William James

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 Vari…