Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
William James, 1907
A group of friends in the mountains argues itself hoarse over whether a man goes round a squirrel that keeps hiding from him behind a tree trunk. William James settles the dispute with one question and turns it into a method for the whole of philosophy. In eight lectures from 1906 and 1907 he explains how to tell an empty argument from a real one, what truth is, and why the future of the world depends, among other things, on us.
Who it is for
For anyone tired of endless arguments who wants to understand what people are really arguing about. And for anyone who has never read philosophy but would like to start with a book written for ordinary listeners.
Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.
A professor who came to speak to people who were not professors
Boston, November 1906. The Lowell Institute is holding public lectures for the city's residents, and William James, a Harvard professor, steps up to the lectern. In front of him are not students but ordinary listeners, and he admits frankly that the venture is a bold one: he will have to talk like a professor to people who have never studied philosophy.
He begins with someone else's idea. The writer Gilbert Chesterton remarked that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. James agrees: everyone has a philosophy. It is not a school subject but our dim sense of what life honestly and deeply means.
The eight lectures, given in Boston and repeated in January 1907 in New York at the invitation of Columbia University, became this book. James printed them as he delivered them. He offers a simple way to test any idea, from an argument on a hiking trip to the question of God: ask what would change in life if the idea were true.
Ahead of you are an argument about a squirrel, a hotel corridor, a path in the woods and an offer James asks you to imagine coming from the creator of the world. By the end it will be clear how to tell empty arguments from real ones, and what James called truth.
We choose a philosophy with our character
The first lecture opens with an admission philosophers usually keep quiet. James says the history of philosophy is to a great extent a clash of human temperaments. A philosopher offers only impartial reasons, but his temperament pulls him towards a conclusion more strongly than any reason. He wants a world that suits his nature, and he believes in the picture of the world that suits it.
To show this, James writes out two columns. In the first are the tender-minded: they start from principles, believe in free will and in the unity of the world, and expect everything to end well. In the second are the tough-minded: they start from facts, are sceptical, see the world as a multitude of separate things, and expect no comfort from it.
These people look down on each other. The tough think the tender are sentimental softheads, and the tender think the tough are coarse and callous. James compares it to Boston tourists mingling with the people of the gold-mining town of Cripple Creek. But most of us, he says, want the good things on both sides: facts and principles, science and faith.
What does philosophy offer such a person? The empiricists, the philosophers of experience, give you science, and with it materialism and a world without human hopes. The rationalists, the philosophers of pure reason, give you a system with faith in it, but one far removed from real joys and sorrows. One of James's students wrote that the world of a philosophy professor is like a marble temple shining on a hill, while life has been left outside the door, in the street. James promises a philosophy that is true to the facts and does not take away hope.
About the author
William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, a professor at Harvard University, and the author of The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Together with Charles Peirce he is considered a founder of pragmatism.
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