This book offers a powerful interpretation of the philosophy of William James. It focuses on the multiple directions in which James's philosophy moves and the inevitable contradictions that arise as a result. The first part of the book explores a range of James's doctrines in which he refuses to privilege any particular perspective: ethics, belief, free will, truth and meaning. The second part of the book turns to those doctrines where James privileges the perspective of mystical experience. Richard Gale then shows how the relativistic tendencies can be reconciled with James's account of mystical experience. An appendix considers the distorted picture of James's philosophy that has been refracted down to us through the interpretations of his work by John Dewey.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. The Promethean Pragmatist: 1. The ethics of Prometheanism; 2. The willfulness of belief; 3. The freedom of belief; 4. The will to believe; 5. The ethics of truth; 6. The semantics of 'truth'; 7. Ontological relativism: William James meets Poo-bah; Part II. The Anti-Promethean Mystic: 8. The self; 9. The I-thou quest for intimacy and religious mysticism; 10. The humpty-dumpty intuition and panpsychism; 11. Attempts at a one-world interpretation of James; Appendix: John Dewey's naturalization of William James; Bibliography of works cited; Index.