Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The William James Reader
    Unavailable
    The William James Reader
    Unavailable
    The William James Reader
    Ebook1,043 pages25 hours

    The William James Reader

    By William James

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    William James was the older brother of novelist Henry James, and a pioneering psychologist and philosopher. His works pushed the boundaries of psychology and helped shape the direction the field would grow in. Collected here are four of his most important books: Essays in Radical Empiricism, The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and What is an Emotion? These books helped forge a field and remain as important today as when they were first written!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateMay 20, 2013
    ISBN9781627931762
    Unavailable
    The William James Reader

    Read more from William James

    Related to The William James Reader

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Perception Of Something

      Nov 7, 2020

      A Perception Of Something
      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Should I Care about the Abhidharma?

      Jun 5, 2020

      Why Should I Care about the Abhidharma?
      12 min read

    • Article

      Herbert Spencer’s Principle of Equal Freedom: Is It Well Grounded?

      Sep 1, 2020

      During the mid-to late nineteenth century, Herbert Spencer was the most widely read philosopher in the world. A large part of his appeal was owing to his ambition of providing a complete and comprehensive account of human reality based on scientific

      38 min read

    • Article

      Electrons May Very Well Be Conscious

      Dec 30, 2020

      Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May, 2020. In May, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and ph

      5 min read

    • Article

      Why Science Should Stay Clear of Metaphysics: Meet the philosopher who revived anti-realism.

      Sep 8, 2016

      Philosophers of science are not known for agreeing with each other—contrariness is part of the job description. But for thousands of years, from Aristotle to Thomas Kuhn, those who study what science is have roughly categorized themselves into two ba

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Charmed Life of Frank Wilczek

      Mar 17, 2021

      Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, is both a way of thinking about the abundance that characterizes our exterior and interior worlds, and a kind of alternative to traditional religion, a way of being “born aga

      13 min read

    • Article

      How Do We Make Sense of Rebirth?

      Jun 28, 2022

      How Do We Make Sense of Rebirth?
      15 min read

    • Article

      Mind Or Brain?

      Jan 23, 2024

      THAT LITTLE VOICE that’s narrating your experience as you read this—is it in your mind or in your brain? At first glance, this might seem like a stupid semantic question. But it cuts to the heart of a weighty dilemma for modern science that also has

      2 min read

    • Article

      Through the Human Lens: The Millions Interviews Meghan O’Gieblyn

      Aug 23, 2021

      I’m always baffled when self-professed “rationalists” object to the supernatural claims of religion—that a virgin could give birth, that God could be three persons. Modern science contains just as much mind-bending absurdity. The post Through the Hu

      10 min read

    • Article

      Adam Smith

      Jul 18, 2022

      Adam Smith By Samuel Fleischacker New York: Routledge, 2020 Pp. xvi, 364. $24 paperback. Samuel Fleischacker opens Adam Smith saying the book is about Adam Smith the philosopher, not Adam Smith the economist. And indeed it is. The book’s first chapte

      4 min read

    • Article

      Angst And The Empty Set

      Sep 19, 2019

      Suppose you open your handbag one day expecting to find your wallet there, but don’t. Do you literally see the absence of your wallet in your handbag? If you do, it means something important: Absences have a positive presence in your perception that

      4 min read

    • Article

      This Essentially Meaningless Conflict

      Sep 22, 2017

      MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S accomplishments are impressive by any standard: she has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, among other honors. But perhaps a better measure o

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Multiverse As Muse

      May 11, 2017

      In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a present that can, at any moment, bifurcate into different futures—an endless labyrinth of worlds. Taken together they form, he writes, “an infinite

      6 min read

    • Article

      What’s Philosophy For?

      Aug 10, 2020

      What’s Philosophy For?
      4 min read

    • Article

      Angst and the Empty Set: We Can Experience Nothingness, but Does It Actually Exist?: We can experience nothingness, but does it actually exist?

      Aug 28, 2014

      Suppose you open your handbag one day expecting to find your wallet there, but don’t. Do you literally see the absence of your wallet in your handbag? If you do, it means something important: Absences have a positive presence in your perception that

      4 min read

    • Article

      Steven Pinker Argues That Critical Thinking Leads To Progress In ‘Rationality’

      Oct 28, 2021

      In his latest book “Rationality,” cognitive scientist Steven Pinker extols the power of critical thinking to propel society forward.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Seeing The Good

      Nov 7, 2020

      Seeing The Good
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Science of Early Buddhism

      Feb 6, 2018

      The Science of Early Buddhism
      6 min read

    • Article

      We Have to Talk About Doubt: How to tell the difference between scientific and conspiratorial skepticism.

      Sep 1, 2021

      What is the role of reasonable doubt in advancing science? And how should we contrast scientific doubt with the cavilling doubt of conspiracy theories which play little part in advancing understanding? Over the last year we have seen the scientific m

      5 min read

    Reviews for The William James Reader

    3.5/5

    15 ratings14 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      The AmbassadorsHenry JamesTuesday, April 10, 2012 8:14 PMI spent about 3 weeks with this book, reading it intermittently. Henry James’ prose is very difficult. I would read some sentances, with multiple dependent clauses, three times without getting the meaning, so it was very slow going. He writes at great length about the thoughts and perceptions of his main character, Strether (Lewis Lambert Strether), and builds through these perceptions profound descriptions of characters. Strether is in England, then Paris, as an ambassador from Chad Newsome’s mother, who is hoping that her son will return to Massachusetts to take over the family business. Strether agrees to the mission because he hopes to marry the widowed Mrs. Newsome. Strether meets Maria Gostrey on his first landing; she is a free woman who helps him find his way, and understand the characters encountered; everyone is very well-off, there is nothing but parties and dinners in the novel. Chad has been converted from a carefree playboy into a gentleman, by his relation with Madame de Vionner, and is not easy to convince about returning home. We are left uncertain at the end if he does return, or stays with his lover. Strether, at the end, returns, leaving a very disappointed Ms. Gostrey. I came to care about the characters, and to ignore the convoluted prose, hurrying to find out if Strether would abandon Maria in the end. I read this in the Folio Society edition, with beautiful watercolor illustrationsStrether to Little Bilham, a poet friend of Chads: “All the same don’t forget that you’re young - blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary, and live up to it. Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.” (James, in his forward, says that this comment he heard was the inspiration for the novel)“Miss Barace’s nose, in short, would find itself out of joint” - I thought my wife was the only person who used this phrase.“Let yourself, on the contrary, go - in all agreeable directions. These are precious hours - at our age they mayn’t recur. Don’t have to say to yourself, at Milrose, next winter, that you hadn’t courage for them” This is Strether encouraging his friend Waymarsh to travel with a female companion to Switzerland. “Women were thus endlessly absorbent, and to deal with them was to walk on water.”
    • 5/5
      People who react adversely to the prose style (some of the sentences in this book, and others like "Wings of the Dove," can be a page long), should keep in mind that this is the late--or late style--Henry James, where he is doing what great authors ought to do--taking chances, expanding the power of language to explore psychological space, and experimenting. Mrs. Newsome (nuisance) dispatches Lambert Strether to Paris, to induce her wayward son, Chad Newsome, to return home so that he might take his part in his family's lucrative advertising company. Strether encounters Marie de Vincent, the marvelously cultured woman to whom Chad has become attached, and his mission becomes side-railed as he gradually comes to realize that Chad, although he is having a sexual affair with de Vincent, is much better off--indeed, under a finer moral influence with de Vincent--than he would be back in Massachusetts. From Mrs. Newsome's perspective, though, Strether fails. Strether does not fail, however; he is one of James' "children of light" who cannot compromise insight, compassion, and delicacy for the coarse calculations of the world, however much they might be ground down or diminished by them.
    • 4/5
      I read this book in 1963 with considerable enjoyment. Lambert Strether is sent to Paris to induce Chad Newsome to return to Massachusetts. Strether finds Newsome in the toils of Marie de Vincent--virtuously, he feels, until Book XI. Book XI is some kind of supreme masterpiece. I would like to quote the essence but it is--as is all the book--diffused. A key sentence (and incidentally illustrating the James style): "When he reached home that night, however, he knew he had been, at bottom, neither prepared nor proof; and since we have spoken of what he was, after his return, to recall and interpret, it may as well immediately be said that his real experience of these few hours spent on, in that belated vision--for he scarce went to bed till morning--the aspect that is most to our purpose," What sentnece construction--but it grows on one, and I do not deprecate ti. I look back in admiration at the sure hand of the expert constructionist. I often wonder what the reader of the Atlantic Monthly made of the installments--although maybe those Victorian-orientated readers were less lost than today's average reader. All in all--I have read The Ambassaadors with profit, which I cannot say for soem of my earlier reading of James' work.
    • 3/5
      Dense, dense, dense! This was a tough read, much tougher than any similar soap opera penned by James' friend, Edith Wharton. I think Mr. James cornered the market on commas.
    • 4/5
      A tough read for me 40 years ago, but I'm so glad I persisted. "Live all you can!"
    • 5/5
      Note: This book is the first of my quest to read 20 "significant" (as defined by me) books, not counting those for class and re-reads, this semester (spring 2010) Actual Review: I don't think I've fallen for an author this much since I started reading Jane Austen - which is quite ironic, since James disliked Austen! James' writing is intricate and playful, his command of the english language is astounding, and you can tell he's enjoying his own powers - for example, when he described Mrs. Barrace as "The unobscured Mrs. Barrace", or when we are introduced to Maria Gostrey as "Not freshly young, not markedly fine, but (whose features) were on happy terms with one another" The story itself is neither freshly young, nor markedly fine, but exceed all expectations. James excells in slowly revealing the complexity of people and their relationships with one another; one discovers people as one would solve a mystery, and that, indeed, is the inherant interest in the book, and what kept me flipping pages. His characters - even Lambert Strether - seem not to grow, but rather simply to reveal more of themselves, as one reveals the inner layers of an onion. It is impossible to characterize them in a single sentence - indeed, it seems almost impossible to describe them without re-writing the book! Nor can the theme of the book be so easily dissected - I've read that it's "about a man's late awakening to the importance of morality founded...on it's value per se", and it is, I suppose, but it's about so much more than that. I would argue that it's about life, and the value of living, and experiencing all you can - quite as Strether would say - and about being true to yourself (although in a much less trite fashion than usual. The book leaves us with no easy conclusions; and with that, it reminds me of Austen - entertaining and fun and gripping, but, at the same time, deep and probing.
    • 3/5
      Back in college I loved Henry James, but in the intervening 20+ years I haven't read anything by him. In a particularly Jamesian way, my memory of reading James in my early adulthood was a sort of beacon of the type of reader I thought I was then - erudite, literate and quite grown up. Well, now that I'm an actual grown-up, I see a lot more in James's work than I did at 21, and I find it somewhat disappointing.The Ambassadors is the story of Lambert Strether's return to Paris at age 55. He is on a mission - his "particular friend" back home, Mrs. Newsome, has sent Strether to rescue her son, Chad, from the arms of "that sort" of woman. If Strether, a somewhat washed-up non-businessman, is successful, he will marry the wealthy Mrs. Newsome. If not, well, that's that. Upon his first arrival in Europe, in Liverpool, he meets Miss Maria Gostry, an American expat who lives in Paris.They immediately form a cozy, friendly relationship and Miss Gostry offers to see Strether when he gets to Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Strether finally sees Chad and meets Chad's friends. He finds that, rather than being dissolute and depraved, they are worldly, artistic and extremely interesting. He becomes drawn into their world, so much so that he recommends that Chad stay in Paris. When it becomes evident to Mrs. Newsome that Strether has not succeeded in convincing Chad to stay home, she sends her daughter, son-in-law, and son-in-law's sister to convince everyone to come home and do their duty. However, Chad has taken up with the lovely Marie de Vionnet (who Strether also finds quite attractive), and Strether has been somewhat seduced by Paris and the sophisticated people he has found there. SPOILERS In the end, while Chad decides to stay in Paris with Marie, Strether has found that he is really too old for this - he feels uncomfortable and must go home. He has one last chance at happiness with Maria Gostry, but he rejects even this.After reading my plot synopsis, I find that this novel could have been a great novel of Edwardian manners. Unfortunately, though - at least for me - James's writing style gets in the way of the story. The Ambassadors is an early work in James's late period writing. As James got older, his writing seems to have become more convoluted and obscuring. There are sentences here that I don't think I could ever parse - and perhaps James couldn't, either. And then his use of commas . . . . I know I use too many commas, and I should remember this novel every time I want to use one. Here are the first few sentences of the third paragraph (when Strether sees Miss Gostry for the first time in the Liverpool hotel): "After the young woman in the glass cage had held up to him, across her counter, the pale pink leaflet bearing his friend's name, which she pronounced, he turned away to find himself, in the hall, facing a lady who met his eyes as with an intention suddenly determined, and whose features - not freshly young, not markedly fine, but expressive and agreeable - came back to him as from a recent vision. For a moment they stood confronted; then the moment placed her: he had noticed her, the day before, at his previous inn, where -- again in the hall -- she had been briefly engaged with some people of his own ship's company."The genius of James is that the start and stop effect of all this punctuation directly reflects Strether's hesitant start and stop approach to life. However, the affect on the reader (or at least this reader) is a stuttering, halting failure. I could never get momentum, never get lost in the story - there was no flow.SPOILER Most disappointing for me, however, was the ending. Although Strether is seduced by Europe, and although by losing Chad he has lost Mrs. Newsome, he decides that he must return to America - back to his small and inconsequential life. It seems that a lot has changed in a century. Strether's sense of duty, his sense that he doesn't really deserve to be happy, seems at odds with what one might expect today. Perhaps today we have too much of a sense of entitlement towards searching for happiness, and not enough satisfaction with what we have right before us. On the other hand, though, perhaps Strether went home with a somewhat more open mind - more willing to partake of the creativity he once loved as a young man. Who knows. What I do know is that instead of finding the ending sad (or at least poignant), I found it frustrating and unsatisfying - which is perhaps the idea.
    • 2/5
      An image began to emerge of James as I read this that never quite gelled, but was something like "a man in a dickey, stirring an invisible pot of oatmeal in a dimly lit room, staring at the wall through too-weak bifocals and telling a story about people you never knew in a summerhouse you never visited, perpetually unable to decide whether it was Old Jim or Young Frank that made of Miss Sedgwick or the widow Daintry a comment of which the motive and significance were unclear,but who keeps insisting 'come on, you remember'." And there's spaghetti on his shirt.

      It should surprise nobody that HG Wells was more succinct, comparing James to a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea that has rolled into a corner of the room. But I flatter myself that I was a bit more accurate, captured a few more of the intricate vicissitudes of trying to read this book--and then I think "ah, but look where intricate vicissitudes got this book". The Ambassadors is dull. It is ponderous, turgid, pedantic, almost autistic in place, terrified of sex. And alongside that terror, obsessed with the hidden and imagined meanings behind every lightly or significantly dropped little flirt or flurry, in the manner of two sensitive fourteen-year-old boys writing each other mannered letters in chemistry class, to discuss what Sharon and Alexis said that day when they know they'll never, ever get the courage up to ask them. I think James' audience in the oatmeal-stirring story above is probably being told to those two boys. I think that would be his idea of heaven.

      The basic idea is all right--"small-town American, upright because timid, goes on a mission of small-town American moral rectitude to Paris, where his mind is opened and he realizes he has wasted his life. He tries to intervene in the affair to the benefit of his charges--as he never really ceases to think of them, even as they try to provide for him like a eunuch uncle--does a certain amount of good, but doesn't manage to seize the day for himself because it is too late and he is too old and timid. He goes home." Pathos, (the good kind of) bathos, the clash of worlds, turn-of-the-last-century drawing-room manners, &c.

      And Strether is a decent sort, if immensely frustrating and ultimately pusillanimous (James loves this word, and while I'm not comfortable with the across-the-board dismissal of Latinate vocabulary when an Anglo-Saxon alternative presents itself, allow me to suggest that "pusillanimous" instead of "weak" or "timid" probably has potential as a sort of litmus test for smalling out when you're attaining an exquisite realm of semantic subtleties and when you're just being a pompous git: if it doesn't add more than "pusillanimous", you're the latter. On the subject of language let me also say that much as I hate James' style, it is a pleasure to find, amidst the cloud of adjectives and prepositional phrases that he spews out onto the paper, the occasional pithy Americanism, in a context and a mode you'd never expect. I really like it when Strether settles his own hash).

      But OH GOD this guy can't write for shit. By anyone's standard. I hope I can justifiably call myself a fairly well-read and open-minded fellow who can make allowances for the complex-composite octopusing of the 19th-century realist sentence, and understand its potential for evoking the "complicated vagueness" of a real-life psychological state, and acknowledge James' deep insights into human nature, although he only seems to know how to draw them from a certain kind of human, and even see how the flaws of the prose are analogous to the flaws of the protagonist, and how that's kind of neat. I can cut James slack for all of that and still not have enough slack left to excuse this:

      "His most frequent form of words was that he knew himself, and they were applied on this occasion to his certainty of not sleeping. He knew himself well enough to know that he should have a night of prowling unless he should succeed, as a preliminary, in getting as tired as he wanted."

      "She knew her theatre, she knew the play, as she had known, triumphantly, for three days, everything else, and the moment filled to the brim, for her companion, that apprehension of the interesting which, whether or no the interesting happened to filter through his guide, strained now to its limits his brief opportunity."

      Vocab over style, like the letters of those fourteen-year-olds, like an intelligent and bookish kid in a backwater town or a backwater country--or most accurate of all for James, I think, a backwater bourgeois family, superficially "of the world" but never really interested in excising their inner Woollett--who nobody ever told he couldn't write, but instead indulged and called "our little professor". Only the guy was 60 when this was published. But you can still hear him smugging smugly to himself with each of those superfluous commas: "Mumsy wouldn't, perhaps, it must, and will, be acknowledged, put a comma there, but I must take more care, in my very serious work, for it, unlike her very charming occasional letters to Auntie Isadora, on the subject of her garden, and sundry similar topics, is for the ages."

      I have a phone call to make, and I am tired of thinking or writing about this book, and so I will just also note that it is way gross how ultimately the self-satisfaction of Woollett wins out on so many levels, and the narration takes so seriously the assbuttoned Waymouth with his Old Knickerbocker-style rectitude, and Chad (Chad!) with his flared nostrils and impeccable pedigree, and makes snide "Jewess"-type remarks about the French aristocrats, because the only good bloodline is a US American Protestant bloodline, and all the worries in this are US American protestant worries, like about keeping yourself pure vs. having the enjoyment incumbent on your class and stature, and ohhhhhhhhhhh, I'm tired of that stuff. One of the most (only) enjoyable bits is toward the end, when Strether goes for a walk in the country and finally gets away from all those dull fucking awfuls, and your heart leaps, and then sinks again when Chad and Mme. de Vionnet show up, but you're still like "Strether has a plan! Maybe he will bring all their problems to a soothing catharsis and I will never have to think about them again!"

      And he sort of does, I guess. Anyway, I'm done with this crapulence.

    • 2/5
      I've owned this book for close to 20 years. I've attempted to start is five times and made it only to the second chapter. I finally force myself to struggle through the entire book. Why? I'm not sure, but I did it. It was a struggle - War and Peace wasn't nearly as ponderous. With that being said, I was able to discern brief glimpses into the talent of James as a novelist. It would take me several readings of this to gain a full appreciation of this work . . . however, I just don't have it in me. I would have benefited by having read this one in an English Lit. class with a knowledgable instructor guiding me through the difficult terrain of The Ambassadors.
    • 5/5
      This is James at his most dense. There are sentences here that I will never be able to decipher. And there are passages so lovely that they demanded to be read again and again. Whether or not this is James at his best I don't know. I have not exhausted his library. It was his favorite. It was, he said, the closest he got to creating a character that was himself. Perhaps those of us who want to know the inner workings of Henry James should read The Ambassadors and leave Colm Toibin's The Master for another time.
    • 4/5
      An example of the notoriously convoluted late style of Henry James. The style has its moments in this novel of social and emotional complexities and ambiguities, but at times it can seem like grasping at air and nuancing the irrelevant without ever letting a shirt go unbuttoned or manners lapse from the highest standards of unquestionable propriety. Generally the soft focus and the constant dodgings and turnings and obfuscations make it frighteningly easy for the reader to plow through dramatic turns without noticing. There is great depth in this book, but some readers might not have the patience to uncover it because of James's style. Nonetheless The Ambassadors is a remarkable novel despite and partly because of the muffling effect of the writing. There are some wonderful passages that make an implicit case for the merits of slow reading.
    • 1/5
      I hate leaving a book unfinished but the bore was unbearable. I just cannot understand where this author got his fame from : the story is nonexistent, the characters are totally forgetable and the style is so pompeous...
    • 5/5
      This is a joy of a book, at least for those who love James, the tale of the irresistible education of a middle age American man into the vagaries of late 19th century European manners and mores.Thoroughly captivating and saturating, not a quick "read" by any means. More like one of those books in which you take up residence. Get a visa, consider leasing a flat; you'll be there a while. Of course, one could read it faster, but why! A book to savor
    • 2/5
      Typical James sludge—a page and a half long paragraph of convolution that I had to read twice just to realize that all the guy was doing was wandering around, looking for a place to read a letter. Ugh! What is that famous HG Wells line? Something about, reading James is like watching a hippopotamus try to pick up a pea. So true!Slow going to the very last page. Because I didn’t get the main point of the plot, so veiled was it in Jamsien fog, I didn’t care about any of the characters and their dithering drove me up a wall.