**"William James (1842-1910) was "a towering figure in the history of American thought--without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced." That was the opinion of Gordon Allport, a Harvard professor and one-time president of the American Psychological Association. However, few Americans living in this third millennium have ever heard of James, despite the fact that his profound insights into the human psyche are now more urgently needed than ever before. But before James' insights can once more become available, a barrier to their reception must be removed. What barrier? James' "productive paradoxes." That's what Allport charitably called them. 'They' were more than paradoxes, however. They were the pervasive contradictions in James' thought. To rescue his insights from entangling contradictions, the first step must be to draw attention to common sense, the foundation of all 'scientific' learning. James confessed that it was only in 1903, a few years before his death, that he realized for the first time "the perfect magnificence as a philosophical achievement" of our everyday, common-sense thinking. This book draws together the threads of James' ideas about such elements of common-sense as consciousness, language, meaning, learning, space, time, and thought itself.

James yearned to weave science and religion into a popular philosophy useful for the everyday life of everyday people of faith. He saw that many were defenseless in an increasingly agnostic, even atheistic culture. "Thousands of innocent magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls," he wrote in 1882. To which he added, "If I, . . . like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down [the human heart's] lion strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains." Were he to return, he would still be unhappy with the leaders of opinion but also with the responses of those who seek refuge in fundamentalist reliance on religious scriptures or who claim that religion is independent of modern 'scientific' discoveries. Building on William James on Common Sense and William James on the Stream of Consciousness, this third and final volume will show how James in 2009 might weave ancient truths and modern discoveries into a philosophy that would even more completely reward him for his pains.

If you were choosing a physician to perform a life-saving task for yourself or a loved one, would you choose a lesser-qualified physician because the better-qualified one had social or political views inconsistent with your own? Wouldn't common sense tell you that regardless of your personal disagreements, the better-qualified physician would always be the best choice? If you think so, then you are already following one of the foundational teachings of ethical pragmatism (EP)-a common sense philosophy that stands as a simple guide for finding clear perspectives on how to achieve goals in the most beneficial way. The first part of The Essence of Ethical Pragmatism (known as EP) explains the philosophy, its development and its justifications. The second part of the book shows how the philosophy can be implemented to better our lives with a number of examples that involve issues challenging us today.

William James (1842-1910) was "a towering figure in the history of American thought"without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced." That was the opinion of Gordon Allport, a Harvard professor and one-time president of the American Psychological Association. However, few Americans living in this third millennium have ever heard of James, despite the fact that his profound insights into the human psyche are now more urgently needed than ever before. But before James' insights can once more become available, a barrier to their reception must be removed. What barrier? The pervasive contradictions in his writings. To rescue his insights from their entangling contradictions, the first step was to draw attention to common sense, the foundation of all 'scientific' learning. William James on Common Sense accomplished that. The next step is to use that common-sense philosophy and James' psychology to present a fully adequate Jamesian account of the stream of consciousness. This book, a sequel to William James on Common Sense, expands his radical-empiricist, two-part model of the stream of consciousness to the one that allows for all three of its components: sensed phenomena, memory-images, and partless thought.

Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy. Common Sense: A Political History is the first book to explore this essential political phenomenon. The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.

From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, seminal thinkers have declared “common sense” essential for moral discernment and civilized living. Yet the story of commonsense philosophy is not well known today. In America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, Scott Segrest traces the history and explores the personal and social meaning of common sense as understood especially in American thought and as reflected specifically in the writings of three paradigmatic thinkers: John Witherspoon, James McCosh, and William James. The first two represent Scottish Common Sense and the third, Pragmatism, the schools that together dominated American higher thought for nearly two centuries. Educated Americans of the founding period warmly received Scottish Common Sense, Segrest writes, because it reflected so well what they already thought, and he uncovers the basic elements of American common sense in examining the thought of Witherspoon, who introduced that philosophy to them. With McCosh, he shows the furthest development and limits of the philosophy, and with it of American common sense in its Scottish realist phase. With James, he shows other dimensions of common sense that Americans had long embraced but that had never been examined philosophically. Clearly, Segrest’s work is much more than an intellectual history. It is a study of the American mind and of common sense itself—its essential character and its human significance, both moral and political. It was common sense, he affirms, that underlay the Declaration of Independence and the founders’ ideas of right and obligation that are still with us today. Segrest suggests that understanding this foundation and James’s refreshing of it could be the key to maintaining America’s vital moral core against a growing alienation from common sense across the Western world. Stressing the urgency of understanding and preserving common sense, Segrest’s work sheds new light on an undervalued aspect of American thought and experience, helping us to perceive the ramifications of commonsense philosophy for dignified living.

Marková offers a dialogical perspective to problems in daily life and professional practices involving communication, care, and therapy.