Search Results

“... was pragmatic: it was true because it worked for people who tried it. Sara Bull suggested to William James that he write a preface to Rāja Yoga. James, the son of a Swedenborgian, yearned for a more open-ended model of selfhood, which could account for religious experience without resorting to an outmoded ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... and Freud are two prime examples – while others dart from one notion to another: Voltaire and William James are two such impressive darters. Along with varying types of thinkers, there are varying modes of thought. Of these, the most obvious breakdown is between that which involves long and complex chains of reasoning, complicated analysis, and ...”

“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... Edith Wharton once asked Henry James why it was that his novels so curiously lacked real life. James’s private name for her was the ‘Angel of Devastation’, and the fact that she not only perpetrated this remark but went on to record it expressionlessly in her memoirs shows just what he meant ...”

“... as relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... Alice James died in London at the age of 43, regretting only that she would not have the pleasure of knowing and reporting herself dead. The reporting was done instead by her favourite brother: ‘I went to the window to let in a little more of the afternoon light, and when I went back to the bed she had drawn the breath that was not succeeded by another,’ Henry James wrote to their eldest brother, William, in America, as if, in the now fashionable way, defining death to a Martian ...”

“... other artists), Florence (Horace Mann, whose letters to Horace Walpole are famous) and Naples (Sir William Hamilton). There were political refugees, notably Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, and his brother, the Cardinal Duke of York (who was born in Rome and left only once to go to Paris in 1745 and prepare to go to England should the rebellion be ...”

“... I believe that it would. I base this on my experience of writing about two such Puritans, William Prynne and Richard Baxter. In the process of writing these studies I changed my mind about ‘the Puritan Revolution’. In an important new book, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Caroline Hibbard has tackled the origins of the Civil War by documenting the ...”

“... with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the ...”

“... war does seem not merely absurd, but quite incomprehensible. It also raises the hope, as old as William James, that some ‘moral equivalent’ for this sport might in time be found. Both the innocence and the ignorance of even American history in this book are shared by most American high-school graduates. So it is not surprising that Scarry writes ...”

“... to liberalism, to pragmatism (whose philosophical elements he had picked up while studying under William James), and then finally to national prominence as a pundit who wrote regularly for the New Republic, the New York World, the Herald Tribune, the Washington Post and Newsweek. The keynote of his manner throughout his career was dispassionate ...”

“... was a worldwide celebrity, ranked as a thinker alongside Plato, Socrates, Descartes and Kant. William James thought Bergson’s work had wrought a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Lord Balfour read him with great care and attention; Teddy Roosevelt went so far as to write an article on his work. People climbed ladders merely to catch a glimpse of ...”

“... meta-ethics draws inspiration from Pragmatism, the American philosophical tradition developed by William James, C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. Pragmatists urged philosophers, and culture as a whole, to let go of their preoccupation with truth. Do not ask whether beliefs or theories are true, they suggested, but whether they are useful. Truth is a secondary ...”

“... but was executed for. His case was taken up by two Harvard psychologists, Hugo Münsterberg and William James, who were disturbed not just by the possibility that Ivens’s confession was false, but about the mental process that resulted in his seeming genuinely to remember in detail carrying out the killing. Legal systems depend on someone knowing all ...”