William James and John Dewey on Consciousness

Abstract

This article was read at an invitational conference convened by the Institute for Noetic Sciences, June, 1982, to discuss ways of introducing into the educational system our new knowledge of the scope of consciousness. I illustrated the difficulties by the way in which the academic world has ignored or suppressed William James' writings on psychical research and the concept of cosmic consciousness. A similar process has befallen John Dewey's writings on F. Matthias Alexander, which have vainly urged systematic scientific study of the Alexander Technique and its incorporation into the educational system. In James' case, the successor to his chair at Harvard, Ralph Barton Perry, given the task of reprinting James' papers, failed to include most of the writings on psychical research and failed to gather them in one place. Fifty years after James' death, this important omission was rectified by Gardner Murphy and William 0. Ballou, in William James on Psychical Research. In Dewey's case, likewise, his literary executors failed to reprint his writings and letters on the Alexander Technique. In each of these cases, a great philosopher thought his views central to his Weltanschaung but his literary executors found those views unpalatable enough to ignore them.