William James

<p>The importance of this collection of writings of William James lies in the fact that it has been arranged to provide a systematic introduction to his major philosophical discoveries and precisely to those doctrines and theories that are of most burning current interest. William James: The Essential Writings is a series of philosophical arguments on some of the most obscure and head-cracking problems in contemporary philosophy; the relation of thought to its object; the interrelationships between meaning and truth; the levels and structures of experience; the degrees of reality; the nature of the embodied self; the relation of ethics aesthetics and religious experience to man's strenuously and heroically active nature; and above all the structurization of the experienced life-world as the validating ground and origin of all theory; Bruce Wilshire has provided an introduction to William James's thought on these and other related points which is at once both substantial and subtle.</p>