This eighth volume of a projected twelve continues the series of
William James's correspondence with family, friends, and
colleagues, which was begun in volume 4 of the Correspondence. The
eight volume contains some 530 letters, with an additional 620
letters calendared, thus giving a complete accounting of James's
known correspondence from 1895 to June 1899 inclusive.
During this period, James struggles against various temptations,
never completely successfully, to devote all of his attention to
philosophy, the first and great love of his life. To this end, he
published The Will to Believe with a promise to set out more
formally his system of radical empiricism. The volume helps
document the reception of the book and the controversy to which the
title essay gave rise, a controversy the main issues of which have
once again returned to the forefront of philosophical discussion
and places James in the middle of postmodernist discussion. His
1898 tour of California where he delivered his lecture on
"Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," the start of the
pragmatism controversy, also belongs to the period of the present
volume. Among the distractions from philosophy are his 1896 Lowell
Institute lectures on exceptional mental states and the Gifford
lectures on varieties of religious experience, on which he began
work in the late 1890s. His new philosophical correspondents are
the Polish nationalist and messianist Wincenty Lutoslawski and
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, the future strategist of the
pragmatism controversy.
James becomes a public philosopher, whose views were sought on
the problems of the day. To James's great dismay, the United States
was becoming an imperial power: the Venezuela crisis and the
Spanish-American War sometimes rousing James into outrage. France
was being torn apart by the Dreyfus affair with James expressing
strong sympathies for Dreyfus and the intellectuals. The race
question was coming to the forefront, with Booker T. Washington
entering the list of correspondents.
His family continued to take up much of his attention. As his
children grew older, they became the recipients of numerous
didactic, affectionate, and playful letters from a father often at
a distance.
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