
William James
The Essential Writings
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Description
The importance of this collection of writings of William James lies in the fact that it has been arranged to provide a systematic introduction to his major philosophical discoveries, and precisely to those doctrines and theories that are of most burning current interest. William James: The Essential Writings is a series of philosophical arguments on some of the most "obscure and head-cracking problems" in contemporary philosophy; the relation of thought to its object; the interrelationships between meaning and truth; the levels and structures of experience; the degrees of reality; the nature of the embodied self; the relation of ethics, aesthetics, and religious experience to man's strenuously and "heroically" active nature; and, above all, the structurization of the experienced life-world as the validating ground and origin of all theory; Bruce Wilshire has provided an introduction to William James's thought on these and other related points which is at once both substantial and subtle.
Bruce W. Wilshire is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the "Principles of Psychology," and he edited along with Ronald Bruzina Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy 8, also published by the State University of New York Press.