Series:

The Correspondence of William James

6 total works

Cover of The Correspondence of William James v. 8; 1895-June 1899

This eighth volume of a projected twelve continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, which was begun in volume 4 of the Correspondence. The eight volume contains some 530 letters, with an additional 620 letters calendared, thus giving a complete accounting of James's known correspondence from 1895 to June 1899 inclusive.

During this period, James struggles against various temptations, never completely successfully, to devote all of his attention to philosophy, the first and great love of his life. To this end, he published The Will to Believe with a promise to set out more formally his system of radical empiricism. The volume helps document the reception of the book and the controversy to which the title essay gave rise, a controversy the main issues of which have once again returned to the forefront of philosophical discussion and places James in the middle of postmodernist discussion. His 1898 tour of California where he delivered his lecture on "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," the start of the pragmatism controversy, also belongs to the period of the present volume. Among the distractions from philosophy are his 1896 Lowell Institute lectures on exceptional mental states and the Gifford lectures on varieties of religious experience, on which he began work in the late 1890s. His new philosophical correspondents are the Polish nationalist and messianist Wincenty Lutoslawski and Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, the future strategist of the pragmatism controversy.

James becomes a public philosopher, whose views were sought on the problems of the day. To James's great dismay, the United States was becoming an imperial power: the Venezuela crisis and the Spanish-American War sometimes rousing James into outrage. France was being torn apart by the Dreyfus affair with James expressing strong sympathies for Dreyfus and the intellectuals. The race question was coming to the forefront, with Booker T. Washington entering the list of correspondents.

His family continued to take up much of his attention. As his children grew older, they became the recipients of numerous didactic, affectionate, and playful letters from a father often at a distance.

Vol 1

Cover of The Correspondence of William James

This definitive, fully annotated 12-volume collection of The Correspondence of William James reproduces the majority of known letters to and from James in their entirety, while the remainder are "calendared" with brief summaries. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, these volumes are extraordinarily valuable for James scholars and a source of considerable enjoyment and insight for others.

Cover of The Correspondence of William James v. 4; 1856-1877

This volume begins a new series: William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues, starting when William James was fourteen and on his second trip abroad and concluding when he was thirty-five, negotiating with the president of Johns Hopkins University about a course he had been invited to teach on the relation between mind and body. These letters deal with everything from his protracted search for a vocation, his recurrent physical and emotional problems, his irregular education, his odd -- one might say Jamesian -- courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens, and his developing views on art, morality, politics, women, medicine, philosophy, science, religion, national character, the Civil War, the South, Americans abroad, and other writers and thinkers. They are witness to his growth into adulthood and the price he paid for that growth. William James's teenage letters reveal an adolescent amazingly charming and precocious who displayed from the beginning the promise of his maturity: witty, self-assured, and discerning.

Cover of The Correspondence of William James v. 9; July 1899-1901

This ninth volume of a projected twelve continues the series of William James's correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues that was begun in Volume 4. Consisting of some 470 letters, with as many more calendared, it offers a complete accounting of James's known correspondence from July 1899 through 1901.

Volume 9 covers the period of James's great collapse, of his years of exile in Europe in search of health, and of the beginning of his withdrawal from full-time teaching at Harvard. In spite of his heart troubles, nervous prostration, and often-proclaimed inability to work, James wrote and successfully delivered his Gifford Lectures, which in 1902 were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, probably his most widely read work.

In Europe, James develops a profound ambivalence toward America. He comes to realize how strong his attachment is to his home but at the same time he becomes more and more dismayed by the emergence of the United States as an imperial power with the consequent loss of what he perceives to be his country's moral purity.

James's views on religion are expressed in various fragments and asides. While creeds and churches continue to make no claims upon him, he believes that religious experience places us in touch with a deeper stratum of reality. Because of his intimate association during these months with the dying Frederic Myers, problems of psychical research are also prominent.

He corresponds with leading women in the emerging field of social work, including Frances Morse, Elizabeth Evans, and the Goldmark sisters, Pauline and Susan, and prominent intellectuals such as Theodore Flournoy, Wincenty Lutoslawski, Carl Stumpf, Ferdinand Schiller, Henry Sidgwick, Hugo Munsterberg, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, Charles William Eliot, James Mark Baldwin, and Edwin Godkin. His daughter, Margaret Mary, and his youngest son, Alexander Robertson, receive fatherly advice and encouragement from a distance during the crucial years of their young lives.

Cover of The Correspondence of William James, Volume 3
This volume presents the correspondence between William James, known for his contributions to psychology and philosophy, and his brother Henry. It covers their most productive years, when William was writing The Varieties of Religious Experience and Henry was writing his late masterpieces.

Cover of The Correspondence of William James v. 2; William and Henry, 1885-96
William James, known for his contributions to psychology and philosophy, occupies a secure place in American intellectual history. The 12 volumes of ""The Correspondence of William James"" present his vast and entertaining correspondence with his brother Henry, with other members of his family, with friends and colleagues, as well as with enthusiasts and detractors among readers of his work. The publication of James's private letters complements the 17 titles of ""The Works of William James"". During the years covered in this second of 3 volumes devoted to the letters of William and Henry, each of the brothers underwent a period of trial or testing as a writer. Henry's attempts at fame as a playwright failed, and his 1880s novels did not receive the popular reception he had hoped for. William struggled for years to complete ""The Principles of Psychology"", while burdened by many responsibilities, intermittent depression and eye troubles, finally to have it published in 1890, 12 years after the contract date. These letters offer glimpses of the diverse academic, literary, and social worlds in which the brothers circulated, of Henry's friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, William Dean Howells, Rudyard Kipling, and the American writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, who may have been in love with him. In William's letters he expresses pleasure and progress in his work, comments on Henry's writing, describes his meetings with and reactions to Paul Bourget and other continental writers, and even reports an attack of crab lice and an experiment with peyote. After the death of both parents in 1882 and of brother Garth Wilkinson in 1883, the famous family had dwindled to William, Henry, the unstable and alcoholic Robertson and the invalid Alice. The anxieties of William and Henry over the troubles of Robertson and Alice are a recurrent theme of these letters, particularly up to the time of Alice's death from breast cancer in 1892. William's letter show his continuous concern for and frustration with the philandering, alcholic Robertson. But it is Alice who elicits the most extensive and moving commentary. After her move to England in 1884, Henry writes at great length and poignancy of her difficulties. She emerges as an example of how American civilization laid crippling constraints on the development of young women. The correspondence in this volume also covers the birth of William's daughter, Margaret Mary (Peggy), and his fourth son, Francis Tweedy, later renamed Alexander Robertson, and the poignant death of 18-month-old Herman. It details William's purchase of a large farmhouse in New Hampshire and his building of a home in Cambridge, the two residences that afforded him some solitude for his periods of moodiness, melancholia and insomnia. Henry's letters, though occasionally hinting at some regret over his life as a confirmed bachelor, reveal how he cherished his solitude, because it suited him and was conducive to his literary art. Altogether, this volume is a window into the lives of two brothers who stood out as accomplished and influential figures in their generation.