William James

William James, elder brother of the novelist, trained as a physician at Harvard and taught there for thirty-five years, moving from physiology to psychology to philosophy. The Principles of Psychology of 1890 founded the field in America and gave it the stream of consciousness; The Varieties of Religious Experience studied faith as experience rather than doctrine; Pragmatism proposed that truth is what works, and the Essays in Radical Empiricism the metaphysics behind it. He wrote the clearest prose of any philosopher on the lists, and Henry once said he was the novelist of the family.