(William James, popularizer of pragmatism, with his good friend and intellectual antagonist, Josiah Royce, in 1903.)

Fruits Not Roots: A Glance at America’s Greatest (or at Least Top-3) Philosopher

By the end of Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (2007), I found myself underlining entire paragraphs, writing “Yes!” on every other page, in an absolutely satisfying, intellectual climax.

Richardson uses William James’ works to walk us through the mind of one of America’s most profound intellectuals. Richardson has a keen eye for brilliant minds, having already done a biography on another great American luminary: Ralph Waldo Emerson. Richardson traces the evolution of James’ thought through stoicism, anatomy and physiology, experimental psychology, quasi-existentialism, tychism, determinism, and eventually to James’ greatest contributions to Western thought — pragmatism.

James is a philosopher who writes like a novelist. He is an iconoclast producing palpable criticisms of dualism, reductivism, materialism, Hegelianism, atomism, atemporalism, universalism, idealism, and monism. He shakes the foundations of Western philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, Berkeley, Hume, and Freud. He reclaims much that has been lost in the postmodern world.

He puts philosophy in its proper place; it is nothing if it is useless in our daily lives. The “truth” of an idea depends on its outcome, how it impacts lived experience, and not merely…