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In 1907 William James published a book of his recently delivered lectures called Pragmatism in which he detailed the links he found betwen the pragmatic frame of mind and the philosophical situation of his time. They caused a storm of controversy. Most particularly James's pragmatic musings on truth went down, with some, like a lead balloon. With The Meaning of Truth James meant to buttress his claims about truth and repel the barbs of his rationalistic enemies. The key essay in the book in many ways is the third Humanism and Truth . Humanism is James's preferred name for pragmatism. Here James lays out his thesis on truth as being a matter of continuity of experience and of useful relations with things. James always resisted the notion, commonly ascribed to many so-called pragmatists and relativists, that they make it all up . Here James suggests that experience as a control is no mere fancy. James claimed to be constrained in his theorising about truth and constrained by the world that is empirically there all around us. Read this book if you want a statement of James's position on truth or if you want pragmatist insights into the same topic. Or read it for plain intellectual fun. Its arguments are deceptively simple and particularly persuasive.

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9781495365799

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William James (1842 -1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics. James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

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