Long 19th c. · 1842–1910
Who influenced William James?
Influences and legacy
Made truth mean what works in experience, and wrote psychology's first great book.
William James was influenced by Gustav Fechner, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce, and went on to influence John Dewey, Kitarō Nishida and Ludwig Wittgenstein. That is 6 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Notman Studios (photographer), Public domain See the whole map
Who was William James?
William James, brother of the novelist Henry James, trained as a physician and taught anatomy at Harvard but never practised; he turned to psychology and then philosophy. He taught the first psychology course in the United States and is often called the father of American psychology.
With Charles Sanders Peirce he founded pragmatism, and he also developed radical empiricism and helped found functional psychology. His best-known books are The Principles of Psychology, Essays in Radical Empiricism and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Husserl, Russell, Dewey and Wittgenstein all drew on him.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced William James?
3 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Gustav Fechner 1801–1887
- Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
- Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914
Who did William James influence?
3 thinkers on this map draw directly on William James.
- John Dewey 1859–1952
- Kitarō Nishida 1870–1945
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
The line of teachers behind William James
The longest documented line of influence ending at William James runs 21 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- Thomas Hobbes
- Baruch Spinoza
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Christian Wolff
- Immanuel Kant
- Charles Sanders Peirce
- William James
Two steps away from William James
Indirect influences
- Through Charles Sanders Peirce: Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant
- Through Ralph Waldo Emerson: Michel de Montaigne
The second generation
Contemporaries of William James
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of William James, with no direct line between them.
- Peter Kropotkin 1842–1921
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Ernst Mach 1838–1916
- Franz Brentano 1838–1917
- Henry Sidgwick 1838–1900
- F. H. Bradley 1846–1924
- Gottlob Frege 1848–1925
- T. H. Green 1836–1882
William James by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 3
- Direct followers
- 3 — #40 of 279 on this map
- Thinkers upstream
- 88
- Thinkers downstream
- 13
- Wikipedia languages
- 88 — #14 of 47 among 19th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Epic
Questions about William James
- Who influenced William James?
- Gustav Fechner, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Sanders Peirce.
- Who did William James influence?
- John Dewey, Kitarō Nishida and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- When did William James live?
- 1842–1910. The map files William James under the long 19th century.
- How rare is the William James card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on William James in 88 languages, which makes it an Epic card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 19th-century philosophers
- Karl Marx 1818–1883
- Charles Darwin 1809–1882
- Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910
- Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821–1881
- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
- Georg W. F. Hegel 1770–1831
- Friedrich Engels 1820–1895
- Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855