Watson, Cecelia Alexandre (Author)
Richards, Robert John
Daston, Lorraine J.
Daston, Lorraine J.
University of Chicago
Leary, David E.
Leary, David E.
Edition Details: Advisor: Richards, Robert J; Committee Members: Daston, Lorraine, Leary, David E.
Physical Details: 164 pp.
Language: English
My dissertation considers the influence of the artist and critic John La Farge on William James's psychology and philosophy. James and La Farge studied painting together as young men, and these lessons fed James's understanding of evolved intelligence and the relationship between subject and object; it inflected his descriptions of perception and his definition of truth; it showed through in his vivid personal and literary style; and it fueled his pragmatic, pluralistic philosophy and his religious speculations. This project points to a new way to position James's work in the context of the larger intellectual landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. James relied on artistic method to escort psychology and philosophy through the tangle of modernist anxieties about subjectivity and objectivity: How, asked the arts and sciences, were observers to uncover truth in the objects of their inquiry? Was there any "reality" to be found independent of the self? If so, could one circumvent the self and alight once again on securely objective epistemological foundations? Viewed in the broader context of nineteenth and early twentieth century anxieties over subjects and objects, La Farge's method became the basis for James's answer to the question, "What, and how, can we know?" In order to develop a clear picture of James's response to this problem, I draw on literature focused on a variety of topics and centered in a variety of disciplines, including art history; critical studies of pragmatism; biographies of James and exegeses of his scientific and philosophical work; literary studies of Henry James; histories of American psychology; and the history of biology.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 73/04, Oct 2012. Proquest Document ID: 914451508.
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