"In his diaries, the American philosopher and psychologist William James, for whom the personal and the philosophical were never far apart, recounted how in his late twenties he was confronted with existential despair regarding the issue of free will: do humans have the capacity to act freely and meaningfully? James famously decided that his "first act of free will is to believe in free will," and declared that, "if you can change your mind, you can...

William James (1842-1910) was one of the most original and influential American thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a professor at Harvard University, he published many works that had a wide-ranging impact on both psychology and philosophy. His Principles of Psychology was the most important English-language work on the mind since Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. His Varieties of Religious Experience practically inaugurated...

Truth is increasingly, marginalized. Powerful news interests, social media and political orators all seem to point to the idea that the days of absolute Truth are past. Religions have always claimed to stand for a transcendent dimension to reality and to the idea of an absolute claim to Truth but, in the West, religion has been and is declining in influence. Fundamentalism is on the rise and this, combined with relativism, contributes to the current...

Históricamente la terapia ocupacional ha tenido dificultades para reconocerse como una disciplina académica y científica. Esto se ha generado, en parte, por un desconocimiento de sus bases epistemológicas y teóricas centrales y por la carencia de una reflexión crítica y constante sobre su práctica clínica y profesional. Es por ello que este libro propone "rescatar" algunas de esas bases teóricas que, pese a haber sustentado el desarrollo...

Preeminent American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859-1952) rejected Hegelian idealism for the pragmatism of William James. In this collection of informal originally published between 1897 and 1909, Dewey articulates his now classic philosophical concepts of knowledge and truth and the nature of reality. Here Dewey introduces his scientific method and uses critical intelligence to reject the traditional ways of viewing philosophical discourse....

I know something about you without knowing you. I bet you spend A LOT of time in your head. You know, thinking, worrying, stressing, freaking out-call it whatever you want. I call it a preoccupied mind. And with what?99% of your thoughts are useless. William James, once the leading psychologist in America, and one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism, put it best: "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely...

Pragmatism, as Richard Rorty has said, "names the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition." In Democratic Hope, Robert B. Westbrook examines the varieties of classical pragmatist thought in the work of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce, testing in good pragmatic fashion the truth of propositions by their consequences in experience. Westbrook also attends to the recent revival of pragmatism by Rorty, Cheryl Misak, Richard Posner,...

La notion de vérité est ambiguë. On peut parler d'une proposition vraie ; mais on peut parler également de la vérité de son contenu, comme Platon a posé celle des objets hypostasiés en Idées, que vise d'après lui la connaissance ...

Following the life of a charismatic woman committed to reform, The Pragmatic Ideal provides an introduction to the politics that dominated the early decades of the twentieth century, ideas that are the basis for much of today's progressive thought. As one of the "New Women" who came of age, during the Progressive Era, Mary Field Parton, a close friend of Clarence Darrow, pursued social justice as a settlement house worker and as a leading writer on...