William James's Social Evolutionism in Focus
The Pluralist 6 (3) (2011)
| Abstract | It is well known that William James’s thinking was influenced by evolutionary theory and by Darwin’s theory of natural selection in particular. It is easy to misunderstand James’s evolutionary thinking, however, if one is tempted to read contemporary evolutionary views back into James. In this article I try to avoid such anachronism by carefully distinguishing James’s evolutionary views from some of their nearest conceptual neighbors. I focus in particular on James’s social evolutionism, especially as he expounds it in his 1880 essay “Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment.”1 By distinguishing James’s social evolutionism from sociobiology, from social Darwinism, and from the theory of memes, I underscore .. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,865 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMax Carl Otto (ed.) (1942). William James. Madison, the University of Wisconsin Press.
Jean Suplizio (2007). On the Significance of William James to a Contemporary Doctrine of Evolutionary Psychology. Human Studies 30 (4):357 - 375.
Bertrand Russell (1992). William James's Conception of Truth. In William James & Doris Olin (eds.), William James: Pragmatism, in Focus. Routledge.
Jack Barbalet (2004). Hypothesis, Faith, and Commitment: William James' Critique of Science. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (3):213–230.
Graham Bird (1986). William James. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
James Rowland Angell (1908). Book Review: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. William James. [REVIEW] Ethics 18 (2):226-.
Henry Jackman (2008). William James. In C. J. Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
William James (1880). Great Men and Their Environment. Atlantic Monthly 46 (Oct.):441-449.
Jaime Nubiola (2000). Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James. Streams of William James 2 (3):2-4.
William James (1907/1995). Pragmatism. Dover Publications.
Analytics
Monthly downloads
Sorry, there are not enough data points to plot this chart.
|
Added to index2011-10-26Total downloads1 ( #277,005 of 556,772 )Recent downloads (6 months)0How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
