William James
(1842-1910)
Older brother to the famous U.S. novelist Henry James, William James attained fame of his own, in North America as well as Europe, as a psychologist and as a an early theorist of religion. Educated as a young man in Europe, James received his medical degree from Harvard in 1869, taught anatomy and physiology there, established an experimental psychology lab, was the first to teach psychology in a U.S. university (1875), and within a few years was also lecturing in philosophy. By the time he was invited, for 1901-2, to Edinburgh University, Scotland, to deliver its famous lecture series (established in 1888 by Lord Gifford, the Gifford Lectures continue to this day to "promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term--in other words, the knowledge of God"), James had already become a noted philosopher of religion, publishing in 1897 a collection of ten essays entitled The Will to Believe (some dating to the late 1870s on such topics as morality and faith). Topics that had preoccupied him up until this point became the topic of his Gifford Lectures, published the following year under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience. Drawing on his work in psychology, James focused on the various types of religious experience that, according to him, predated any expression of religion as found in narrative, behavior, and institution. Unlike the early naturalistic theorists of his time, James makes clear in these still very famous lectures that religious experience is not a mistaken apprehension of some element in the natural world, distorted by consciousness, but is, instead, a unique sort of experience not to be dismissed or explained away; the theology in these lectures is therefore most evident as is his defense of religious faith--found in his earlier writings--from the explanations of what was at that time called medical materialism. Today, James is also remembered as an early advocate of pragmatism--the philosophical view, prominent among some U.S. philosophers, that, according to James's interpreation, beliefs are tested by the observation of their consequences.
Major Works
Principles of Psychology (1890; 2 vols.)
The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to "Pragmatism" (1909)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)
Quotation
"Religion ... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences
of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since
the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that
out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies,
and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. In these lectures,
however, as I have already said, the immediate personal experience will
amply fill our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism
at all."
- from William James, Lecture 2 of The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902))
Select Web Resources on James
William
James Biography
Emory
University's William James site
Encyclopedia
of Religion and Society entry on William James
The
Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
Secondary Literature on James and Religion
Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, pp. 108-112. Open
Court, 1986.
Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introduction.
Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Walter Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline, pp.
43-45. Fortress Press, 1995.
David Lamberth et al. (eds.), William James and the Metaphysics of
Experience. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and
Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton University Press,
1999.
Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited.
Harvard University Press, 2003.
Wayne Proudfoot (ed.), Williams James and a Science of Religions: Re-experiencing
The Varieties of Religious Experience. Columbia University Press,
2004.
Jacques Barzun , "James, William," The Encyclopedia of Religion,
2nd edition. vol. 7, pp. 4775-4778. Macmillan Reference USA, 2005.