Correspondence of William James – serie

This volume presents the correspondence between William James, known for his contributions to psychology and philosophy, and his brother Henry. It covers their most productive years, when William was writing The Varieties of Religious Experience and Henry was writing his late masterpieces.

This volume contains 309 letters which start when William James was 14 years old and conclude when he was 35. The letters range from his relations with family and friends to his courtship of Alice Howe.

This fifth volume of letters chronicles James's emergence into professional and personal maturity. The correspondence is dominated by letters to his wife, Alice, and they reflect difficult events of the period such as the death of his parents and the responsibility he took for heading the family.

This seventh volume continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that was begun in volume four. Consisting of some 488 letters, with an additional 510 calendared, it offers an account of the academic's correspondence for the years 1890 to 1894.

The eighth volume of William James's correspondence, covering the period 1895 to June 1899. During this period, James struggles against various temptations, never completely successfully, to devote all of his attention to philosophy, the first and great love of his life.

The ninth volume of William James's correspondence, covering the period July 1899 to 1901. It covers the period of James's great collapse, of his years of exile in Europe in search of health, and of the beginning of his withdrawal fron full time teaching at Harvard.

Consisting of some 572 letters, with another 460 calendared, this tenth volume in a projected series of twelve offers a complete accounting of William James's known correspondence-with family, friends, and colleagues-from the beginning of 1902 through March 1905. For James these were hopeful years of recovery. The end of the depressing cure at Nauheim, the successful conclusion of the arduous Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, the reaching maturity and independence of his two eldest children, and the gradual withdrawal from teaching responsibilities at Harvard allowed him to hope that he would at long last present his philosophical message to the world in the shape of a treatise on metaphysics. Philosophy was in a state of unrest, with old alliances breaking up and new ones forming, and was ripe for a more fruitful reformulation of its traditional questions. Intellectualism, philosophical and scientific, was waning, making room for the emergence of an empiricism congenial to humane values. As reflected in the letters of this period, James comes to recognize that Dewey and the Chicago school were his allies and that the Frenchman Henri Bergson was moving in the same direction. Consequently, Bergson is the major new correspondent of the present volume, and, because he emerges during this period as James's leading supporter, Ferdinand Schiller is another dominant correspondent. Often boisterous and irreverent, Schiller saw himself as a general about to overwhelm an aged and sleepy, but still dangerous, enemy. James, in the meantime, had to call upon all of his diplomatic skills to keep on good terms with the people Schiller irritated, while remaining Schiller's friend and defender. Scholars will find much material in this volume that will help them judge whether the common view of pragmatism as a capricious subjectivism largely reflected a widespread lack of respect for Schiller. While continuing his involvement with anti-imperialism, James takes a more critical stance toward existing social conditions during this period, proclaiming his admiration for the small and insisting on the connection between great size and social evil. In 1904 he tours the American South. There are hints that he was acting as a scout for his brother Henry, which perhaps caused William James to see more of the meanness and shabbiness of the region than he would have otherwise. Along with Bergson and Schiller, prominent intellectuals represented in this volume include Theodore Flournoy, Wincenty Lutoslawski, Carl Stumpf, Hugo Munsterberg, Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Lodge, John Dewey, George Herbert Palmer, Charles William Eliot, James Mark Baldwin, and Edwin Godkin.