William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion - Hardcover

Halliwell, Martin; Rasmussen, Joel D. S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019968751X ISBN 13: 9780199687510

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2014

Synopsis

William James and the Transatlantic Conversation focuses on the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) and his engagements with European thought, together with the multidisciplinary reception of his work on both sides of the Atlantic since his death. James's encounters with European thinkers and ideas ran throughout his early life and across his distinguished international career, in which he participated in a number of transatlantic conversations in science, philosophy, psychology, religion, ethics, and literature. This volume explores and extends these conversations by drawing together twelve scholars from a range of disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic to assess James's work in all its variety, to trace his multidisciplinary reception across the twentieth century, and to evaluate his legacy in the twenty-first century. The first half of the book considers James's many intellectual influences and the second half focuses on A Pluralistic Universe (1909), the published text of his 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University, as a key text for assessing James's transatlantic conversations. The pluralistic transatlantic currents addressed in the first part of the volume enable a fuller understanding of James's philosophy of pluralism that forms the explicit focus for the second part. Taken as a collection, the volume is unique in scholarship on James in generating transatlantic, interdisciplinary, and cross-generational dialogues, and it repositions James as an important international thinker and arguably the most distinctive American intellectual figure of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

About this title

About the Author

Edited by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen

Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Leicester.

Joel D. S. Rasmussen is University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought and Fellow of Mansfield College at the University of Oxford.

Review

[A]ny reader wishing to be better acquainted with him would be well advised to consult this book. * Kate Kirkpatrick, The Way * lively and insightful ... This volume, with its twelve laboratories of imaginative inquiry, pushes the boundaries for our understanding of James. * Paul Croce, Society for U.S. Intellectual History *

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 019968751X
• ISBN 13: 9780199687510
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 235