William James On Exceptional Mental States

This book is the first reconstructing of those lectures, and hence, a new and important addition to the body of James's work on the psychology of the subconscious.

An innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind at the turn of the twenty-first century via the texts of philosopher and psychologist William James.

Between 1800 and the First World War, white middle-class men were depicted various forms of literature as weak and nervous. This book explores cultural writings dedicated to the physical and mental health of the male subject, showing that men have mobilized gender constructions repeatedly and self-consciously to position themselves within the culture. Aiming to join those who offer nuanced accounts of masculinity, Devlin investigates the various and changing interests white manhood was positioned to cultivate and the ways elite white men used "their own," so to speak, to promote larger agendas for their class and race.

This new companion to William James The Varieties of Religious Experience offers contemporary responses to James's seminal book from key international experts.

Ultimately, Young William James Thinking reveals how James provided a humane vision well suited to our pluralist age.

Moreover, Oliver argues, Jamesian transcendence is relevant to current questions in cognitive science and the emerging ecological, computer, and cyber worlds." "Jamesian transcendence, according to Oliver, seeks to reconcile individual growth with social responsibility. In this age of impersonal information, it invites us all to embrace our own enthusiasms, or "delights," as the surest sources of personal happiness, mutual regard, and depth of experience."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on the experience of freedom embodied in three Twain texts, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger, this book encapsulates both Twain's early and late theoretical speculations on the nature of the divided self. From the thoughts and actions of the protagonists in these works, we can trace and follow Twain's fictive map of mind, one that eventually leads to a new vision of personal freedom.

In this insightful new book on the remarkable William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, Krister Dylan Knapp provides the first deeply historical and acutely analytical account of James's psychical research. While showing that James always maintained a critical stance toward claims of paranormal phenomena like spiritualism, Knapp uses new sources to argue that psychical research held a strikingly central position in James's life. It was crucial to his familial and professional relationships, the fashioning of his unique intellectual disposition, and the shaping of his core doctrines, especially the will-to-believe, empiricism, fideism, and theories of the subliminal consciousness and immortality. Knapp explains how and why James found in psychical research a way to rethink the well-trodden approaches to classic Euro-American religious thought, typified by the oppositional categories of natural vs. supernatural and normal vs. paranormal. He demonstrates how James eschewed these choices and instead developed a tertiary synthesis of them, an approach Knapp terms tertium quid, the third way. Situating James's psychical research in relation to the rise of experimental psychology and Protestantism's changing place in fin de siecle America, Knapp asserts that the third way illustrated a much broader trend in transatlantic thought as it struggled to navigate the uncertainties and religious adventurism of the modern age.