William James

Rudolf Otto describes religion as numinous. The numinous is describes as the power or being of divinity. Rudolf Otto defined it himself as “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self”. Rudolf Otto refined his theory into three distinctive segments; numinous mysterium, numinous tremendum, and numinous fascian. The numinous mysterium is the wholly other. OR something that is entirely different from the ordinary things we experience in…

As the sun rises, the moon falls; everything becomes bright. Yet soon, the moon decides to rise again, taking away the light, and only providing darkness. This idea can be translated to the roles of sadness and happiness in a person’s life. In order to better understand the moon and sun analogy, imagine this. Two items are placed on a balance labeled, ‘Human Emotion’. Those two weighted items are each labeled ‘Sadness’ and ‘Happiness’. The scale begins to wildly tip back and forth, never coming…

in civilized society. This was made apparent by William James with his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War”. In his essay, James argues through anecdotes and multiple viewpoints that another method besides warfare should be used to advance civilization. James utilizes perspective throughout his essay to strengthen his argument through an ethos appeal. Throughout his work, he consistently acknowledges two parties: pacifists and advocates of war. James establishes himself as a man of logic when…

Peirce and William James. One outstanding similarity between these two authors is that they both promoted the philosophy of Pragmatism. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines pragmatism as: “A reasonable and logical way of doing things or of thinking about problems that is based on dealing with specific situations instead of on ideas and theories”. The core of pragmatism is what is known as the pragmatist maxim. This is essentially a rule for generating hypotheses (Hookway, 2012). Both James…

A strong argument supporting Pragmatism would be that the theory has a specific set of rational ordering. William James in the nineteenth century believed that reality is confined to the stimuli that perk our interests. He gave the criteria for seven realities people could exist in at any particular time. The first was the physical world that is perceived. The second was the scientific world that people learn to conceive through formal observations. The third is the abstract world that is…

not worth living” was the most important problem of philosophy (Camus 3). This is understandable, as once one has established that life exists, the next step is to understand if that life has any meaning or value. Albert Camus, Thomas Nagel, and William James each argue how one should continue living one’s life after the existential crisis of nihilism and of realizing the absurdity of the meaning of life. Camus believes that one should react with scorn to the absurdity of the universe, Nagel…

John Dewey argues against William James' theory by saying that Dewey believes that emotions are experiences in which our emotions are directed toward the environment (84-85). Too, he argues that out bodily responses are needed as a way to deal with the emotion (85) and to relieve that sensation (86). Dewey mentions how he does not grasp why sounds such as laughter should be emitted while responding to an emotion (86). Too, laughing does not always insinuate that something is funny, but a laugh…

exploiting others for their labor, land, and ideas. These groups of people are referred to as “the other”, they are often targets of xenophobia and hate. The other can be people with common identifiers: gender, race, class, etc. The writers James McBride & William Shakespeare in The Color of Water and Hamlet shed light upon how othering is normalized within society through heavy emphasis on their characters' flaws. A primary example of how deep othering is nested within our society is the…

daughters of a poor country parson” (James 6). This immediately invokes an image of a woman who is of simple upbringing and is thus naïve and susceptible to psychological influences. She meets her potential employer, who is described as “a bachelor in the prime of life[.] [S]uch a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (James 7). He is also described as having “charming ways with women” (James 7). Immediately…

Clifford Vs James In the “Ethics of Belief”, William K. Clifford presents us with an example. The example tells us why we always need sufficient evidence to believe something. He says that no one should believe something from a gut feeling or something we just think is true without any evidence of that it proves that it is right. We think of this as if it were a joke because it may not affect us now, but if everyone begins to follow this it will be a big difference from the way we think now.…