Before and beyond dualism: Paul Croce and David Leary on William James.

Abstract

Reviews the books, "Young William James Thinking" by Paul Croce (2018) and "The Routledge Guidebook to James's Principles of Psychology" by David E. Leary (2018). Paul Croce's Young William James Thinking and David Leary's The Routledge Guidebook to James's Principles of Psychology reach important, at times convergent conclusions, though through very different approaches. Croce practices the kind of sympathetic hermeneutics that James wished had informed the reception of his pragmatism. A labor of love, Young William James zeroes in on the "center" of James's "vision," redrawing its contours. Leary, by contrast, proceeds through a razor-sharp analysis of James's Principles of Psychology. He sees himself as tracing paths and itineraries, through which readers can explore James's complex work. Croce's book addresses a broad audience of people who are interested in William James and the James family, and who also desire to learn more about American culture and society in the second half of the 19th century. Leary's study is aimed at a more specialized readership of historians of science, intellectual historians, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as graduate and undergraduate students. Through works like Leary's and Croce's readers can better understand the reasons why James's thought came to function as a resource not only for neuroscientific, biological understandings of mind, self, and values, such as Antonio Damasio's, but also for a humanistic "sciences of the human person," such as Roberto Assagioli's psychosynthesis and American humanistic psychology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).