The key ideas

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

William James, 1907

A group of friends in the mountains argues itself hoarse over whether a man goes round a squirrel that keeps hiding from him behind a tree trunk. William James settles the dispute with one question and turns it into a method for the whole of philosophy. In eight lectures from 1906 and 1907 he explains how to tell an empty argument from a real one, what truth is, and why the future of the world depends, among other things, on us.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of endless arguments who wants to understand what people are really arguing about. And for anyone who has never read philosophy but would like to start with a book written for ordinary listeners.

Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.

A professor who came to speak to people who were not professors

Boston, November 1906. The Lowell Institute is holding public lectures for the city's residents, and William James, a Harvard professor, steps up to the lectern. In front of him are not students but ordinary listeners, and he admits frankly that the venture is a bold one: he will have to talk like a professor to people who have never studied philosophy.

He begins with someone else's idea. The writer Gilbert Chesterton remarked that for a landlady considering a lodger it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. James agrees: everyone has a philosophy. It is not a school subject but our dim sense of what life honestly and deeply means.

The eight lectures, given in Boston and repeated in January 1907 in New York at the invitation of Columbia University, became this book. James printed them as he delivered them. He offers a simple way to test any idea, from an argument on a hiking trip to the question of God: ask what would change in life if the idea were true.

Ahead of you are an argument about a squirrel, a hotel corridor, a path in the woods and an offer James asks you to imagine coming from the creator of the world. By the end it will be clear how to tell empty arguments from real ones, and what James called truth.

We choose a philosophy with our character

The first lecture opens with an admission philosophers usually keep quiet. James says the history of philosophy is to a great extent a clash of human temperaments. A philosopher offers only impartial reasons, but his temperament pulls him towards a conclusion more strongly than any reason. He wants a world that suits his nature, and he believes in the picture of the world that suits it.

To show this, James writes out two columns. In the first are the tender-minded: they start from principles, believe in free will and in the unity of the world, and expect everything to end well. In the second are the tough-minded: they start from facts, are sceptical, see the world as a multitude of separate things, and expect no comfort from it.

These people look down on each other. The tough think the tender are sentimental softheads, and the tender think the tough are coarse and callous. James compares it to Boston tourists mingling with the people of the gold-mining town of Cripple Creek. But most of us, he says, want the good things on both sides: facts and principles, science and faith.

What does philosophy offer such a person? The empiricists, the philosophers of experience, give you science, and with it materialism and a world without human hopes. The rationalists, the philosophers of pure reason, give you a system with faith in it, but one far removed from real joys and sorrows. One of James's students wrote that the world of a philosophy professor is like a marble temple shining on a hill, while life has been left outside the door, in the street. James promises a philosophy that is true to the facts and does not take away hope.

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About the author

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, a professor at Harvard University, and the author of The Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Together with Charles Peirce he is considered a founder of pragmatism.

All books by this author: William James

Terms from the book

  • Depression
  • Huxley
  • materialism
  • Kierkegaard
  • Solomon
  • Metaphysics
  • Columbia University
  • Helium
  • Common sense
  • Lowell Institute: A foundation in Boston, established in 1836, that organises free public lectures for the city's residents. James gave the lectures there from which this book grew.
  • Chesterton: Gilbert Keith Chesterton, an English writer and essayist, author of the Father Brown stories. James opens the book with a quotation from his collection of essays Heretics.
  • Pragmatism: A movement in philosophy that judges the meaning and truth of ideas by their practical consequences. The name comes from a Greek word meaning deed, action.
  • Temperament: Here: a cast of character which, in James's view, quietly inclines a philosopher towards one picture of the world or another.
  • Tender-minded: An image from the book, not a scientific term. James's name for people who start from principles, believe in the unity of the world and in free will, and expect comfort from philosophy.
  • Tough-minded: An image from the book, not a scientific term. James's name for people who start from facts, are sceptical, and expect no comfort from the world.
  • Cripple Creek: A gold-mining town in the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado. For James it stands for a rough, tough way of life.
  • Empiricists: Philosophers who hold that experience and facts are the main source of knowledge.
  • Rationalists: Philosophers who hold that reason and general principles, rather than experience, are the main source of knowledge.
  • Pragmatic method: The approach James proposes: in any dispute, ask what practical difference would follow if one side were right rather than the other.
  • Peirce: Charles Sanders Peirce, an American philosopher, logician and scientist, and a friend of James. James calls him the founder of pragmatism.
  • Ostwald: Wilhelm Ostwald, a German chemist from Leipzig, winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. James cites him as a scientist who used the pragmatic method without calling it that.
  • Absolute: In the idealist philosophy of the early twentieth century: an all-embracing mind in which the whole world and all its evil are reconciled and overcome in advance.
  • Cash-value: James's expression for the practical meaning of an idea: what it changes in a person's experience.
  • Papini: Giovanni Papini, an Italian writer and philosopher who in his youth led the Italian pragmatists. The image of the hotel corridor is his.
  • Renouvier: Charles Renouvier, a nineteenth-century French philosopher. His idea of free will helped the young James out of his crisis.
  • Monism: The view that everything in the world is, at bottom, one whole.
  • Pluralism: The view that the world consists of many separate parts, connected only in part.
  • Vivekananda: Swami Vivekananda, an Indian philosopher and preacher of Vedanta, who lectured in America in the 1890s.
  • Radium: A radioactive chemical element discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. It gives off energy continuously.
  • Conservation of energy: A law of physics: energy does not arise from nothing and does not vanish, it only passes from one form into another.
  • Ramsay: William Ramsay, a British chemist and winner of the 1904 Nobel Prize. With colleagues he showed that helium is produced when radium decays.
  • Ptolemaic astronomy: The system of the world in which the Earth stands still at the centre while the Sun and the planets revolve around it. It was created by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century.
  • Meliorism: The view that the world is neither doomed nor saved in advance, but can become better through human effort. The word comes from the Latin for “better”.

All terms

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