Understanding William James: books to read, in order
William James wrote the first great American psychology textbook and then spent the rest of his life doing philosophy, and the two halves explain each other: the stream of consciousness, the will to believe and the pragmatic theory of truth all follow from taking experience seriously as it is actually had. This path starts with the two public lecture courses that made him famous, goes back to the psychology, then works through the theory of truth and its critics, and closes with the biography and the intellectual world he came out of. James is one of the best prose writers in philosophy, so the primary texts here are far less forbidding than their reputations; the secondary books are labelled where they appear.
The two great lecture courses
BeginnerMeet James where he meant to be met — lecturing to a general audience — and get the two claims he is remembered for: that an idea's truth is a matter of what difference it makes in experience, and that religious experience can be studied empirically without being explained away.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Four weeks for 780 pages, and this is the rare thinker path where the primary texts are easier than the commentary would be. James wrote to be heard: both of these were delivered aloud to general audiences, and the prose is the best in Anglophone philosophy. Pragmatism is 308 pages of eight lectures
- Pragmatism as a method for settling disputes by asking what practical difference each answer would make
- The tough-minded and tender-minded temperaments, and James's claim that philosophies express them
- Truth as what works, and the immediate ambiguity in 'works' that the critics seized on
- Religion studied as psychological data rather than as doctrine to be assessed
- The once-born and the twice-born, healthy-mindedness and the sick soul
- The privileging of personal religious experience over institutions, which is both James's method and his bias
- Radical empiricism appearing in embryo — the insistence that relations are experienced, not inferred
- Apply the pragmatic method to a philosophical dispute of your choosing. Does it dissolve the dispute or merely restate it?
- What does James mean by saying an idea becomes true, and what does that verb commit him to?
- Why does the Varieties take individual experience rather than institutions as its data, and what does that decision exclude?
- Is the sick soul a psychological type or a deeper insight into reality, on James's account? He is deliberately ambiguous — locate the ambiguity.
- What does James think the pragmatic method shows about religious belief, and does the Varieties deliver it?
- Take the squirrel-and-the-tree example from Pragmatism and construct two more disputes of the same shape from your own experience. Then find one the method does not settle.
- Read the two lectures on the sick soul and write down which passages you suspect are autobiographical. The biography in stage four will tell you whether you were right.
- Write James's definition of truth in one sentence, then list the three most obvious objections to it. You will meet all three in stage three.
- In the Varieties, count how many of the cases are Protestant. Then write what that does to the generality of the conclusions.
Next up: Both these books rest on a psychology James had already published fifteen hundred pages about, and the next stage is that psychology.
Eight lectures introducing pragmatism as a method for settling disputes that would otherwise be interminable, including the squirrel-and-the-tree example everyone quotes. Short, funny, and the single best entry to James; the account of truth here is what stages three and four then argue about.
The Gifford Lectures, treating conversion, mysticism, saintliness and the sick soul as psychological data rather than doctrine. His most widely read book and still the founding text of the psychology of religion; the catalogue record for it carries a garbled year and a stack of reprint publishers in the author field.
The psychologist
IntermediateRead the work James did first and the concepts everything later depends on — the stream of consciousness, habit, attention, the self, and emotion as the perception of bodily change. The order here is deliberate: take the abridgement before the twelve-hundred-page original.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Seven weeks for 1,541 pages, and the order here does most of the work. Psychology: the briefer course is 343 pages, James's own abridgement made for students, and it contains the famous chapters on habit and the stream of thought at a fraction of the bulk. Read it first, in a fortnight. The principl
- The stream of consciousness: thought as continuous and personal, with the metaphor of a bird's flights and perchings
- Habit as the flywheel of society, and the practical advice James draws from it
- The James-Lange theory: emotion as the perception of bodily change rather than its cause
- The self divided into material, social and spiritual selves, plus the pure ego problem
- Selective attention as the mind's fundamental activity — what we call reality is largely what we attended to
- The will and the effort of attention as the seat of moral action
- On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings: the argument that we systematically cannot see the significance others find in their own lives
- Why does James insist thought is a stream rather than a chain of ideas? What theory is he attacking?
- State the James-Lange theory and the standard objection to it. Does James anticipate the objection?
- How does the social self work, and how many of them does James say a person has?
- What is the moral significance James attaches to the effort of attention, and does the psychology support the weight put on it?
- How does the Briefer Course differ from the Principles beyond length? What has been cut, and is anything distorted by the cutting?
- Introspect for ten minutes and try to catch a transitive part of the stream rather than a substantive one. James says you cannot; write what happened.
- Apply the habit chapter's practical rules to one habit you want to establish, and record whether they work over a fortnight.
- Take an emotion you felt strongly and test the James-Lange order against it. Then write the strongest counter-case.
- Read On a Certain Blindness and write about a person whose enthusiasm you have privately dismissed, from the inside.
- Pick one chapter you read in both books and mark exactly what the Briefer Course dropped.
Next up: The psychology in place, the next stage takes up the philosophical claims it was always leading to, and the critics who went after them.
James's own abridgement of the Principles, made for students and known ever since as Jimmy to the larger book's James. Read it first — it contains the famous chapters on habit and the stream of thought with a fraction of the bulk.
The 1890 masterwork that took twelve years and effectively founded American psychology, still cited for the chapters on the self, attention and will. Enormous, and best read selectively; go back for the chapters the Briefer Course made you want more of.
Lectures translating the psychology into classroom practice, published with a set of addresses to students including On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings. The most charming thing James wrote and a good rest after the Principles.
Belief, truth and the critics
IntermediateWork through the philosophical core and the objections. The stage covers the right to believe ahead of the evidence, the pragmatic theory of truth and James's response to the charge that it makes truth whatever is convenient, and radical empiricism's claim that relations between things are themselves experienced.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Six weeks for 1,147 pages, and this is where James stops being easy. The will to believe is 332 pages — the title essay plus a set of companion essays that are as good — and it is the most attacked thing James wrote, routinely in a version he did not hold, so read it in full rather than in summary;
- The genuine option — living, forced and momentous — and the strict conditions under which the will to believe applies
- The distinction James actually draws: it is a right to believe where evidence cannot decide, not a licence to believe what suits you
- The pragmatic theory of truth and the charge that it makes truth whatever is convenient
- Verification as a process — truth as something that happens to an idea
- Radical empiricism's two theses: relations between things are themselves experienced, and no trans-experiential connections are needed
- Pure experience as neutral stuff, with mind and matter as functional roles within it rather than substances
- Pluralism against monism, and why James thinks the block universe is intolerable rather than merely false
- State the conditions on a genuine option precisely. How many actual beliefs meet them?
- What is the version of the will to believe that critics attack, and where in the text is it ruled out?
- How does James answer the charge that pragmatic truth collapses into expediency? Is the answer successful?
- What does radical empiricism add to pragmatism? Could you hold one without the other?
- If pure experience is neither mental nor physical, what makes a given bit of it one or the other?
- Why does the block universe bother James so much? Is his objection philosophical or temperamental — and does he think that distinction matters?
- Find a belief of your own that meets all three conditions of a genuine option. If you cannot, say what that shows about the essay's scope.
- For each chapter of The meaning of truth, write the objection it answers in one sentence. That list is the best summary of the controversy in existence.
- Take one of James's own examples of a relation being experienced and test it by introspection. Then write what a critic would say you actually did.
- Set the account of the stream of consciousness from stage two beside the doctrine of pure experience and write how the second grows from the first.
- Write a page defending James against the charge that pragmatism is a philosophy for people who want their beliefs to be comfortable.
Next up: The philosophy stated and defended, the last stage sets it against the life it came out of and the American world that produced it.
The essay defending belief in genuine, forced and momentous options where evidence cannot decide — the most attacked thing James wrote, and routinely attacked in a version he did not hold. Read it in full rather than in summary; the accompanying essays are as good.
The sequel to Pragmatism, written entirely to answer Russell, Moore and the other critics of the truth theory. Read only after Pragmatism, since every chapter is a reply to a specific objection to it.
The posthumous metaphysics: pure experience as the single stuff of the world, with mind and matter as functional roles within it. Its companion volume A Pluralistic Universe is not listed separately here because the only catalogue record for it is an edition that binds the two together, which would double-list this book.
The introductory textbook James was writing when he died, unfinished and published posthumously. Placed last in the stage because it is his most systematic statement of positions the earlier books arrive at by other routes.
The life and the milieu
IntermediateSet the work against the life — the depressive crisis of his twenties, the medical training, the extraordinary family — and against the American intellectual world that produced pragmatism in the aftermath of the Civil War.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Six weeks for 1,460 pages, and it divides cleanly. Robert Richardson's William James is 639 pages, the best modern biography, and unusually good at showing how the philosophy grew out of a life spent in and out of illness and doubt; read it first over two and a half weeks at 40-50 pages a session. I
- The crisis of James's late twenties and the resolution he recorded as an act of will — the biographical root of The Will to Believe
- The medical training and the physiological grounding it gave the psychology
- The James family as an intellectual environment, and Henry senior's influence and cost
- Myers's method: reconstructing each position as an argument to be assessed rather than a development to be narrated
- Menand's thesis that pragmatism was a response to the certainty that produced the Civil War
- Holmes, Peirce and Dewey as the other members of the circle, and how differently each took the shared starting point
- The difference between explaining a philosophy by a life and explaining it away
- How does Richardson connect the depressive crisis to the will-to-believe argument, and does the connection strengthen or weaken the argument?
- Where does Myers judge James's arguments to fail, and are his criticisms ones James could have answered?
- What is Menand's thesis, and what evidence would count against it?
- Peirce disowned James's version of pragmatism. On the evidence of these books, was he right to?
- Having read the whole path, is James's psychology separable from his philosophy, or is one the other's premise?
- Which single book would you now give someone with a month to spend on James, and why not Pragmatism?
- Check the passages you flagged as autobiographical in the Varieties back in stage one against Richardson's account. Record how many you got right.
- Use Myers to pin down James's final position on truth, then write it in a paragraph a critic would accept as accurate.
- From Menand, write what each of the four figures took from the shared starting point, in one sentence each.
- Write a 600-word answer to the question the path opened with — whether the psychologist and the philosopher are one project — citing books from all four stages.
- Reread the first lecture of Pragmatism now. Write down what you did not previously see in it.
Next up: This is the end of the path: with the life, the psychology and the metaphysics all in view, James's famous sentences stop being aphorisms and become conclusions.
The best modern biography, and unusually good at showing how the philosophy grew out of a life spent in and out of illness and doubt. Catalogued under the bare name William James; read it first in this stage.
Secondary, and the standard philosophical study rather than a life story: a systematic reconstruction of James's positions topic by topic, with the arguments assessed. The reference book to keep once you have read the primary texts.
Not about James alone but about the intellectual circle — Holmes, Peirce, Dewey and James — and the argument that pragmatism was a response to the certainty that produced the Civil War. The right closing book, because it explains what the whole movement was for.
Discussion
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Paths that share books, cover the same subject, or open a related topic.
