Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

This essay explores the relevance of William James’s thought for addressing the contemporary climate crisis, thereby putting his thinking to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented shattering of certainties, indeed of worlds? In the first part of the essay, James’s writings are revisited and the echoes of the Anthropocene are traced in view of the continuities and ruptures between his time and ours. This seems important because, if, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, the imprint of human action on the earth is so profound as to challenge the very sense of historical continuity, then we must question the continuing validity of our intellectual past in order to think through our present. In the second part, the essay reinterprets James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical responses to worlds in upheaval, countering simplistic readings of James as a “happy pragmatist” who simply goes for what works. It is precisely because James thought in the face of a troubled present – and not simply about it – that his philosophy can be made to matter into today’s world in turmoil.

This concluding dialogue seeks to convert James’s discursive ideas about education into scenes of lived encounter – between teachers and students, bodies and minds, thinking and feeling – while honoring the possibilities for surprise that such encounters open. In this endeavor, we are also extending Stephanie Hawkins’s work, which reminds us of how James uses the term conversion – meaning “to turn with” or “turn together” – to describe the process through which we come into transformative relation with someone or something other than ourselves. James’s dialectical, often gradual process of “educational” conversion seems to us to offer useful correctives to many incumbent histories of the discipline that would rely on entrenched and reductive genealogies of authority. By reconnecting James’s understanding of conversion with his commitment to conversation, we aim to give living voice to the cluster of deeply felt relations that constitute the life practices we call “teaching” and “learning.”

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’.

This essay explores William James’s debt to Charles Peirce, arguing that this debt is integral to pragmatism’s historical use-value for studies of race and racism. Scholars of race have historically found pragmatism useful because of its anti-foundationalism. A philosophical stance resistant to abstraction and ossification, pragmatism’s emphasis on continuity through adaptation makes it useful for dismantling racial essentialism while preserving the experience of social and historical continuity necessary for the ongoing recognition of disenfranchised groups. In the late nineteenth century, however, pragmatism failed to reckon with the systematic denial of power and representation to racialized subjects. I argue that this failure is inseparable from pragmatism’s weddedness to the concept of experience and that a deep dive into how pragmatists have relied on this concept to negotiate the relationship between mind and body reveals the racial contours of its genealogy. Transforming what for Peirce was a methodological rule for scientific investigation into a theory of Truth, James imagined a world made entirely of subjects rather than objects. In so doing, he also dismantled the dialectical aspect of Peirce’s principle and the semiotics on which it depends. As this essay argues, James’s pragmatism does have potential for interpreting the history and significance of race. This potential, though, lies less in its anti-foundationalism than in its materialism and a reclamation of Peirce’s more dialectical model of embodied consciousness.

Climate change represents both a physical and spiritual challenge to humanity in the twenty-first century. Facing the realities of climate change and environmental destruction requires our best political and scientific thinking as well as an attitude capable of confronting the bleak uncertainty that arises in this task. This chapter argues that the philosophy of William James offers a unique conceptual approach to this contemporary predicament. It brings together several distinct threads of James’s philosophy – radical empiricism, “the will to believe,” and pluralism – with contemporary analysis of climate change to describe ways of living with the real uncertainty of the Anthropocene without that knowledge becoming an excuse for inaction and fear. In the end, James’s philosophy offers a powerful lesson to us today: It teaches us to accept the world as we experience it – scary and troubling as that might be – but to find in that acceptance the possibilities of change.

In this chapter, Jane Thrailkill aligns the instructive aims and literary effects of Jamesian style to underline the broader pedagogical purpose of literary criticism. Her reading of The Principles of Psychology analyzes what she describes as James’s “troping devices,” special literary tools intended to catalyze in his audience a process of “experiential, tactile, sensory education.” In this key early work, Thrailkill argues, James’s stylistic play seeks to “capture the mind in action” – to make the text itself into the kind of experience from which we learn, rather than a static description of that experience. As this essay establishes, James’s experiments in thinking and writing are everywhere motivated by his commitment to pedagogy, combined with his knowledge of how learning actually occurs.

William James dedicates two lectures of his Varieties of Religious Experience to what he calls “The Sick Soul.” In these lectures, William combines pragmatist insights, anecdotal commentary, and examples from literary history to explore the phenomenon of human suffering. James, I argue, stresses a hermeneutics of suffering that does not inevitably comply with the promise of an experiential openness towards understanding. Rather, he treats suffering both a source of and a challenge to such an openness, and he thus offers an understanding of suffering that is indicative of a larger discourse in philosophical thinking. In a comparative reading of James’s Varieties, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s struggle with the death of his son Waldo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, I will discuss suffering as a way of understanding that allows us, in turn, to make suffering accessible to understanding as such. James, Emerson, and Gadamer remind us that suffering is neither self-serving nor self-sufficient. As it marks an impaired connectivity within the self and between self and world, hermeneutics of suffering expresses a failed sense of connectivity and conditions the sufferer’s reconnection with the social world. Both in reading and in writing, James, Emerson, and Gadamer recurrently turn to literary and philosophical imagination to test the limits of action and passion, of doing and enduring, to center suffering as a hermeneutic process that may be unavoidable in the human experience, but that always already entails the conditions of its own overcoming.

Chapter 2 begins with Emerson’s responses to the ineffable character of mystical experience: one of silence and listening, the other of a profusion of terms from a multitude of cultures. Writings on mystical experience by William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein are part of the discussion. This chapter considers Emerson’s skepticism about the “external world” and “other minds” and about both freedom and fate, which form a “knot of nature.” The following section concerns skepticism as an existential condition, as when Emerson writes in “Experience”: “So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity.” The chapter concludes by considering skepticism as a positive way of life, what Emerson calls a “wise skepticism.” This form of skepticism has roots in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and, in a particularly important form for Emerson, in the Essays of Montaigne.

How did mapping and measurement act as technologies of improvement? By the early seventeenth century, a professional class of surveyors had emerged in England, promoting concepts of geometric justice in print. They also integrated their services into crown estate management, promising to make forest and fen commons profitable. Much has been written about the spread of cartographic literacy among early modern elites, but relatively little is known about how local communities interacted with maps, surveys, and their makers. Fen projects brought the geometric techniques of improvement into contact with local customary knowledge. Examining maps and surveys of the northern fens across three centuries, this chapter traces how they were produced; how they re-organised social environments; and how fen communities negotiated these processes. It situates surveying as one epistemological tool within disputes over the redrawing of land and water in Hatfield Level, which involved legal officials, written documents, crowds, experiential knowledge, and oral testimony. Intended to author and authorise improvement, the boundaries that maps and surveys demarcated did not prove stable.

How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

Kant claims that to “pick out from ordinary cognition the concepts that are not based on any particular experience and yet are present in all cognition from experience (for which they constitute as it were the mere form of connection) required no greater reflection or more insight than to cull from a language rules for the actual use of words in general, and so to compile the elements of a grammar” (4:323). The analogy with grammar offers a fruitful way to understand how the categories apply to and structure the materials provided by sensibility and empirical concepts. The categories might be described as providing the rules of a kind of ‘transcendental grammar’ that makes experience possible. Attending to the analogy with grammar reveals that the link between the categories and empirical concepts is far closer than one might initially think, since the content to which the categories apply must be grounded in sensible experience. Grammar does not create new content but rather informs propositions by giving structure to linguistic elements available to speakers of a language; likewise, the categories do not produce new cognition but rather ‘inform’ judgments by giving structure to the sensible contents provided by experience.

Unlike the individualist strains of much social science, psychological anthropologists take for granted the proposition that individuality is socially constructed. But at the same time, the discipline has rejected a determinism that understands the individual as a mere reflection of culture, a notion that is the simple inversion of individualist ideology.Experience is usefully conceptualized as the realm within which human subjects can take shape, becoming selves in a socially construable way. Ideally this relationship between culture and self takes shape as a familiar landscape through which the human subject can pass with some sense of purpose and meaning.However, both at the level of society or the individual, this harmony is not guaranteed. The concepts of self and experience – especially when considered together – provide a stronger theoretical foundation for an anthropology that avoids the reification of persons and culture and attends more closely to the processes whereby subjects pursue and follow filaments of meaning in their lives.

This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.

Chapter 6 presents a discussion of how one might go about changing the minds of others (and even one’s own). This broad discussion reiterates messages from Chapter 4 in the context of engaging misinformation and reconstructing knowledge. The topic of ‘debunking’ is introduced and how using it to change people’s minds is perhaps more difficult than simply advising others of their ‘mistakes’ (e.g. with respect to the backfire effect), depending on the nature of the belief and the individual’s attachment to it. Persuasion techniques are also discussed, as is how people can ‘change their own minds’ and how we often rationalise poor thinking.