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  • Wealthy family
  • Career: art, chemistry, medicine, zoology
  • Lifelong problems with self-esteem, neurotic
  • “neurasthenia” or “Americanitis”
  • Most interested in consciousness
  • Disliked lab work/ doing experiments

  • Taught psychology for a time, then moved exclusively into philosophy
  • American Harvard Professor: Decade after Wundt, James concluded conscious thought is not as simple.Consciousness is a continuous stream.
  • Considered by many scholars to be greatest American psychologist

William James - Theory:

  • Pragmatism

James wrote considerably on the concept of pragmatism. According to pragmatism, the truth of an idea can never be proven. James proposed we instead focus on what he called the "cash value," or usefulness, of an idea.

  • Functionalism

James opposed the structuralism focus on introspection and breaking down mental events to the smallest elements. Instead, James focused on the wholeness of an event, taking into the impact of the environment on behavior.

William James and Functionalism (philosophy of mind)

  • James-Lange Theory of Emotion
  • The James-Lange theory of emotion proposes that an event triggers a physiological reaction, which we then interpret. According to this theory, emotions are caused by our interpretations of these physiological reactions. Both James and the Danish physiologist Carl Lange independently proposed the theory.

Functionalism

Psychological school of thought that fallowed Structuralism and move away from focusing on the structure of the mind to a conscious is related to behavior. How does the mind affect what people do.

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