The Oxford Handbook of William James

In philosophy, James is remembered for his pragmatism, an outlook that ties truth and meaning to practical results, and for his will to believe doctrine, which defends a right to believe even without evidence, in some cases. His landmark contributions to psychology include his theory that emotions are feelings of bodily changes following excitement--that "we feel sorry because we cry, are angry because we strike" and not vice versa. His Varieties of Religious Experience offered an intimate look at intense, personal, and often heterodox religious experiences.

Featuring twenty-nine new essays by leading scholars like Gary Hatfield, Philip Kitcher, Cheryl Misak, and Jesse Prinz, this Oxford Handbook provides an organized, chapter-by-chapter presentation of key themes in James's thought. These themes include attention, emotion, consciousness, evolution, intentionality, truth, religion, ethics, pragmatism, mathematics, and radical empiricism. James was an extraordinarily dialectical thinker, and his engagement with figures from Hume and Hegel to Peirce and Dewey are covered along with his influence on later phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Each chapter provides those new to James with an accessible route into a topic of interest, while also providing seasoned readers sophisticated interpretations by the best living scholars working on James today.