William James

Ignas K. Skrupskelis

In May 1908 William James, a gifted and popular lecturer, delivered a series of eight Hibbert lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, on "The Present Situation in Philosophy." These were published a year later as A Pluralistic Universe. During the preceding decade James, as he struggled with deep conflicts within his own philosophic development, had become increasingly preoccupied with epistemological and metaphysical issues. He saw serious inadequacies in the forms of absolute and monistic idealism dominant in England and the United States, and he used the lectures to attack the specific form that "vicious intellectualism" had taken. In A Pluralistic Universe James captures a new philosophic vision, at once intimate and realistic. He shares with his readers a view of the universe that is fresh, active, and novel. The message conveyed is as relevant today as it was in his time. Supervised by a team of scholars, each a specialist in his field, The Works of William James fills the long-standing need for an authoritative, standard edition of the philosopher's works. The General Editor and supervisor of the project is Frederick Burkhardt. Mr. Burkhardt, formerly a professor of philosophy and then a college president, is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. The Textual Editor, Fredson Bowers, Linden Kent Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is in charge of the establishment of the text and its production according to standards of the Center for Editions of American Authors. Gold Medalist of the Bibliographical Society, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy, Mr. Bowers is the author of two books on the theory and practice of textual criticism and editor of several multivolume critical editions. Ignas K. Skrupskelis, the Associate Editor, contributes the substantive notes. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and has conducted extensive research in the James collection.

A Pluralistic Universe

Henry James

Elizabeth M. Berkeley

This collection of 216 letters offers an accessible, single-volume distillation of the exchange between celebrated brothers William and Henry James. Spanning more than fifty years, their correspondence presents a lively account of the persons, places, and events that affected the Euro-American world from 1861 until the death of William James in August 1910. An engaging introduction by John J. McDermott suggests the significance of the Selected Letters for the study of the entire family.

Selected Letters

William and Henry James

Fredson Bowers

A pioneer in early studies of the human mind and founder of that peculiarly American philosophy called Pragmatism, William James remains America's most widely read philosopher. Generations of students have been drawn to his lucid presentations of philosophical problems. His works, now being made available for the first time in a definitive edition, have a permanent place in American letters and a continuing influence in philosophy and psychology. The essays gathered in the posthumously published Essays in Radical Empiricism formulate ideas that had brewed in James's mind for thirty years as he sought a way out of the philosophical dilemmas generated by the new psychology of the late nineteenth century. They constitute the explanatory core of his doctrine of radical empiricism, a doctrine that charts his course between the absolute idealism he could not accept and, at the other extreme, the law of associationism, which reduces knowledge to sheer contiguity of ideas. In his introduction John J. McDermott describes the historical background and the genesis of James's theory and considers the objections raised by its opponents.

Ignas K. Skrupskelis

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