Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking Reviews

• 
  Buck

  Canadians of a certain age may recall a brilliant series of commercials put out by Carlsberg years ago. Aimed at thirty-something men, they cleverly extolled the joys of adulthood. A typical spot showed a horny couple sharing a pre-coital embrace in a motel room. The voiceover narrator explains: “A friend of mine once tried to tell me that the best sex I’d ever have would be with my wife.” Pause. “He was right.” And then the slogan: “Welcome to your Carlsberg years.” (Youtube is pretending not to know what commercial I’m talking about, and keeps recommending instead this cruelly hilarious clip of
  a shitfaced Orson Welles – at once the saddest and funniest thing ever.)
  
  Well, I’ve decided that pragmatism is a philosophy for people in their Carlsberg years. It has a sort of adult-contemporary vibe to it. By design, it’s very middle of the road. This sounds like a dig, but it’s really not. The fact is, I kinda like Wilco – and I kinda like William James. Warmed-over Nietzscheanism, a rakish dash of critical theory, a bit of Bataille when you’re feeling frisky: that’s all very well for your twenties, but sooner or later you settle down, buy a Suzuki Swift and start wondering how you’re going to get rid of that tribal tattoo on your arm. Nothing tragic about that.
  
  I won’t bore you with a detailed summary of pragmatism—that’s what Wikipedia’s for—but I’d just suggest that, if you’re reading this, you’re most likely, in some corner of your harried soul, a pragmatist already. Pragmatism—of the unofficial, half-assed variety—has become the default mode for most (secular) Westerners. This isn’t James’ doing, exactly. He just gave a local habitation and a name to something that was floating around in the zeitgeist.
  
  If you’re interested in pragmatism itself, you should probably just go straight to Richard Rorty for the modern-dress version. The only reason to read James is for the beauty of his prose—and for the particular tang of his humour and sanity. Even when he’s discussing the most dry-as-dust concepts, he can’t help being earthy and vivid:
  
  Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious from, ought to make matter sacred ever after...That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.
  
  When you remember that James himself lost a child, you start to realize just how much passion and seriousness went into the man’s writing. Already in the 19th century, there was a joke going around that William James was a novelist disguised as a psychologist, while his brother Henry was a psychologist trying to write novels. At this point in my life, William suddenly seems a lot more interesting and relevant than Henry, but that’s probably just another sign that I’ve entered my Carlsberg years.
  
• 
  Ahmed Ibrahim

  في تقديم زكي نجيب محمود لكتاب جون ديوي "المنطق: نظرية البحث" يلخص المنطق البرجماتي بشكل جميل، فالمنطق التقليدي يدور حول صدق أو كذب الجملة، أما المنطق البراجماتي يبحث عن الغرض الذي تؤديه الجملة، هل الجملة تؤدي إلى غرض مفيد وعملي أم لا؟ هذه هي البراجماتية.
  
  البراجماتية من أكثر المذاهب الفلسفية التي يُساء فهمها، وكثيرا ما تُخلط بالنفعية، بيد أن البراجماتية كمذهب فلسفي يحاول إزالة اللبث والخلاف عن الكثير من الأمور غير المجدية من الخلاف عليها، كما يحاول أن يصل بالإنسان للراحة العملية.
  
  يبدأ الكتاب بوقوف الكاتب على المشاكل الفلسفية للعصر الفلسفي الحديث والاختلافات بين العقليين (اللينين العريكة) والتجربيين (الصعبين المراس).. يتناول الكاتب كلا الفلسفتين ليقف على الإشكالية، حيث تقف البراجماتية في منطقة الوسط بين الفلسفتين، فكل فلسفة تأخذ عليها البراجماتية عدة مآخذ وتتقف معهما في بعض الأمور. لذلك يمكن أن نقول أن البراجماتية مذهب توفيقي.
  في المحاضرات التالية يقف في كل واحدة على جانب محدد من الرؤية البراجماتية، يبدأ أولا مع تحديد معنى البراجماتية ثم يتناول بعض المشاكل ويتعامل معها من منطلق فلسفته، فيتناول الواحد والمتعدد ومفهوم البداهة، ثم أهم مباحث الكتاب وهو مفهوم البراجماتية للحقيقة، وقد عرضهم مفهومهم للحقيقة لسوء الفهم والنقد الذي يتهمهم بالقول بأنهم يقولون بعدم وجود حقيقة، لكن الكاتب يتناول تقد الآخرين ويفنده ويوضح نظرتهم للحقيقة "فإن الحقيقي باختصار جدا ليس سوى المطلوب النافع في سبيل تفكيرنا، تماما مثلما أن الصحيح ليس سوى المطلوب النافع الموافق في سبيل سلوكنا" وهذا اختصار للمفهوم العام الذي سيتناوله الكاتب أكثر في هذا الفصل وفي فصل آخر بعدها. ثم يتخدث الكاتب عن مفهوم الإنسية في ضوء البراجماتية، فالحق في نظر العقليين مختلف عنه في نظرة البراجماتيين، وهذا موضوع هذا الفصل. كما يخصص آخر فصل في الكتاب أيضًا لتناول الإنسية والحقيقة والعلاقة الرديكالية بينهما.
  ومن أهم ما يميز وليم جيمس عن شيلر وديوي أعلام البراجماتية هو أهتمامه بتناول الدين على المحك البراجماتي، فالدين بشكل عام مفيد لتصورات البعض ومفيد، لذلك أهتم جيمس بالحديث عن الدين وفائدته في إطار فلسفته. وفي آخر مبحث في الكتاب ينتقل إلى وظيفة الإدراك، وفيها لا يبحث عن كيف يحدث الإدراك، ولكن عن ماهية الإدراك، وهذا الفصل يتنقل بين علم النفس والفلسفة.
  
  بهذا الكتاب وضع وليم جيمس أسس الفكر البرجماتي في كتاب، يختلف جيمس أحيانا مع أعلام البراجماتية الآخرين: شيلر وديوي ولكن فلسفتهم تدور حول محور أو منطق واحد.
• 
  Dave Schaafsma

  I read this as I have read it before for a grad course I am teaching on Language, Literacy and Democracy. And Pragmatism. This book is a series of lectures James gave more than a hundred years ago to help explain pragmatism as a method, not as just yet another philosophical position. It's a method of approaching truth as against abstract theory. Seeing truth not as Truth and the self as something clear and solid we need to discover but multiple, social, shifting, flexible, continually constructed in engagement with experience. Which makes it sound like a lot of contemporary postmodern philosophy. Right, the ideas have been around for centuries, nothing new, James says, and these skeptical "show me" ideas continued through the work of contemporary pragmatist practitioners such as Richard Rorty. Anti-"isms," which can be single theoretical explanations of the world, like Marxism, Feminism, anti-racism. Single bullet explanations that are fixed and a-contextual. Grand Theories that claim to explain How the World Works. Bull hockey to that, James says.
  
  The central idea here is that the meaning (or truth) of any idea — philosophical, political, social, or otherwise — has validity only in terms of its experiential and practical consequences. In other words, you think this, you believe this. . . so what? What difference does it make in the world? What good is to believe that? James and pragmatism HATE abstractions and the emptiest most ethereal reaches of philosophizing. They're anti-dogma. As one raised to believe in a Calvinist brand of religion, I have some history that leads me to say amen to James and draw closer to anarchy (against a fixed system of rules) than fascism, let's just say.
  
  James is also responding to Darwin, who was of course all the rage in the late nineteenth century. Darwin says, among other things, that we are mostly determined by our biology, by genetics. He shows us this true through scientific experiment. And he has a point. But James says nope, anything that claims you are completely determined by any one thing in particular ways is just plain limited. You are changing and always will be. Not fixed by experience but open because of it.
  
  James and the pragmatists say that you in part make yourself and your world. A hopeful view, perhaps a little naive, you say, you cynic, but as a teacher, I have to believe in possibilities for learning and life, and James helps me not be so. . . hopeless about the world and its future. He helps, at least. And as someone in academia, I hitting it helps to be less certain than too damned cocksure of oneself.
  
  James, the brother of novelist Henry, was one of the great thinkers of his time. He wrote Principles of Psychology to help found that field, he wrote Varieties of Religious Experience to examine people's experience with belief/religion/psychic phenomena, in various cultures. He's a little stuffy and not all of what he cared about then matters to me, but I still like his contribution to thinking about thinking.
• 
  أحمد سعيد البراجه

  يقول "أحمد خالد توفيق" : الفلسفة هى فن التحدث عن التفاحة بدلاً من أكلها.
  ولكن البراجماتية تختلف ،، فالبراجماتية تتجاوز التحدث عن التفاحة إلى الحديث عما بعد أكلها ..
  
  البراجماتية كفلسفة تغض الطرف عن الحديث عن الماضي ،، وترفض الإستغراق في تأمل الماضي ،، وتهتم بنتائج وتأثير الماضي والحاضر على المستقبل ..
  
  يقول ( د.زكي نجيب محمود ) عن البراجماتية في مقدمة الكتاب : أعطني من القول ما يهديني سواء السبيل في حياة عامة أو في صناعة وزراعة وتجارة، أسلم لك من فوري أن قول حق، بغض النظر عما كان وما هو كائن بالفعل ..
  
  
  الكتاب يضم محاضرات ألقاها "وليام جيمس" فيلسوف البراجماتية ،، والتي ألقاها في أواخر العام 1906 وبدايات 1907 بأحد جامعات نيويورك ،،
  وقد هذا السبب في صعوبة وثقل المحاضرات ،، فهي محاضرات أكاديمية ،، استغرق مني الكتاب وقتاً طويلاً لأنني أعدت قراءة بعض أجزاء الكتاب أكثر من مرة ،،
  ومع هذا لا أستطيع أن أجزم أنني أنهيت الكتاب ،، فهناك صفحات لم أستوعب ما بها نظراً لأنها تتكلم عن شخصيات ونظريات فلسفية لم أستوعبها مع أول قراءاتي في الفلسفة ،،
  ولكن الكتاب أضاف بالفعل لمعلوماتي ،، وأعتقد أنه أثر في تفكيري بشكل أو آخر ،،
  
  
  تفاجأت وأنا أقرأ مقدمة المؤلف أنه لا يستسيغ لفظة " البراجماتية " ولكن الوقت قد فات لتغييرها ،، وفي آخر الكتاب يقترح تسمية نستبدلها باسم " الإنسية " ،،
  
  
  المحاضرات الثمان تتحدث عن :
  - المعضلة الراهنة في الفلسفة.
  - معنى البراجماتية.
  - بعض المشكلات الميتافيزيقية على المحك البراجماتي.
  - الواحد والمتعدد.
  - البراجماتية والبداهة.
  - مفهوم البراجماتية للحقيقة.
  - البراجماتية والإنسية.
  - البراجماتية والدين.
  
  هكذا إذاً يعرفنا "وليام جيمس" عن ظروف نشأة البراجماتية ولماذا نحن بحاجة إلى فلسفة جديدة ،، ليشرح بعد ذلك حلول البراجماتية لقضايا الفلسفة الحديثة ..
  
  وفي آخر الكتاب يضيف المؤلف فصولاً نشرت من قبل ،، يكمل بها شرح مفهوم البراجماتية تحت عنوانين : وظيفة الإدراك ، النمور في الهند ، الإنسية والحقيقة.
  
  
  الكتاب لا يلخص ،، ولا أستطيع الكتابة عنه ،،
  ولكني أستطيع الإجابة عن أسئلتكم عن البراجماتية على حسب ما فهمته من الكتاب ،،
  
  
• 
  Darwin8u

  I love reading a book and saying at the end, 'this is fundamentally what I believe; this is generally how I think; this has always been a piece of MY philosophy.'
• 
  Alina

  James is a wonderful writer, and this text would be readily approachable by even readers who have no background in philosophy. A consequence of this, however, is that James doesn't lay out his views systematically, and doesn't provide rigorous argument for them; his arguments primarily consist in applying his views to extended examples (e.g., he presents how religious experience would be explained according to his view; how the debate between materialism and religion would be seen under his lights; etc). This gives a false sense of validity to his views; it seems that James' position has a lot of explanatory power, but it's not difficult to make many positions capable of rationalizing and explaining many cases.
  
  James's overall view is that the meaning of a statement or theory is reducible to the practical consequences that statement or theory has. For example, James thinks that creationist and materialist cosmological explanations, ultimately, have the same meaning because they both predict the exact same consequences that we encounter in practical experience (i.e., the existence of the world around us, today). This view entails that the truth of a statement or theory is born out in whether its practical consequences are favorable, preferable, or appropriate in our experience. There is no absolute truth that stands independently of our practical experience and desires; truth is subsequent to and determined by how we experience things and what we desire. This allows James to claim that truth is just one value of the good among others, like beauty or yumminess or pleasure.
  
  I think there's a large grain of truth to this view, but also James leaves it critically ambiguous and applies it in ways that are misleading. I've been thinking, along with G. E. Anscombe, about how any action can be captured by a series of means-end reasoning (e.g., the man moves his arms up and down in order to pump (poisoned) water, he pumps water in order to get it into the house, he gets water into the house in order to poison its (Nazi) residents, he poisons its residents in order to help with the anti-Nazi cause). Two identical, overt behaviors could amount to distinct actions, depending on the aims or reasons for which the agent is performing it. With this in mind, we can think about how James's view doesn't have to be a straightforward matter of verificationalism, or that the truth of a theory is identical to whether our experience can verify it. Instead, the truth of a theory is born out in whether we are capable of taking diverse actions whose aims/reasons are consistent with, affirm, or include parts of that theory. For example, if a religious person can get by in life with their actions including aims/reasons that do not violate and even support their religious cosmology, then this theory will be truthful to them.
  
  The main issue with James's view, I think, is that he fails to make a critical ontological distinction between the bare existential of a physical thing and the meaning of a thing (regardless of whether it's physical). It seems that our actions cannot plausibly include means (overt behaviors) that interact with the existence of physical things that don't actually exist. So there is a hard, material constraint upon actions, which amounts to a hard constraint upon a subset of possible truths. There cannot be debate over the ground beneath our feet's existing, for example, because we cannot plausibly get actions off the ground that presuppose that this ground doesn't exist.
  
  In contrast, we can plausibly get a diverse array of meanings off the ground, by presupposing them in our actions. When I take a next step on the ground, for example, I can do this with the aim to get my steps in for the day, to arrive at the next slice of the time-worm that constitutes my spatio-temporal being, to release anxiety, to approach my beloved, etc. Many of the states of affairs or items included in these aims are not physical in character (e.g., time-worms, anxiety). This non-physical character allows these items to become systematically affirmed by an agent's diverse actions, so that their existence does get born out in experience; they have genuine practical consequences, insofar as the agent can act by virtue of them. Unlike the existence of a physical thing, there are no hard constraints on the existence of these non-physical items. Any abstract reason can guide an agent's diverse actions, as long as the agent is committed to it, and it is consistent with the agent's other reasons.
  
  With this distinction in place, we can see that James's example that materialistic and religious cosmologies have the same truth value is false. There are many fine-grained differences in states of affairs each would entail. James would be right only if each predicted solely the bare existence of physical things around us. But a religious person might pray to god, while an atheist would find this a make-believe or incoherent action, for example; these views predict the existence of far more, non-physical entities, which figure into the meaning or truth-value of these views.
  
  I'm left wondering about the relationship between these non-physical entities and physical things. If the former were reducible to the latter, then there should be hard constraints derivable for the former; then, even if a non-physical entity may be systematically affirmed by a person's actions, this person would still count as delusional. I don't think any straightforward reduction would be possible, because the two are just so ontologically different. There are many stories, mythologies, elements of culture that serve as the basis of non-physical entities, and these have evolved over human evolution, into extreme complexity. If reduction is impossible, how else are we to think about the relationship between the two? I wonder if there are causal paths that could be identified; or if there are relationships that are valuable to examine which aren't causal at all in character.
• 
  Matt

  William James’ erudite, though painfully long, volumes on The Principles of Psychology won me over when I read them. His intelligence and expansive view of the world, and our experiencing of it, was a wonderful blend of psychology and philosophy. A mixture that he serves up as “pragmatism” in Pragmatism: a New Name of Some Old Ways of Thinking.
  
  The only thing James knows is that no one knows the answers to the philosophical and religious questions we love to bicker about. Therefore, in the absence of real answers, how do you construct an ethic by which we satisfy our impulse to assign value while at the same time recognize scientific truths that dictate our reality? He has no desire to deprive the faithful of their comforts, but:
  

  [i]n this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is “noble”, that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean. Pg. 26>

  
  For James, our philosophic thinking must allow room to grow and learn. We are not at the apex of human understanding of the universe, our place in it, or even ourselves. Any belief that restricts the ability to move beyond our current understanding is unproductive. But that just means we need to redefine what we believe. James believes there is more than belief. As he states, “I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe.” Pg. 107.
  
  Growth is the underlying value in James’ pragmatism. Whereas some call for unconditional love, or truth, or observance of dictated commands, as the core of their belief, James wants to learn more. Pragmatism embraces imagination and what causes us to strive past the boundaries of where we are. Those wanting certainty and distinct boundaries obviously reject such fluid thinking. James knew this, and even in these lectures, desperately wished that his detractors would not be so quick to dismiss these thoughts as mere principles of convenience or what is most expedient. If you believe the world is not tailor-made to be understood for our luxury, then, whether it be pragmatism or a belief in the unknowability of God’s purpose, there seems little choice but to acknowledge our ignorance and try to find a way forward. The alternative is simply standing still.
  
• 
  Xander

  Pragmatism (1907) is William James' attempt to square the circle. It is his answer to the endless philosophical debate between rationalism and empricism. The rationalist claims there is an Absolute Truth, waiting for us to grasp it, while the empiricist claims there is a multitude of truths: all our experiences are truth.
  
  Both positions are an answer to the question: what is truth? Now, this debate has been raging ever since the ancient Greeks, and it has seen the invention of innovative and original philosophical systems (Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, among others). But it is safe to say the debate hasn't really been settled - and I'd even claim it hasn't progressed, at all.
  
  William James tries to concoct a totally new philosophical stance regarding the question 'what is truth?', by manoeuvring between rationalism and empiricism. But in doing so, I'm afraid that James has only brought us further from an answer.
  
  James' pragmatism centres around the question: what difference does it make in practice if I grant this idea or fact to be true (or not)? So truth, according to James, is nothing but the practical utility of an idea or fact to the person asking the question. A fact that is useful in practice is true; a fact that isn't useful in practice is false.
  
  (Since James takes utility (of an idea or fact) as the criterion with which to distinguish truth from falsehood, James' stance could - or should - rather be called 'epistemological utilitarianism'. This would make more sense, since pragmatism easily leads to confusion.)
  
  So what to think of James' pragmatism? The problem for James (and pragmatism in general) is that it isn't really an answer to the original debate, at all. Both empiricists and rationalists are looking for a criterion to distinguish truth from fiction, but both search in different areas: the rationalist will look for metaphysical principles, while the empricist will look for sense experience. Both will not be satisfied with such a childish answer (as James gives them): "you are both right, as long as the statement is useful to you, it is true." In James' view they are both right in their own ways - because their philosopoical stance is useful to them, in practice - and there really is no debate.
  
  I am perhaps a bit unfair regarding James' pragmatism, therefore let me use some citations, so you can judge for yourself:
  
  "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify, false ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as." (p. 77)
  
  And truth is, according to James, in a sense, agreement. But agreement to what?
  
  "Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading - leading that is useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters, as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability, and flowing human intercourse.They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking." (p 83)
  
  So to interpret this: truth is using ideas that are conducive to practical daily intercourse between human beings. The higher the ideas used, contribute to this goal, the more true they are. Therefore, utility in human intercourse, is James' "large loose way" (p. 83) of defining agreement (i.e. truth).
  
  I cannot really make it more clear than the above statements and interpretations. Pragmatism (at least James' version) judges truth of ideas or facts by the practical utility of the ideas or facts involved, related to our daily lives. James' pragmatism, it is soon realized, would quickly lead to objections. To take just two examples.
  
  (1) What about those ideas that we can use to destroy ourselves with?
  
  The atom bomb is based on scientific theory; we can destroy humanity with it; hence it doesn't promote 'human intercourse'. Indeed, the untruth of the atomic theory would be (at least in general, from the perspective of mankind as a whole) more conducive to human intercourse, so that would, almost by definition, make the atomic theory false.
  
  But the same atomic theory that lets us build a-bombs, lets us build nuclear reactors, which power our societies and give us energy, warmth, etc. This is utility in the flesh. So the theory is true after all?
  
  In chapter 5, James seems to get the gist of the above, when he says the following:
  
  "Its [our practical control of nature] rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the being of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and cannot turn it off." (p. 72)
  
  Although James seems to see the problem, he doesn't realize this is a serious objection to his stance on 'utility as a criterion for truth.'
  
  (2) What about the time when there were no human beings around for ideas to have practical utility in human intercourse?
  
  Since their existence (as an idea or fact) has no effect on our practical lives, is it true or untrue that dinosaurs existed? etc. etc.
  
  (Of course one could argue that our knowledge of the history of our planet is conducive to our daily lives, since it gives us meaning to our lives. Yet there are millions of human beings to claim that 'the existence of dinsoaurs as a fact' stands in the way to their practical lives as devout Christians. And it doesn't really answer the question in what sort of way our life would be different if we had no knowledge whatsoever of dinosaurs.)
  
  So what about the book? The book is short (one can read this in an afternoon), fairly readable, and accessible. Yet it uses arcane and outdated language, and is - without prior knowledge - at times hard to grasp for the layman. James has a certain attraction in his style of presentation, yet at times one wonders if he couldn't just cut the academic prose and plainly state what he means (especially since he is adressing a popular audience). Its content isn't all that interesting - it certainly doesn't need 8 chapters to bring the main message across. In sum, I cannot really recommend this book.
  
  As a last remark, I'd like to point to James' curious stance on humanism and religion. Since pragmatism judges the truth of statements by their utilitarian practical value, it follows that human beings (partly) create truth. This leads James to conclude (in chapter 7) that humanism and pragmatism go hand in hand. In a sense, pragmatism IS humanism. The same, in general, goes for religion.
  
  In chapter 8, James states that religion is fully compatible with pragmatism. I'm not so sure if the average religious believer will agree, though. James' pragmatism goes against dogmatism (i.e. rationalism; the claim that there is absolute Truth) and allows for a plurality of visions regarding truth. Monotheistic religions do make absolute truth claims, though, so I am not sure what James means when he claims "pragmatism can be called religious" (p. 116) while in the same sentence adding the conditional: "if you allow that religion can be pluralistic" (p. 116).
  
  So it seems that James' pragmatism tries to answer an important question but fails in its attempt and leaves us only with even more (new) questions and contradictions.
• 
  Zakaria Bziker

  I had to read this book to understand the age we're living in. I am not a fan of pragmatism. I think it reduces the philosophical inquiry to selfish pursuits and ties science to short term goals. Pragmatism, to my understanding, has no need for philosophy.
  “Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance.”
  ― Bertrand Russell
• 
  robin friedman

  James's Pragmatism
  
  In 1906 and 1907, William James delivered a series of eight lectures at the Lowell Institute, Boston, and at Columbia University, New York City which he published as "Pragmatism: A New Way for Some Old Ways of Thinking". This short book, which James further described as "popular" lectures on philosophy constituted James's fullest statement of his thought up to that time. It remains a provocative, valuable, and important work, a classic of American thought.
  
  I want to mention some important considerations in James's overall approach in this book. First, I was struck, in reading "Pragmatism", by the importance James attaches to the philosophical quest. He begins his opening lecture, "The Present Dilemma in Philosophy" with the observation that an individual's philosophy is the most important thing about that person because it gives his or her sense of "what life honestly and deeply means." James makes high and traditional claims for the importance of philosophical investigation -- claims which not been followed by a number of subsequent professional philosophers.
  
  Second, James wrote his book for a lay audience of educated individuals whom he called "amateur philosophers". People in this class, for James, were not technically trained academic philosophers but rather were those who had a sense of both the claims of religion and spirituality and the claims of empirical science. These amateurs, James continued, wanted, in our modern terminology to "have it all"; and they were inclined to overlook conflicts or inconsistencies between types of beliefs that they wished simultaneously to hold. Many of James philosophical successors did not follow James in writing for amateurs. They wrote instead for other philosophers.
  
  Third, James saw his role as a philosopher in mediating between the claims of Darwinian and physical science and religion. In a memorable phrase, he divided philosophers and philosophical tendencies into two broad types: "tender-minded" and "tough minded". The tender-minded thinkers of his day, the focus of much criticism in "Pragmatism" were the absolute idealists, American and British successors to Hegel. The tough-minded thinkers were empiricists, wedded to factual investigation and to materialism. Tough minded thinkers wanted nothing to do with metaphysical or religious abstractions. James conceived of pragmatism as a way to accept what was valuable in both tender-minded and tough-minded thinkers.
  
  Thus, in the body of his lectures, James developed pragmatism as a method and a theory of truth. Pragmatism is an instrumental philosophy which holds, James states at one point, that "ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience." (Note the reference to "ideas" in this definition which may tie James unduly to some previous methods of thinking that he would otherwise reject.) Philosophy is not a subject for intellectualist abstractions but rather a tool to help people understand themselves and their needs in specific situations, consistently with their needs in other situations. Pragmatism, for James, is a forward-looking philosophy which tests ideas by their consequences, both in matters of science and in matters of religious belief. Thus, for James pragmatism is a philosophy which mediates between science and religion. Unlike some of his fellow pragmatists, the religious life was important to James.
  
  James applies his basic approach to pragmatism to address traditional philosophical questions, including the nature of substance, personal identity and free-will. His discussions are still worth reading. For me, the strongest section of the book was the Lecture IV in which James contrasts philosophical monism and pluralism. This chapter helped me to both to understand and to question the fascination that claims to the unity of the world or of experience have exerted and continue to exert on many thinkers. This chapter is an excellent exposition of philosophical pluralism -- the view that there are many things and that they may only be imperfectly and incompletely connected. The lectures on "Pragmatism and Common Sense" and on "Pragmatism and Humanism" are contemporary and important in that they suggest the absence of fixed categories and the legitimacy of alternative means of describing experience for different purposes.
  
  James writes so beautifully that he sometimes lacks the technical precision that might make his ideas clearer. He frequently uses loose metaphors that, while intruiging, serve to obfuscate rather than clarify his position. This is particularly the case in lecture VI, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth" in which James expounds upon his claim that the truth of an idea is the use we can make of it. As James himself points out, his position was subject to a great deal of criticism, much of which may be misdirected. But James does not entirely help himself in expounding his position on this difficult question.
  
  In the final chapter of his work, James explains his philosophical stance as a meliorist -- one who looks towards the future and tries to work to make his life and the world a better place. He finds that, for him, some form of religious theism is essential for this endeavor. While rejecting transcendental idealism and the absolute, James accepts the existence of a God, if not the all-powerful, all-knowing, unitary God of traditional Jewish-Christian theology. The method of knowing an idea by its use and consequence finds a place, for James, in both matters of the spirit and matters of science. Thus, James claims that pragmatic thought is able to honor both the claims of spirit and the claims of science. James modified his pragmatism in subsequent works and ultimately may have adopted a position closer to the idealism he criticizes in "Pragmatism".
  
  With many modifications and qualifications, much of James's strategy for mediating between science and religion remains important and has been developed by subsequent thinkers. He articulated an important mission for philosophy and made it a subject and a quest which could continue to inspire and to help people with their lives. James is a challenging thinker that deserves to be read. He still has a great deal to teach.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Moomen Sallam

  شرح سهل من احد الأقطاب الثلاثة للفلسفة البراجماتية، وتناول بعض القضايا الفلسفية في ضؤ البراجماتية، ولعل أهم ما في الكتاب تناولة للدين، فيما يمكن تسميته بالايمان البراجماتي.
• 
  Matt

  
  And again, I doff my cap to Buck Mulligan for getting it right.
  
  I am not a pragmatist, but I respect what James is trying to do here.
  
  Also, I gotta say that in terms of writing philosophy, he (James) is definitely head and shoulders above many a profound, pithy, erudite thinker.
  
  I do think there's some essential value to well-written prose, especially when its not taking the form of fiction or poetry or what-have-you and the writer can be easily excused for obscurities, necessary obfuscations, arcane terminology and clunky grammar.
  
  It ain't easy writing philosophy, so I do grade on a curve in this corner of the literary world, but when someone can actually put their ideas down in a comprehensible, accessible form I will be the first to applaud, even if I'm not totally jibing with where they want to take me.
  
  Also, I'll never forget reading this at a tender age on a porch at night, by a beach, listening to the waves rumble, looking at the ice in my drink cast sparkling shadows on the wicker table as I'm reading about reality and appearance.
• 
  Steve

  I can’t “rate” this book because I only understood a tiny fraction of it. It’s a series of 8 lectures, and I had the impression it was not delivered to professional philosophers or even to philosophy students - but the attendees must have been quite well educated if they had any chance of comprehending the lectures. The book was published in 1907 but I think the lectures may have been given several years before that. Anyway, I “read” the book in some sense but vast portions were completely meaningless to me. Oh well. I’m really fascinated by philosophy, but so much of it is impenetrable for me.
• 
  Christopher Howard

  If someone were smart
  enough
  to
  learn all the languages
  
  of the world, they would call it
  the human language
  and they would
  
  tell you how this became
  that in another
  language through time or
  
  just mere accident—a wife
  through misreading
  a smudge
  
  in a letter sent home from
  her husband tells her friend
  
  some novelty she'd never
  heard, and the two commit
  it
  
  to memory, their friendship
  holding the weight of credence,
  of authority, knowing not
  
  where some fact they've committed
  originated, and how they are
  its chief proponents, because they
  
  take it on faith, its reality because
  
  it came out
  of a lived experience
  
  and had the weight
  of friendship
  
  as its foundation. How quickly we would
  hear how most were right
  most of the time, or at least according
  
  to how capable we were
  of making simple mistakes—the folly
  of life—following a faith
  
  in each other's experience, in our
  ability to trust we will discover
  mistakes in our reason and ameliorate
  
  our accidents upon any day
  of judgement when the
  time comes.
  
• 
  John Pistelli

  Pragmatism is often hailed as the United States's unique contribution to philosophy. While this school of thought got its name from pioneering semiotic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, it was popularized by Peirce's more academically successful friend, William James, who defined and applied the term in ways Peirce eventually rejected. Though luckier in life than the ill-starred Peirce, James also had a peripatetic professional career. A son of the Swedenborgean amateur philosopher Henry James, Sr., and a brother to the major American novelist and literary critic of his generation, James began as a painter, took a medical degree, pursued experimental psychology, turned to comparative religion and philosophy, and became a popular lecturer and author in the latter decades of his life. In Pragmatism, based on a series of public lectures and published in 1907, James elaborates and defends the philosophy implicitly underlying the rest of his work, including his psychological and religious theories.
  
  As if to exaggerate pragmatism's stereotypically American quality, James defines the philosophy as one that seeks to know not the absolute and eternal truth, as idealist and rationalist philosophers from the Platonists to the Cartesians enjoin us, but rather to understand any given proposition's "cash-value," i.e., its practical worth and social function. James doesn't use pragmatism only to refute idealism; he wants it to mediate between idealism and its opposite in materialism and empiricism. While he does associate pragmatism with some traditional enemies of idealism and rationalism—

  It agrees with nominalism for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions, and metaphysical abstractions

  —James also hopes to rescue religious faith from the ruins in which Darwinism and a host of other 19th-century scientific developments had left it. Granted, James accepts the central Darwinian insight that living things' behavior, to include humanity's most abstract reasoning, is adaptive:

  [T]he pragmatistic view [is] that all our theories are INSTRUMENTAL, are mental modes of ADAPTATION to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma…

  But James, having defined truth as an adaptive instrument of active man, brings the deity in through the back door: we believe in God not because God is real, nor because we find evidence of His design in nature and natural law, but because it's too hard to live without faith, especially after Victorian science has burdened us with the second law of thermodynamics and its corollary in the eventual heat-death of the universe:

  A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets, like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse. Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope. Surely here is an issue genuine enough, for anyone who feels it; and, as long as men are men, it will yield matter for a serious philosophic debate.

  And though determinism perhaps makes more sense in the crystalline realm of logic, where each decision and development further enchains us to a fatal syllogism, we believe in free will for the same reason we believe in God—that we can do nothing new without the hope it provides.

  Free-will pragmatically means NOVELTIES IN THE WORLD, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past.

  James's highest value is creative, constructive activity. He objects to rationalism and idealism, no less than to an absolute and therefore tragic or deterministic materialism, because they leave us prostrate before a universe already finished, a world that does not need us to collaborate in its ongoing fecundity.

  In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We ADD, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man ENGENDERS truths upon it.

  Instead of optimism and pessimism, two passive worldview in which we sit back and wait for the inevitability that good or bad things will happen, James promotes "meliorism," the belief that the world can become a better place, but only if we rouse ourselves to make it so:

  Meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become.

  Unlike so many despairing mandarins of his era, including his own illustrious novelist brother who liked to bemoan the spread of vulgarity, James embraces the modern. He sees truth, beauty, and goodness—even, in some sense, God—not as eternal forms but as realities we bring into being with our activity on the world, a world more and more humanized and globalized in the early 20th century:

  We want water and we turn a faucet. We want a kodak-picture and we press a button. We want information and we telephone. We want to travel and we buy a ticket. In these and similar cases, we hardly need to do more than the wishing—the world is rationally organized to do the rest.

  He moreover frames pragmatism both politically and religiously, defining the pragmatist as a "happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature" and the philosophy with "the protestant reformation." Despite anarchism's foreign connotation in James's own period, when it would have been associated with European assassins and bomb-throwers, when named in concert with Protestantism, readers may be reminded of America's cultural founding by Puritans, not to mention their anarchic outcasts like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.
  
  James's anarchism is as much a matter of form as content. While James professed not to understand his brother's more rarefied later fictional productions, he himself adopts an irresistibly quotable pugnacious, playful individual literary voice, with its lecturers' vernacular and aural energy, its vividness and clarity, raising a stylistic maypole in philosophy's gray precincts. Pragmatism, then, is American not only in its love of cash and its obsession with God, but in its passion for freedom.
  
  What might pragmatism and William James mean to us today? In his magisterial and absorbing work of popular nonfiction, The Metaphysical Club (2001), Louis Menand explains the late-19th- and early-20th-century rise of pragmatism in pragmatic terms. He wants to know what it did for its proponents and adherents and their society. He argues that pragmatism arose after the Civil War because that unprecedentedly bloody conflict filled its children with a dread of non-negotiable moral principles, the kind that had motivated the fervid Great-Awakened abolitionists and eventually the Boston Brahmins themselves—from the complacent Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to the avant-garde genius Emerson—to wage the war. This seems persuasive only in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: he served in the war and was wounded three times, unlike James, who was notoriously spared the uniform by his family along with his brother Henry, leaving their two less distinguished brothers to fight.
  
  Luckily, the preternaturally well-informed Menand has a host of other contexts to explain his pragmatist quartet—Holmes, James, Peirce, and John Dewey. Modern scientific developments, for example: not only Darwin's dysteleological biology of chance and circumstance, but also the development of statistics and probability theory, according to which investigators arrive at scientific truth not through individual insight or discovery but through "the law of errors," a kind of reliable approximation arrived at by averaging informed observers' best guesses. Menand suggests that this theory, first formulated in astronomy to answer how we might best discover the precise position of heavenly bodies, leads by application to Holmes's defense of free speech as a Supreme Court justice over 70 years later. Society, like astronomy, requires everybody to make their best argument if we're ever to reach something like truth, and therefore we should have the liberty to quarrel and dispute in the public square. This is akin to what James called "pluralism." (I note parenthetically that this compelling bit of liberal jurisprudence directly contradicts today's censorious moral panic about "misinformation," an incoherent concept meaning very little other than "counter-hegemonic ideas," whether right or wrong.)
  
  Then again, Holmes upheld an order consigning socialist Eugene Debs to prison for his anti-war agitation during World War I, so his commitment to free speech was hardly absolute when social order was in question. Menand also mentions Holmes's most notorious judgment, his upholding of the state's interest in eugenics in the Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, though he strangely keeps the damning details out of his book. Holmes based his judgment on the case of an institutionalized woman thought to be “incorrigible” because she’d borne a baby out of a wedlock in her teens, though it turned out she’d in fact been raped by her adoptive cousin and then committed to save her family’s reputation. The jurist nevertheless claimed that "the public welfare" demanded "sacrifices" from the citizenry lest we be "swamped with incompetence." In a sentence with a perhaps chilling contemporary resonance, this pragmatist judge stood on principle: "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
  
  This seeming digression leads us to the politics of pragmatism. For Menand, pragmatism had two practical political effects. First, it allowed for the professionalization of academia, which consolidated along modern (i.e., German) and secular lines in the late 19th century in America. Pragmatism elevated procedure over (religious) principle as the governing ethos of the scientific and humanistic disciplines. Therefore, each discipline, discrete in its own department within the research university, could govern itself by refereeing its internal quarrels with reference to the consistent practices by which its adherents arrive at their conclusions. Academic freedom likewise follows from this idea of peer review and faculty governance: the boundaries of what may be said in a given discipline are for that discipline's own experts to judge, not the timorous public, the moralistic politician, or the meddling trustee. This was surely a momentous and welcome development for freedom of thought—truly, in its way, an extension of the Protestant Reformation, both in Germany and the U.S.—though Menand neglects the downside: the compartmentalization and mechanization of knowledge. The institutions producing and stewarding knowledge were sealed off from the innovations that the amateur, the misfit, and even the madman have always introduced into thought.
  
  This sterilization of the mind is why James doesn't quite fit into the larger story Menand wants to tell. Menand's other political context for pragmatism is the way it answered—particularly in Dewey's career—the need for an ever-expanding technological society to be governed rationally from the top down like the factories it comprised. Menand narrates the late-19th-century move from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism and the concomitant shift from trade unions to industry unions as the country industrialized; the state likewise grew in response to the modernizing country's greater complexity. Holmes's judgment in favor of eugenics makes sense in this light: why shouldn't the government of an industrial nation take a strong hand in streamlining its work-force? Similarly, Mussolini's claim to have been influenced by James's voluntarism—and the pragmatist
  flirtation with fascism in general—reflect a convergence on the idea of active governance that dominated the 20th century after the liberal laissez-faire doctrines of the Victorian era proved themselves hard to adapt to the later industrial period. For pragmatism, even in a Darwinian cosmos, there's always something you do to increase power and profit.
  
  Just as professions manufacture needs only they can fulfill—this is why, pragmatically, you can't always trust the doctor to cure you rather than getting you hooked on chronic and inefficacious therapies—so pragmatism "spoke to a generation of academics, journalists, jurists, and policy makers eager to find scientific solutions to social problems," as Menand writes. It gave intellectuals something to do, a claim besides mere mentation on the public's attention and allegiance.
  
  James is certainly complicit in this transformation of the intellectual's social role. There is no room for the disinterested scholar or artist, someone merely curious, in his philosophy, since we must always be asking, "What is it good for?" Which is, incidentally, the basis for his amusing dispute with his brother over the latter's difficult fiction. William couldn't quite fathom the point of a novel that didn't straightforwardly tell the story, even though Henry's works embody what William's psychology textbook had only theorized: the stream of consciousness (see on this topic J. C. Hallman's beautiful little 2013 book Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William & Henry James). William argued the theories in his philosophy—and even enacted them in his lively style—but it was Henry who lived them in his novels. As Hallman notes, Henry wrote to William after reading Pragmatism, "All my life…I have unconsciously pragmatised."
  
  We come again to a conclusion familiar in these electronic pages about the anti-philosophers and the philosophy-enders. If the end of philosophy is action, the action succeeding philosophy in writing is literature, because it is in literature that the true claims of the plural are realized in contingent aesthetic objects illustrating and even incarnating the totalities of which plurality is capable—a conviction that should come as no surprise, since the founder of the western philosophical tradition, Plato, wrote his philosophy in the form of closet dramas or proto-novels. There is, I am tempted to say, no urgent reason to prefer Nietzsche to Woolf, Heidegger to Rilke, or, in the matter at hand, William to Henry. Yet William writes with such zest for life, with such emergent personality, that he can be recommended not only as philosophy but as literature too.
  
  Accordingly, Menand also contends that James's pragmatism, unlike that of Holmes or Dewey, "was not a philosophy for policy makers, muckrakers, and social scientists. It was a philosophy for misfits, mystics, and geniuses." He quotes from one of James's letters, the philosopher at his most Emersonian:

  I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.

  The letter was written in 1899, the year after the Anti-Imperialist League was founded, which James would soon join. Ironically, imperialism was an idea its proponents and champions found pragmatic in the extreme, "cash-value" and all, while James's practically doomed resistance, in the name of the individual and the underdog, and somewhat against the interests of his own class, can be called what but "principled"?
• 
  Graychin

  Like his younger brother Henry, William James had a gift for language. Anyone in love with the possibilities of English prose will enjoy reading him. Years ago I read his Varieties of Religious Experience and return to it now and then just to hear him talk. The first two lectures in Pragmatism are especially thick with little surprises of phrasing and insight. I marked up my library copy shamelessly (but only with pencil!). That said, James’s attempt to reform philosophy along “pragmatic” lines is less compelling and more confusing than the clarity of his prose might lead us to hope for.
  
  James wants us to reconsider the Aristotelian correspondence theory of truth, according to which an idea or assertion is true as far as it reflects the way things really are. According to this model, the truth of a statement is independent of our having tested it. So, for example, if I were to give you an envelope and tell you it contained a dollar bill, the statement would be either true or false depending on what was actually in the envelope, even if you never opened it to check my statement against reality. Most people would agree with this, of course. It’s our common-sense notion of truth in the western world.
  
  But James suggests that rather than using the word “truth” to describe, in philosophical terms, that “timeless relation” of assertion and reality, we reserve the word only for things that have, one way or another, passed a test of verification, or proven themselves somehow beneficial. Ideas, according to Pragmatism, are tools, and if they don’t “work” for us, they’re meaningless. Reduced like that, James’s idea sounds simple enough, and possibly appealing, but James gets overexcited and there are passages in Pragmatism where he seems to want to discard the correspondence theory of truth altogether. To return to my example of the envelope with the possible dollar bill inside it, James might say, for instance, that the assertion “becomes true” when and if we open the envelope and find that it does indeed contain a dollar bill. Truth, James says when he gets carried away with himself, is something that “happens” to an idea.
  
  To be fair to James, he doesn’t really want to do away with the Aristotelian notion of truth, and he spent some sweat and labor after the publication of Pragmatism trying to calm the apprehensions he roused in so many of his readers. But James had been impressed by his friend Charles Pierce’s elucidation of the law of errors which states that minute scientific observations inevitably vary along a plottable curve, allowing us to infer an accurate-enough position (of a star, say) but never making for absolute certainty. Unless we want to go for a ride with Bishop Berkeley, then, and deny the independent material existence of sense objects altogether, there is an unbridgeable (if infinitesimal) gap between things in themselves and our perceptions of them. While that gap may look small from an everyday distance, it can be philosophically dizzying. With his pragmatic redefinition of truth James wanted to build a bridge to cross it while keeping the vertigo down to an acceptable level.
  
  James was also laboring under the glowering shadows of 19th century German metaphysics and a Darwinian scientific worldview that was just flexing its muscles. Whereas the rationalists wanted to describe a world in which matter is governed hierarchically by mind, science made forceful arguments for mind’s governance by matter instead. James wanted a way to honor his pro-scientific empiricist sympathies while at the same time respectably making room for God. Pragmatism’s careful adjustment of terms allows James to test his idea of God, find it psychologically beneficial (i.e. a “working” idea), and proclaim it therefore true. James might have found it easier to support his theism nowadays as Hegel and Kant recede in the distance and science with its quantum theory and dark matter allows more room for interested speculation.
  
  In the end I think I have to agree with the late Martin Gardner's assessment (in his essay 'Truth: Why I am Not a Pragamatist') and say that Pragmatism was more an attempt to rewrite the dictionary than a philosophy in its own right, and that philosophies departing from the common uses of terms and resorting to private definitions can have little enduring value. If Pragmatism fails, in other words, it fails because it isn't pragmatic enough.
• 
  Mitch Flitcroft

  Pragmatism, according to James, is an approach which evaluates theories or beliefs by their practical application. James argues for pragmatism both as a method of inquiry and as a theory of truth. As a method of inquiry, I find it a tempting alternative to the idle metaphysical speculation that I've become accustomed to during my philosophy degree. However, as a theory of truth, I think it raises some interesting arguments but ultimately goes too far in its human-centeredness. Nevertheless, it's a compelling and beautifully-written book.
• 
  Peter Aronson

  Three-and-a-half stars. (This would have been four stars, but the occasional racist comment threw me a bit. Yeah, he was just a man of his times, but still, it's my rating.)
  
  This is a dense, but thin book, where James lays out the principles of the philosophy called "pragmatism", which is interested in what can be proved to be useful, making it (in my mind) a cousin to "utilitarianism". This includes abstract ideas, which can be proved to be useful if they help actual people. James has little use or patience for abstractions that to not provide some use, even if just consolation at the way of the world, to actual humans.
  
  Pragmatism as presented is not too much out of line with my view of the world, so I didn't find much to disagree with, aside from James' occasional inability to distinguish between how he felt and how the world worked (for instance, deep concern with how the universe ends isn't a sign of higher feelings to me, but rather a sign of neuroticism).
  
  As in
  The Varieties of Religious Experience, James suffers from having all his knowledge of non-western religion, history and culture be from secondary and tertiary sources. I don't believe he's ever had a handle on any religion other than Christianity, and it shows.
  
  I think my favorite takeaway from this book was James' discussion of how temperament biases our reasoning (from the near the beginning of the first lecture) before we even start thinking, by making us pay more attention to one set of facts or another. This explains a lot of disagreements I have seen.
• 
  باهر سليمان

  فلسفته كارثية، حيث لا تجعل قيمة الأشياء في ذاتها بل في الثمن الذي يدفع فيها، فلا فرق وفق هذه الفلسفة بين الخير والحق وبين كونهم سلعًا، بل الدين نفسه عندهم قيمته ليست في نفسه بل فيما ينتجه، بل جعل جيمس معيار صحة العقائد هو التجربة، واعتبر قضايا العلم قضايا حقيقية لأنها مفيدة عملياً، وهو نقيض الموقف العلمي تماما، طبعًا هذه الفردية البراجماتية هي صدى للتمزق العقدي في أمريكا في القرن التاسع عشر.
  ووليم جيمس نفسه يقول : إن الحقيقي في أوجز عبارة ليس سوى النافع المطلوب في سبيل تفكيرنا، تمامًا، كما أن الصواب ليس سوى الموافق النافع المطلوب في سبيل مسلكنا.
  ده كلام جيمس..وفيه النفعية واضحة كالشمس..وهو يجعلها أحد مكونات برجماتيته ..نفعية+ فلسفة وضعية.
  وهو حقيقة ثابتة عنه فهو لا يُعادي الأديان لا لأنها صحيحة في نفسها، وإنما لأنها مفيدة في الإنسان وموقفه هذا متقارب جدًا مع موقف فيورباخ ..هذا فضلًا عن حقيقة مذهبه في الوجود الإلهي فالأمر يطول ..فهذه الفلسفة هي إلحاد برجماتي لا ترى في الدين حقيقة موضوعية .
• 
  Illiterate

  Pragmatism rightly ties truth to action. Unfortunately James ties it to utility, thereby suggesting emotional comfort could be as relevant as successful action.
• 
  Bob Nichols

  The history of philosophy, James says, is "to a great extent that of a certain clash of temperaments" that "loads" thought to justify one position over another. These he divides into the "tender minded" who need monistic, religious, rationalistic certainty and the "tough minded" who are materialistic, pluralistic, and irreligious. Given these different value-laden base points, disputes tend to be unresolvable. Pragmatism is James' way to escape competing visions of the truth. Pragmatism evaluates competing claims by responding to one simple question: What is the "concrete consequence" of some abstract position for the life of the individual?
  
  So, rather than arguing about whether God does or does not exist, James' approach is to say that it doesn't really matter because religion gives people hope. "Nirvana" is not a problem concept because it "means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists." Whether we have free will or not, belief in free will gives us hope we can make the world a better place.
  
  James' central observation that the two broad philosophical schools are based on differences in temperament and, accordingly, value differences, helps to explain why philosophical and religious disputes are difficult to resolve. His attempt to steer an alternative course, however, bumps into some problems. While there is considerable value in asking the question about the practical consequences to abstract notions and evaluating them in terms of the concrete differences they make in people's lives, how one makes such assessment is itself a product of value differences. Where jihad means hope and motivation to many, it means a threat to others. Also, cultural tribalism and educational background may have as much to do with philosophical differences as temperament. It is, for example, hard to believe that all in the materialist West are "tough minded" whereas those in the non-materialistic Muslim world are "tender minded." Clearly, more is involved in accounting for religious and philosophical differences. When James calls for a pragmatic or "melioristic" type of theism as an alternative to "crude materialism" and "transcendental absolutism," he is on his weakest ground. James seems willing to entertain falsity in place of truth if there's some practical benefit involved. Also, to have hope and security requries more credibility than James' "wink-wink, it's o.k. to have your belief because it's makes you feel better" type of approach.
  
  On the whole, this is a thoughtful attempt to suggest fresh ways of looking at old, intractable problems.
• 
  Drew Canole

  This became a pretty tedious read after the first couple chapters. He seems to keep repeating the same basic ideas and applying them to a variety of subjects.
  
  He states at one point how a theory goes through a few different stages in it's introduction and adoption. Eventually a theory becomes so commonplace that it's taken as obvious and trivial. I think that's what's happened to Pragmatism over the last 100+ years, since it was first formally stated.
  
  It's still a powerful idea and one that's useful. I'm not entirely sure I understand the full force of it's implications, and I want to now read James's essay on truth for a more thorough discussion on that.
  
  I would have preferred a more concise presentation of his ideas than this book. I prefer the secondary literature I've read on the topic.
  
  The book is actually a text taken from a series of lectures James did. I read it on Gutenberg - so I'm not sure this applies to the print versions - but a lot of the important points are presented in all capitals, and I imagine James screaming at the audience to emphasis these. I started to hate James by the end of the book, his constant repetitions and dull prose, so this helped me picture him as an asshole.
• 
  Marts (Thinker)

  William James's explanations on the philosophical tradition of pragmatism.
  
  As mentioned in lecture 2: "Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude...
  A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth."
  
  All eight lectures can be read online here:
  http://www.authorama.com/pragmatism-1...
• 
  Rana Yamout

  ان الفلسفة هي أسمى المساعى الانسانية ، وهي أشدها تفاهة وإهمالاً في آن . انها تعمل في داخل أدق الشقوق وتفتح أوسع الصور المتخيلة .فالمذهب العقلي دائماً أحديُّ هو مبدأ من الكليات والكونيات ويعظم من وحدة الاشياء . في حين ان التجريبية تبدأ من الاجزاء وتجعل من الكل طائفة او مجموعة . والمذهب العقلي عادة يعتبر نفسه اكثر تديناً من التجريبية . يطلق على المذهب العقلي ، اللين العريكة ، تعقلي يقر بالمبادىء ، تبصري ،مثالي، تفاؤلي، ديني ، مؤمن بالارادة الحرة، يقيني . اما التجريبي فهو الصعب المراس ، تجريبي يقر بالوقائع ، احساسي ، مادي ، تشاؤمي ، لاديني، قدري ، تعددي، ارتيابي.
  ان الطريقة البراجماتية هي في الاصل وبصفة أولية طريقة لحسم المنازعات الميتافيزيقية التي لولاها وبدونها ، ما كان يمكن لها ان تنتهي . ان البراجماتية تمثل اتجاهاً مألوفاً تماماً في الفلسفة ألا وهو الاتجاه التجريبي ، ولكنها تمثله في شكل اكثر تطرفاً وأقل ممانعة فيه واعتراضاً عليه في تفس الوقت ، مما سبق لها ان اخذته على عاتقها حتى الان . ان البراجماتي يولى ظهره بكل عزم وتصميم والى غير رجعة ، لعددكبير من العادات الراسخة المتأصلة العزيزة على الفلاسفة المحترفين ، إنه ينأى بعيداً عن التجريد وعن عدم الكفاية ، ويعرض عن الحلول الكلامية ، وعن التعليلات القبلية الدرئية وعن المبادىء الثابتة .وهو يولى وجه�� شطر الاستنادية والمحسوسية والكفاية ، شطر الحقائق والوقائع ، شطر العمل والاداء والمزاولة وشطر القوة . وفحوى ذلك كله ان البراجماتية تعني الهواء الطلق وإمكانات الطبيعية المتاحة ، ضد الوثوقية التعسفية واليقينية الجازمة . فالبراجماتي يتشبث بالوقائع ، بالتخصيص بالتمييز بالتماسك ، ويلاحظ الحقيقة وهي تعمل في حالات معينة خاصة ثم يعمم . فالحقيقة عنده ، تصبح اسما تصنيفياً لكل انواع القيم العاملة المحددة في الخبرة . والبراجماتية تنسج من العلوم من حيث انها تفسر المجهول بالمعلوم وغير الملاحظ بالملاحظ ، وهي تجمع بين القديم والجديد في تناغم وتآلف . ان البراجماتية قد تكون هي الموفق ��لسعيد لطرق التفكير التجريبية مع متطلبات الناس الدينية.
  ان الاعتقاد بالواحد او المتعدد ، هو التصنيف الذي له الحد الاعلى من عدد النتائج . ان اهم نوع من الوحدة يدرك بين الاشياء ، من وجهة النظر البراجماتية هو وحدتها الجنسية . فالاشياء توجد في انواع ، وما يتضمنه النوع بالنسبة لفصيلة او نموذج واحد ، يتضمنه ايضاً بالنسبة لكل فصيلة اخرى اى نموذج آخر من ذلك النوع . ان ميزان الشر المائل في واقع الامر ، يتحدى كل طاقة الصبر الانساني وأناته. إن إلهاً يستطيع ان يستطيب مذاق هذه الكمية الوافرة الزائدة من الرعب والهول والفزع ، ليس إلهاً صالحاً لان يستغيث به البشر ، إن قواه البهيمية مرتفعة جداً وبعبارة أخرى فإن المطلق بهدفه الأوحد ليس الإله الشبيه بالانسان لعامة الناس من الكافة . ان العالم مليء بقصص جزئية تسير متوازية بعضها بحذاء بعض، مبتدئة ومنتهية في اوقات متباينة ، وهي تتشابك وتتحابك وتتداخل عند نقاط معينة ، ولكننا لا نستطيع ان نوحدها توحيداً كاملاً في عقولنا . ان العالم واحد اذن بقدر ما نجربه ونختبره على انه متسلسل الارتباط ومركب من حلقات متصلة ، إنه واحد بقدر ما يبدو من عديد الالتحام والضم والاقتران المحددة ، ولكنه كذلك ايضاً ليس واحداً بقدر ما نجد فيه من عديد الفصم والقطع والفصل والحل المحددة .فلا هو كون واحد صرف وبحت ، ولا هو كون متعدد صرف وبحت . ان الأحدية المطلقة تحرم حتى النظر في أمرها جدياً واصمة ذلك بأنه مناف للعقل من مبدأ الامر ، فمن الجلي أن البراجماتية يجب ان تدير ظهرها للأحدية المطلقة وتولي وجهها شطر طريق التعددية الاكثر تجريبية .
  
  ان طرائق التفكير الاساسية عن الاشياء هي اكتشافات لأسلاف سحيقة في القدم استطاعت ان تحتفظ بنفسها طوال وخلال خبرة كل الزمن اللاحق وهي تشكل مرحلة واحدة كبرى من التوازن في تطور العقل الانساني ، مرحلة البداهة . اما المراحل الاخرى فقد طعمت نفسها من هذه المرحلة واستطاعت ان تبتز منها ، ولكنها لم تنجح ابداً في ان تزيحها من مكانها . مرحلة البداهة في الفلسفة فإنها تعني شيئاً اخر مختلفاً تماماً ، انها تعمي استعماله لأشكال فكرية معينة ، او فئات معينة من التفكير . ان البداهة تتجلى كمرحلة محددة تماماً في فهمنا للاشياء ، مرحلة تشبع ، بطريقة ناجحة نجاحاً لا قياسياً ، الاغراض التي من أجلها نفكر .
  ان الحقيقة في نظر المذهب العقلي جاهزة وكاملة منذ الازل ، في حين انها في نظر البراجماتية لا تزال في التكوين والاصطناع ، وتنتظر جزءاً من ملامحها من المستقبل . فالكون في جانب مغلق ومصون وآمن ، وفي الجانب الاخر لا يزال يتابع مغامراته ويسعى في طلبها.
  على الاسس البراجماتية اذا كان فرض الله يعمل إكفاء ورضا في اوسع معاني الكلمة ، فهو فرض صحيح ، ومهما تكن الصعوبات المتخلفة منه ، فالخبرة تومئ الى ان الفرض يعمل إكفاء ورضا .
  المدرك يعرف أيما حقيقة او واقع يعمل بمقتضاه ويشبهه بطريقة مباشرة او غير مباشرة ، والشعور المدرك حسياً يعرف الحقيقة او الواقع كلما انتهت فعلتً او كومناً بمدرك يعمل بمقتضى ذلك الواقع او يشبهه او بطريقة اخرى يرتبط بسياقه ومحتواه . والمدرك الاخير قد يكون إما هسًّا نفسياً وإما فكرة متعلقة بمراكز الحس عن طريق الخبرة العملية اذا كان الشعور نهائياً هسًّا نفسياً ، وعن طريق الايحاء المنطقي او الناشئ عن العادة اذا كانت مجرد صورة في العقل فحسب .
  لا تعني الإنسية "بالحقيقة" شيئا اكثر من الخبرات الحسية والتصورية الذهنية الاخرى التي قد تجد خبرة راهنة معينة نفسها مختلطة بها في الواقع من الامر .
• 
  blaz

  This is like Nietzsche’s epistemology if it was repetitious and occasionally veered into sophistry. Some good parts but some very unconvincing. Easily could have been cut down by a quarter. Pragmatism is pretty much the DNA of mainstream educational philosophy in the modern West via Dewey, so it was interesting to see its tenets laid out in a clear and accessible way, but also frustrating to see how far the whole “co-constructors of knowledge” idea has intellectually degraded from its already somewhat specious source. The argument leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, but it was designed for a laymen audience so I’d suggest it as a good starter book for people looking to get into philosophy.
• 
  Andriy

  Доволі слабка спроба автора обґрунтування своїх філософської інтуїції та інсайту, майже повністю позбавлена глибокої імпліцитної філософської критики інших філософських напрямків, що втім не позбавляє цінності й цікавості саму інтенцію й ідею прагматизму й не робить його хибним.
  Є багато цінних думок зокрема:. про те, що темперамент філософа визначає філософію більше, аніж його аргументи, про те, що аматорська філософія зазвичай еклектична і хоче скористатись перевагами кожного з протилежних і клнфліктуючих напрямків, але насправді тому вона й залишається аматорською (справжньою філософію робить сила темпераменту філософа); про обмеженість здорового глузду тощо.
• 
  Sheldon

  Good title. It is indeed nothing but a new name given to old ways of thinking. I’m not sure why he wrote more than just the title then.
• 
  Jeffrey Howard

  Still as important as ever.