William James Accomplishments

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William James is considered by many people to be the most insightful and stimulating of American philosophers, and the second of the three great pragmatists, the link between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. William James was born in New York City on January 11, 1892 and would later become a leading American psychologist and philosopher in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was the oldest of five children in the household and a sibling to Henry James, who later became a famed novelist and writer (A&E Television Networks n.d.). His mother complained that “the trouble with him is that he must express every fluctuation of feeling, and especially every unfavorable symptom, without reference to the effect of those around him.” His life culminated in a reconstruction of spirituality and consciousness in relation to physiology and neuroscience. His life was also spent in perpetual diagnosis of backache, eyestrain, and nervous disorders. Unlike his siblings Garth Wilkinson, Robertson, and Alice, James’s psychological distress and physical disorders …show more content…

His soul experienced many dark nights, as displayed in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. While his father had solved his own problems in the context of religion, William would form his salvation in the methodology of science and formal logic. He tried to comprehend his own difficult experience in physiological terms, and then to master its difficulties by the disciplines of psychology and philosophy. During the course of his own journey of discovery, he would lay down the foundations for modern science of psychology and build it as an American discipline. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung made their way to American in 1909, and they the man they most wanted to meet was William James because of his genius

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