The 'Fourteen Doors' Outward of William James's Philosophy

Gerald E. Myers. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. 627 pp. Illus. Eugene Fontinell. Self, God, and Immortality: A Jamesian Investigation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. 297 pp. William James. Essays in Psychical Research. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 684 pp. Frederick J. Down Scott, ed. William James: Selected Unpublished Correspondence, 1885-1910. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. 603 pp. William James was once likened, by his sister Alice, to a house with fourteen doors, all opening outward. The expansive spirit and open nature of the man and his philosophy continue to interest and puzzle. On the one hand, William James was a philosopher grappling with the perennial, and largely technical, problems of epistemology and philosophical psychology. On the other hand, he was a cultural figure, for whom philosophy was simply a form of expression, a particular means of presenting his own "passionate vision." James occupied both worlds, the worlds of the professional and of the public philosopher, at the very historical moment when most academic philosophers were abandoning the public forum for the secure and insulated confines of the ivy-walled university. The diversity of the volumes under consideration here is an indication of James's precarious balance within, and ultimate transcendence of, two worlds of discourse

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