Abstract

This essay explores the significant role that the writings and Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius came to play in the life and work of William James. James’s correspondence reveals that he first read Aurelius’s Meditations during the troubled ‘crisis years’ of his twenties. Moreover, these writings were a source of solace for James and informed his personal life philosophy during this period. There is evidence that it was from a Stoic standpoint that he contested his father’s faith. And, in later years, it is his interrogation of the experiential divide between a life lived under Stoicism and one lived as a ‘religious’ believer that lies at the heart of his Varieties of Religious Experience