William James on Common Sense

**"William James (1842-1910) was "a towering figure in the history of American thought--without doubt the foremost psychologist this country has produced." That was the opinion of Gordon Allport, a Harvard professor and one-time president of the American Psychological Association. However, few Americans living in this third millennium have ever heard of James, despite the fact that his profound insights into the human psyche are now more urgently needed than ever before.

But before James' insights can once more become available, a barrier to their reception must be removed. What barrier? James' "productive paradoxes." That's what Allport charitably called them. 'They' were more than paradoxes, however. They were the pervasive contradictions in James' thought. To rescue his insights from entangling contradictions, the first step must be to draw attention to common sense, the foundation of all 'scientific' learning.

James confessed that it was only in 1903, a few years before his death, that he realized for the first time "the perfect magnificence as a philosophical achievement" of our everyday, common-sense thinking. This book draws together the threads of James' ideas about such elements of common-sense as consciousness, language, meaning, learning, space, time, and thought itself.