# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/william-james
# Generated: 2026-09-01T04:55:57.556Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/william-james"
name: "William James"
slug: "william-james"
description: "He trained as a doctor, taught anatomy, and never saw a patient — then built American psychology from scratch and co-founded pragmatism, the first homegrown school of American philosophy."
tagline: "American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist (1842–1910)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/William_James_by_Alice_M._Boughton%2C_c._1907%2C_platinum_print%2C_from_the_National_Portrait_Gallery_-_NPG-NPG_87_37James-000001_(cropped).jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United States"
  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1842-01-11"
deathDate: "1910-08-26"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           71.04
  momentum:             0
  historical:           25.38726
  currentAttention:     16.17857142857143
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: 137
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  - name: "Psychology"
    slug: "psychology"
  - name: "United States"
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  - name: "Americas"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born January 11, 1842, into a wealthy family — his father a Swedenborgian theologian, his brother the novelist Henry James — William James studied medicine at Harvard and joined the faculty to teach anatomy. He never practiced. Instead he turned to psychology, offering the first psychology course in the United States, then published The Principles of Psychology, a text that anchored the young field. He moved into philosophy and with Charles Sanders Peirce established pragmatism, the doctrine that ideas prove themselves in practice, not abstraction. His Essays in Radical Empiricism and The Varieties of Religious Experience, an inquiry into mysticism and mind-cure, widened his reach across epistemology, religion, and metaphysics. He died August 26, 1910, ranked second only to Wilhelm Wundt in a 1991 survey of psychologists, his thinking woven into the work of Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Rorty.