Evading the Challenge of Psychical Research.
William James (1842 - 1910). He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. Life: William James was born on 11 January 1842 at Astor House (then the finest hotel in New York City). He was the son of Henry James Sr., an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian, and was the elder.
William James (1842-1910), psychologist and philosopher, president of both the British and the American Societies for Psychical Research.136 Pierre Janet (1859-1947), pioneer in the study of dissociation, had success on experiments on hypnosis and psi (but later became cautious about psi). 137.
ERMINE L. ALGAIER IV. ABSTRACT. This paper re-contextualizes William James’s early radical empiricism based upon a historical and philosophical reading of the 1896 preface of The Will to Believe.I suggest that James’s “irrational” early radical empiricism, as guided by the “spirit of inner tolerance,” is tinged with a fringe sensitivity or awareness of the epistemic outsider.
James’s psychical research involves no particular problem for James’s pragma-tism, and in fact is continuous with it to the point where, if one is embar- rassed by psychical research, one is correspondingly unsure about pragmatism. The pragmatic method, as James understands it, involves an extraordinary fidelity to the consideration of unorthodox experience that is not fixed and discrete.
The ten essays that James included in The Will to Believe contain some of his most eloquent statements on the intellectual and emotional risks of religious belief; the philosopher's contribution to a society's moral life; the genesis and importance of genius; and the accomplishments of psychical research. Although all of the essays had been published before, some as early as 1879, and.
William James, with his younger brother Henry James (who became a prominent novelist) and sister Alice James (who is known for her posthumously published diary), received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French languages along with a cosmopolitan character. His family made two trips to Europe while he was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted.
In a lecture at Oxford in 1909, he announced his firm conviction that “most of the phenomena of psychical research are rooted in reality.” James published several papers in the SPR journal Proceedings. In London in 1902, he published an important essay on psychical research, The Will to Believe, and Varieties of Religious Experience. Of the.