William james biography summary graphic organizer

William James' Arguments on Religious experience

  • 1. Religious Experience William James Prepared by: Sem. Slater Wayne B. Morilla Sancta Maria Mater et Regina Seminarium, Cagay, Roxas City Arguments on

  • 3. Religious Experience has been argued to be ground for belief in God.” RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE is the feelings, acts, experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider divine’. What is religious experience?

  • 4. 1. The experiential: Concerned with the experience itself 2. The propositional: Extracts experiences from certain definite propositions. There are two general approaches to interpreting religious experience:

  • 5. TYPES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES 1. Near death experiences 2. Conversion 3. Group experiences 4. Mysticism 5. Meditation

  • 6. St. Teresa of Avila St. Teresa of Avila was a Spanish mystic lived during the Counter- Reformation, a period of religious turmoil in Europe. She has a very exceptional experience with God that she would describe it as a, “erotic passion.” Her love of God and her desire for spiritual union with Him found expression in which an angel pierced her heart with a golden spear and sent her to trance Saint’s encounter with God:

  • 7. St. Teresa of Avila In Teresa’s vision, she as “soul” is completely submissive and receives the wound at the hands of an Eros figure. Nevertheless, central to both scenes is the symbol of wounding, the origin of love in pain inflicted from without. Saint’s encounter with God:

  • 8. The argument maintains that special episodes, such as seeing visions of Christ or Mary or hearing the voice of God, as well as the more general experience of “living in God’s presence,” establish evidence of God as their source. Studies and Evaluation of Religious Experience

  • 9. Can any experience of the divine be used as an argument for the existence of God ?

  • Every experience involves the interpretation of: Sensations – t
  • Birth and Death. William James was

    • Is it possible to gain real and valuable knowledge without using reason? Many would scoff at this notion. If an idea can&#;t be defended on rational grounds, it is either a personal preference that may not be held by others or it is false and irrational. Even if one acknowledges a role for intuition in human knowledge, how can one trust another person&#;s intuition if that person does not provide reasons for his or her beliefs?

    In order to address this issue, let&#;s first define &#;reason.&#; The Encyclopedia Britannica defines reason as &#;the faculty or process of drawing logical inferences,&#; that is, the act of developing conclusions through logic. Britannica adds, &#;Reason is in opposition to sensation, perception, feeling, desire, as the faculty . . .  by which fundamental truths are intuitively apprehended.&#; The New World Encyclopedia defines reason as &#;the ability to form and operate upon concepts in abstraction, in accordance with rationality and logic. &#; Wikipedia states: &#;Reason is the capacity of consciously making sense of things, applying logic, and adapting or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information.&#;

    Fundamental to all these definitions is the idea that knowledge must be based on explicit concepts and statements, in the form of words, symbols, or mathematics. Since human language is often ambiguous, with different definitions for the same word (I could not even find a single, widely-accepted definition of &#;reason&#; in standard reference texts), many intellectuals have believed that mathematics, science, and symbolic logic are the primary means of acquiring the most certain knowledge.

    However, there are types of knowledge not based on reason. These types of knowledge are difficult or impossible to express in explicit concepts and statements, but we know that they are types of knowledge because they lead to successful outcomes. In these cases, we don&#;t know how exactly a succe

    William James: The Psychology of Possibility With John J. McDermott, Ph.D.

    "The narrative of the DVD was written and is presented by John J. McDermott of Texas A&M University, leading scholar of the history of American philosophy and of the work of William James. The narrative is clearly written and engagingly presented, and it provides an excellent introduction both to James’s life and to James’s study of psychology. Throughout the film, McDermott is attentive to James’s balancing of psychology’s ability to provide a theoretical account of the human animal’s basic workings and its ability to provide practical possibilities for the construction of our own personal and social lives."

    - Douglas R. Anderson, Ph.D.
    Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
    Former Editer of The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

    Review 2

    “William James: The Psychology of Possibility” packs substantive considerations of the great thinker’s work in psychology and his focus on experience. John J. McDermott, the preeminent James scholar of our time, leads the viewer not only through important concepts but also through the context in which those concepts arose within James himself. If this were not enough to make for edifying material, the film goes further, in true Jamesian fashion, to discuss and demonstrate the practical usefulness of those concepts—how they affect experience, attitudes, and behaviors.

    His work in psychology permeates the many other disciplines in which James partook—philosophy, religious philosophy, even proto-sociology. But this film, goes further, rightly placing his psychology front-and-center, not only in the relation to his own work but to the history of psychology itself.

    We should all look forward to the next natural step: a film focused up James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and pragmatism."

    --D. Micah Hester, PhD
    President (), William James Society
    Co-author (with Rob Talisse) of On J

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  • William James is a pioneering
  • Early Life. Erasmus Wilson was
  • Henry James, the second son