The Pragmatic Grammar of William James
Philip Davis
William James August 25, 2022 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192847324.003.0002 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that William James is best understood as a 'literary' thinker whose ideas are shown in the process of formation rather than as completed doctrine, and proposes reading his writings as expressions of a warm, fiery personality, drawing on Chapman's characterization of James's thought as suggestive, emanating from 'nature' rather than 'intellect,' and 'always throwing off sparks' from 'the same central fire.' |
Abstract
Abstract: Chapter 2 is about learning to read William James, his language, his grammar, and its relation to a radical world-view. Together these two initial chapters try to show why the author thinks of William James as a ‘literary’ thinker, in whom you can see thought not finished and aloof, but in the very act of its making. His friend, John Jay Chapman said that William James was not articulate in the exact way that a thinker should be. He had the gift of ‘suggestion’, rather than well-defined expression. His thought came out of his ‘nature’ rather than his ‘intellect’, and was never quite in sharp focus. It exhilarated but also exasperated Chapman that ‘James was always throwing off sparks that were cognate only in this, that they came from the same central fire in him’. But that is just how the author of this book reads James’s writings and ideas, as if they were expressions of a warm and fiery person. And he does so in the way that, as James himself says, a psychologist tries to get inside a complex person, to gain some sense of ‘the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells alone’.