Today I am dedicating a blog entry to a fellow I have wanted to for a while on this blog. This would be William James, a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher. James wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism and the philosophy of pragmatism. James also founded the American Society for Psychical Research and he is known to be a champion with alternatives to healing. James challenged his colleagues to not allow a narrow mindset to prevent a honest review of the phenomena he covered upon some research. James spent his full academic career at Harvard University where he also had worked as a professor for different subjects and as chair at a certain point in time. James was one of the strongest proponents of the notion of Functionalism-("a general psychological approach that views mental life and behavior in terms of active adaptation to the person's environment"). James was also a big proponent of pragmatism in philosophy-( pragmatism is the philospshy of considering practical consequences and real effects to be vital components of meaning and truth"). James gained widespread attention with a 1,200 page book called Principles of Psychology: The Briefer Course. James interestingly had defined true beliefs as those that prove to be useful to the believer. James had a pragmatic theory of truth that was combined with a synthesis of correspondence of truth and coherence theory of truth with an additional dimension. James maintained a world view in balance with pragmatism that the value of any truth was dependent upon the use of it to the person who held it. Following the ideas of pragmatism James also believed that the world was a mosaic of a variety of experiences that can only fully be understood in a way through "radical empiricism"-("any philosophical worldview is flawed if it stops at the physical level and fails to explain how meaning, values and intentionality can arise from that"). James's description of the mind-world connection, was explained in terms of a "stream of consciousness"and had a direct and influential influence on avant-garde and modernist literature and art. James also supported an epistemological realism position-(a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind"). Upon many of James's important writings I thought it was interesting that in a lecture titled "The Will to Believe" James defended the right to violate principles of evidentalism so to justify hypothesis venturing. James also did a lot of important work in the philosophy of religion. In lectures at the University of Edinburgh he offered a broad ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience and he interpreted them according to his pragmatic learning's and some important points he makes in this regard are the following: "Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius. The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things. In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives." James is also one of the namesakes of the James Lange theory of emotion, which he developed independently of Carle Lange in the 1880's. The James Lange theory can be described as responses to experiences in the world and the influencing of the autonomic nervous system creating physiological events, such as muscular tension, rise in heart beat and so forth. So James thought within the James Lange theory emotions, then, are feelings which stir about as a result of these physiological changes, rather than being their cause. As far as the Philosophy of History goes James also had an interesting view that I think can be explained a little more by a following statement of his: "Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives." He continues, "The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it" and James felt that the great people of history manipulate the thoughts of society. James also conducted research on Spiritualism and published a book called Expériences d'un Psychiste, and it is a book that relates many experiments conducted with a lady named Leonora Piper. I find William James interesting and complex at times and I think clearly he has been highly influential and apparently I am not the only individual to think this James once being ranked in a research study by Haggbloom, as the 14th most eminent psychologist of the twentieth century.