There is the irony that the title of Gadamer’s Truth and Method seems to promise a method to truth. But he says: “My revival of the expression ‘hermeneutics,’ with its long tradition, has apparently led to some misunderstandings. I did not intend to produce an art or...

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

When Hegel refers to “absolute knowledge,” he does not mean knowing everything absolutely or knowing absolutely everything; rather, it is knowledge of something for what this thing really is: its absolute identity. Famous is Hegel’s use of the biblical Adam for...

Heidegger, Martin

For Heidegger the method of ontology is phenomenology. So, for Heidegger phenomenology requires of its practitioners a heedful attunement to the modes of being of the ways that things are in the world. “Phenomenology” means—to let that which shows itself be seen from...

Husserl, Edmund

Husserl defines phenomenology as a descriptive philosophy of the essences of pure experiences. He aims to capture experience in its primordial origin or essence, without interpreting, explaining, or theorizing. The essences with which phenomenology concerns itself are...

Jaspers, Karl

As psychiatrist, Karl Jaspers believed that patients who suffer from primary delusions would effectively be “un-understandable” and therefore untreatable in a therapeutic manner for the psychiatrist, since there are no rational coherent processes that shaped their...

Kant, Immanuel

Famously, Kant made a distinction between the things-in-themselves (noumena) that lie beyond the reach and realm of human thinking and the things (phenomena) that we encounter (intuit) in everyday experiences as they appear in consciousness. Phenomena are the many...

Kierkegaard, Soren

Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and religious thinker who wrote literary and philosophical essays that reacted against Hegelian philosophy and the state church in Denmark, setting the stage for modern existentialism. Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, the...

Langeveld, Jan Martinus

Langeveld spoke of the “home, street, and kitchen approach” in practicing phenomenology to emphasize this quotidian interest in ordinary life topics, even as these topics often were born in the lifeworld contexts of clinical professional practices. The interest in the...

Levinas, Emmanuel

Levinas has insistently proposed that caring responsibility can only be understood in its most basic modality if we can somehow transcend the intentional relation toward the world that accompanies all modes of being and thinking. Levinas has aimed to show that it is...

Marcel, Gabriel

Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was born in Paris, France. He is a world renown French existentialist dramatist, philosopher and drama critic. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland 1951-1952, and at Harvard University in the United States...

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty is known as a cautious and tentative Socratic philosopher. His writings are rich, expressive, evocative, and profound. Often his texts possess the textual sensibility of a constant probing wondering and questioning. The Preface to his influential study...

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Perhaps Nietzsche’s most famous essay is “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense.” In this essay he mocks the human effort to arrive at truth by erecting huge and complex conceptual frameworks and structures of scientific knowledge that in a fundamental sense rests on...

Ricoeur, Paul

Paul Ricoeur is generally known as a phenomenologist who began his studies with Husserl but who was also deeply steeped in all areas of philosophy, literary theory, theology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and the human sciences such as history, linguistics, politics,...

Sartre, Jean-Paul

The methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology is more a carefully cultivated thoughtfulness than a technique. Phenomenology might be called a method without techniques. The “procedures” of this methodology have been recognized as a project of various kinds of...

Scheler, Max

Scheler’s work is proof that phenomenology does not need to be practiced as a rigorous method in the sense of Husserl. Yet, he carefully and brilliantly explores phenomenological distinctions by means of the “method” of the phenomenological attitude and reflections...

Schleiermacher, Friedrich E.D.

Schleiermacher is born on November 21, 1768, in Breslau, Lower Silesia. His father is a Prussian army chaplain. Friedrich Schleiermacher attends Moravian boarding schools and later becomes a student at the University of Halle from 1787-1790, until he passes...

Schutz, Alfred

The phenomenological sociology and social science of Alfred Schutz is significant for its contribution to a phenomenology of social action, the lifeworld, the notion of multiple realities, the idea of taken-for-grantedness of everyday life practices, and so forth. His...

Spiegelberg, Herbert

When the phenomenological historian Herbert Spiegelberg sets out “to give a minimum operational grasp of what it means to do phenomenology” (p. 14), he starts from the commonly accepted Husserlian phrase “To the Things” (Zu den Sachen) which indicates that doing...

Strasser, Stephan

An interesting case of validity critique is contained in the scornful criticism by Stephen Strasser who once referred to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous account of the objectifying look as “phenomenological impressionism” (1974, pp. 295–302). In his account of “the look”...

van den Berg, J.H.

Van den Berg argues that it was a significant event in human history, around the year 1300, when the ordinary closed body was first cut open and by Mundinus and soon by others. From this historical moment onward, it is possible to see the hand with two kinds of...

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann (1889-1951), Austrian-British philosopher, who was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, particularly noted for his contribution to the movement known as analytic and linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein was raised...