It’s the birthday of the great philosopher, psychologist, and thinker William James, born in 1842 in New York, NY, brother to novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. His father was a wealthy Swedenborgian theologian, highly restless and intellectual, and his children received a quirky, irregular, trans-Atlantic education.

James got a degree in medicine from Harvard Medical School in 1869 but was too sickly and neurotic at the time to do anything but lie around his father’s house reading and writing. At this point, the work of philosopher Charles Renouvier became a most important influence: reading about Renouvier and free will, James decided that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” (I don’t recommend thinking too long about that statement. Just move along.) Things brightened for James. In 1872 he became an instructor at Harvard and in 1878 he married Alice H. Gibbons and began overhauling the field of psychology in earnest, taking it out of the realm of the abstract and into the lab. His two volume work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), was seminal to the movement of functionalism.

James now lost interest in psychology and, ironically, didn’t really like lab work anyway. (If you don’t think that’s truly ironic, just leave off, okay? I’m still recovering from a recent argument with my twelve-year-old on whether something was really ironic or not. You haven’t had a real argument until you’ve argued with a twelve-year-old about irony.) James turned his thought life to the subject of religion (culminating in The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902), and then to philosophy, championing the movement of Pragmatism and revitalizing American philosophy. Basically everyone just got very excited by his use of the pragmatic rule in his attacks against absolutes. I can feel *you* getting excited even now.

James died in 1910 at his country home in New Hampshire. He is considered to be one of the most influential American philosophers and the “Father of American Psychology.

Have a fine day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.