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How can we settle philosophical arguments that seem endless? William James proposes a simple test: ask what practical difference it would make if one view or…
How can we settle philosophical arguments that seem endless? William James proposes a simple test: ask what practical difference it would make if one view or the other were true; if none, the dispute is empty. He starts with a playful quarrel about whether a man walking round a tree goes 'round' a squirrel that keeps to the far side of the trunk. In eight lectures, given in Boston and New York in 1906 and 1907, he applies the method to God, free will and truth itself.
Context and significance
James (1842–1910), brother of the novelist Henry James, trained as a doctor and set up one of the first psychology laboratories in America, at Harvard, before turning to philosophy. Written with warmth and humour, the book made pragmatism, a word taken from his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, the best-known American philosophy. Read also The Varieties of Religious Experience and his life.
About the author
William James (1842–1910), the older brother of the novelist Henry James, studied painting and then medicine, and after years of depression became a professor at Harvard, where he taught the first course in psychology in America and set up one of the first psychology laboratories.
His Principles of Psychology made the new science readable, his Varieties of Religious Experience studied faith with sympathy, and his philosophy of pragmatism asked what difference an idea makes in practice. He wrote with a warmth and clarity rare among philosophers.