William James

An American philosopher and psychologist who taught at Harvard for more than three decades and, with his brother the novelist Henry James, came from one of the most intellectually prominent families in nineteenth century America. James's Principles of Psychology (1890) helped establish psychology as an academic discipline in the United States, and his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) treated religious experience as a psychological fact worth studying on its own terms rather than a claim to be proven or disproven. In Pragmatism (1907) James developed, and gave its widest public hearing, the view first sketched by Charles Sanders Peirce that the meaning and truth of an idea are to be tested by their practical consequences in lived experience rather than by any fixed correspondence to an antecedent reality, a reading close enough to Peirce's own that Peirce later renamed his position pragmaticism to keep the two apart.