专八人文知识需知的美国名人--威廉.詹姆斯

专八人文知识需知的美国名人--威廉.詹姆斯

　　英语专八人文知识涵盖的知识面较广，考生们需要平时多积累小常识，这样在专八考试中才能游刃有余，新东方在线整理了专八人文知识需知的美国名人系列知识点供考生们参考。

　　威廉·詹姆斯(William James，1842—1910)美国本土第一位哲学家和心理学家，也是教育学家，实用主义的倡导者，美国机能主义心理学派创始人之一，也是美国最早的实验心理学家之一。1875年，建立美国第一个心理学实验室。1904年当选为美国心理学会主席，1906年当选为国家科学院院士。2006年，詹姆斯被美国的权威期刊《大西洋月刊》评为影响美国的100位人物之一(第62位)。

　　实用主义思想的贡献者。美国最重要的哲学派别

　　The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school.

　　William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist andphilosopher who was trained as a medical doctor. He wrote influential books on the young scienceof psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and onthe philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist AliceJames.

　　William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr.,an independently wealthy and notoriously eccentric Swedenborgian theologian well acquaintedwith the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieuand the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject ofcontinuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

　　James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including hisgodfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce,Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, HoratioAlger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

　　Early years

　　William James, with his younger brother Henry James (who became a prominent novelist) andsister Alice James (who is known for her posthumously published diary), received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French languages along with acosmopolitan character. His family made two trips to Europe while he was still a child, setting apattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led toan apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.

　　In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of theeyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf.[3] He was subject to variety ofpsychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which includedperiods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two youngerbrothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other threesiblings (William, Henry, and Alice) all suffered from periods of invalidism.

　　James took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. At Harvard he was inspired tostudy theology. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientificexpedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts ofsevere seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained until November 1868. (During thisperiod he began to publish, with reviews appearing in literary periodicals like the North AmericanReview.) He finally earned his M.D. degree in June 1869, but never practiced medicine. What hecalled his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophicalsearching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.

　　James's time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay notin medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studiedmedicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort offatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard beingthe first I ever gave"

　　Career

　　James spent almost his entire academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor inphysiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistantprofessor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885,endowed chair in psychology in 1889, return to philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor ofphilosophy in 1907.

　　James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but wasdrawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itselfas a science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz in Germanyand Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at HarvardUniversity. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875-1876academic year.

　　During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions with Charles Peirce, OliverWendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright that evolved into a lively group known as The MetaphysicalClub in 1872. Louis Menand speculates that the Club provided a foundation for Americanintellectual thought for decades to come.

　　Among James's students at Harvard were such luminaries as Boris Sidis, Theodore Roosevelt,George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Gertrude Stein, HoraceKallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, C. I. Lewis, and Mary Calkins.

　　Following his January, 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture,publishing Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth. James was increasinglyafflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on aphilosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy). Hesailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 to take experimental treatments which proved unsuccessful,and returned home on August 18. His heart failed him on August 26, 1910 at his home inChocorua, New Hampshire. He was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge,Massachusetts.

　　He was one of the strongest proponents of the school of functionalism in psychology and ofpragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, aswell as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. He challenged his professional colleaguesnot to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those phenomena.

　　In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al. using six criteria such as citations and recognition, Jameswas found to be the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th Century.

　　Epistemology

　　James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truthwas a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an addeddimension. Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actualthings, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle mightfit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actualpractice.

　　"The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for humanreasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novelobservations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving humansatisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, isnowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for 'tobe true' means only to perform this marriage-function," he wrote.

　　James held a world view in line with pragmatism, declaring that the value of any truth was utterlydependent upon its use to the person who held it. Additional tenets of James's pragmatism includethe view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly interpretedand understood through an application of "radical empiricism." Radical empiricism, not related tothe everyday scientific empiricism, asserts that the world and experience can never be halted foran entirely objective analysis, if nothing else the mind of the observer and simple act of observationwill affect the outcome of any empirical approach to truth as the mind and its experiences, andnature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition — over andagainst duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality — has maintained a strong influence inAmerican culture, especially among liberals (see Richard Rorty). James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness (psychology)," had adirect and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art.

　　In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, inbrief, that "Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them;which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs thatstart and terminate among them." Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theoryof truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatismscholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalistinterpretation of James.

　　In The Meaning of Truth, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's [sc., thecritic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereasthe pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' " However, Jamesresponded to critics accusing him of relativism, scepticism or agnosticism, and of believing only inrelative truths. To the contrary, he supported an epistemological realism position

　　Will to Believe Doctrine

　　Main article: The Will to Believe

　　In William James's lecture of 1897 titled "The Will to Believe," James defends the right to violate theprinciple of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. Although this doctrine is oftenseen as a way for William James to justify religious beliefs, his philosophy of pragmatism allows himto use the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis' truth.Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in God and prove its existence by what thebelief brings to one's life.

　　Philosophy of religion

　　James did important work in philosophy of religion. In his Gifford Lectures at the University ofEdinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) andinterpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes inthis regard:

　　Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather thanreligious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.

　　The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought bypsychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, theyshow us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.

　　In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must eachmake certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis ofexperience, help us to live fuller and better lives.

　　The investigation of mystical experience was constant throughout the life of James, leading him toexperiment with chloral hydrate (1870), amyl nitrite (1875), nitrous oxide (1882), and evenpeyote (1896). James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxidethat he was able to understand Hegel.[19] He concluded that while the revelations of the mystichold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered,but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such.

　　Theory of emotion

　　James is one of the two namesakes of the James-Lange theory of emotion, which he formulatedindependently of Carl Lange in the 1880s. The theory holds that emotion is the mind's perceptionof physiological conditions that result from some stimulus. In James's oft-cited example; it is notthat we see a bear, fear it, and run. We see a bear and run, consequently we fear the bear. Ourmind's perception of the higher adrenaline level, heartbeat, etc., is the emotion.

　　This way of thinking about emotion has great consequences for the philosophy of aesthetics. Hereis a passage from his great work, Principles of Psychology, that spells out those consequences.

专四专八：历年真题免费领

专四专八：精选好课 暖心助学