“... has not passed into that vigilant eye, felt all the leaps potential in that luxurious torpor?’ William James says of the tigers at Barnum’s menagerie, whose ‘existence, so intensely and vividly real’, caused him to feel ‘poignantly the unfathomableness of ontology’, that though their being is ‘so admirable that one yearns to be in some way ...”

“... other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years before Yeats, James Russell Lowell had already seen that literature itself was the random stuff of visceral alchemy: ‘The somewhat greasy heap of the literary rag-and-bone picker is turned to gold by time.’ Much attention has been given to the 20th century’s predilection ...”

“... edited by Louis Zukofsky I’d never have developed as a poet – I literally went to school to William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky and have had the good fortune to call the latter friend and mentor. Well – there was an influence (from transition and the surrealistes that has always seemed to want to ride right along with the ...”

“... by vocation a philosopher, of distinctive orientation since he has close dealings with Emerson and William James as well as with Wittgenstein, and with Hollywood comedies as well as with Thoreau; and he often turns to Shakespeare for contributions to philosophical issues, confident that he explores ‘the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his ...”

“... let alone her 13-volume novel Pilgrimage, whose experimental narrative anticipated those of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It’s an odd conjunction: on the one hand, Joyce and Woolf; on the other, Dorothy Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and ...”

“... an element of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he ...”

“... into cultural originality.’ Having taken the cultural lead America could now export what William Carlos Williams called its ‘rich regenerative violence’ to the rest of the civilised world. This isn’t the usual history of the modern, and it could be contested: the three cities of Dada are Zurich, Paris and New York, in that chronological ...”

“... for drawing lines between empirical psychology and philosophy. He urges a return to David Hume and William Whewell, for whom the two fields were one. ‘For much of the history of philosophy,’ Machery writes, ‘philosophers could not have imagined their philosophising as separate from not only mathematics, but also the empirical sciences.’ He goes on to ...”

“... was exposed as a child to Nonconformist Christianity, but lost his faith, under the pressure of William James and Herbert Spencer, in 1908 and 1909. Kinkead-Weekes reports that in 1917 he read various hermetic and occult books. He wrote to Philip Heseltine that he had been reading Madame Blavatsky, but that he was not a theosophist. However, he ...”

“... beliefs and feelings, and to be aware of themselves. These assumptions can be challenged, but, as William James observed, their discussion is called metaphysics and lies outside the scope of science. Unlike James, cognitive scientists aim to give a thoroughgoing computational account of how the brain constructs and ...”

“... Edward James​ was charming, eccentric, generous and immensely wealthy. For most of his life, his greatest talent was placing himself in interesting situations, often having used his wealth to make them happen. In 1931, he was the first to publish John Betjeman, who had been a fellow student at Oxford. In 1933 he financed the final collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill ...”

“... of the last century, often frustrated his contemporaries by the diversity of his writings. Thus William James lamented that when Wundt’s critics ‘make mincemeat of some one of his views ... he is meanwhile writing a book on an entirely different subject. Cut him up like a worm, and each fragment crawls.’ This complaint certainly cannot be made of ...”

“... that emerged after Locke, the idea that philosophy is about a set of ‘problems’. Around 1910 William James, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell each wrote texts entitled, with minor variants, ‘The Problems of Philosophy’. That way of seeing philosophy has stuck. But arguably it was Locke who made it possible to see philosophy as problems in the ...”

“... by genius. The off-chart mathematician Noam Himmel opens her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. William James and his sister Alice feature in The Dark Sister (1991), a book Iris Murdoch called ‘brilliantly ingenious, beautifully written and thoroughly alarming’. More recently, the physicist Samuel Mallach appears in Properties of Light ...”

“... writings on this subject Strawson admires, and in whom he finds allies: Descartes, Kant, Hume and William James in particular. It is also peppered with frequent interruptions from an interlocutor – set off in different type – who makes most of the objections that will occur to a careful reader. This is extremely helpful in following what is often an ...”