This volume focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James participated in transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature.

William James and the Transatlantic Conversation focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James's encounters with European thinkers and ideas ran throughout his early life and across his distinguished international career, in which he participated in a number of transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. This volume explores and extends these conversations by drawing together twelve scholars from a range of disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic to assess James's work in all its variety, to trace his multidisciplinary reception across the twentieth century, and to evaluate his legacy in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book considers James's many intellectual influences and the second half focuses on A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the published text of his 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, as a key text for assessing James's transatlantic conversations. The pluralistic transatlantic currents addressed in the first part of the volume enable a fuller understanding of James's philosophy of pluralism that forms the explicit focus for the second part. Taken as a collection, the volume is unique in scholarship on James in generating transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational dialogues, and it repositions James as an important international thinker and arguably the most distinctive American intellectual figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This volume focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James participated in transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature.

Virtue theory, natural law, deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism: these are the basic moral theories taught in “Ethics,” “History of Philosophy,” and “Introduction to Philosophy” courses throughout the United States. When the American philosopher William James (1842 – 1910) find his way into these conversations, there is uncertainty about where his thinking fits. While utilitarianism has become the default position for teaching James’s pragmatism and radical empiricism, this default position fails to address and explain James’s multiple criticisms of John Stuart Mill’s formulaic approach to questions concerning the moral life. Through close readings of James’s writings, the chapters in William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life catalogue the ways in whichJames wants to avoid the following: (a) the hierarchies of Christian natural law theory, (b) the moral calculus of Mill’s utilitarianism, (c) the absolutism and principle-ism of Immanuel Kant’s deontology, and (d) the staticity of the virtues found in Aristotle’s moral theory. Elaborating upon and clarifying James’s differences from these dominant moral theories is a crucial feature of this collection. This collection, is not, however, intended to be wholly negative – that is, only describing to readers what James’s moral theory is not. It seeks to articulate the positive features of James’s ethics and moral reasoning: what does it mean to an ethical life, and how should we theorize about morality?

This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’

Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.