Good Counsel: A Walking Dialogue with William James

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William James is arguably Americas most important psychologist and intellectual. While a thriving literature on Jamesian thought exists, Good Counsel: A Walking Dialogue with William James fills the gap between the passing paragraph or two about James in undergraduate textbooks and the dense academic literature of Jamesian scholars. By offering an interesting and inspiring introduction to James, this book brings a new generation of minds into the Jamesian conversation.
Written as a dialogue between William James and some of his famous students, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Gertrude Stein, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Good Counsel provides an introduction to the important elements of Jamesian thought and seeks to inspire students to explore further. While not a formal critique of James, this book does not shy away from highlighting potential weakness or challenges to his thought.
By the books end, readers should have a solid grasp of basic Jamesian concepts, including what he meant by radical empiricism, pluralism, experience (especially the stream of thought), attention, freedom, truth, reality, God, rational belief, moral claims, moral solitude, consciousness, sentiment (how it drives reason), mysticism, and pragmatism. Furthermore, they should understand the interconnections among these concepts and the objections or alternatives to them (e.g., monism, determinism, reductionism, idealism, rationalism, etc.).

Reviews

Absolutely novel. Matt J. Rossano is a very polished writer with an excellent 'voice' that will speak to both scholarly academics as well as relatively untutored students. In this book, William James has conversations with other significant thinkers as a vehicle for covering important ideas in Philosophy and Psychology, like a set of Socratic dialogs but set in a more modern era. This would be a great book for an honors, capstone, or special topics course, or even a historically-oriented, American-focused course, at the graduate or undergraduate level for Psychology or Philosophy. -- Tracy B. Henley, Texas A&M UniversityCommerce
Good Counsel offers an accessible introduction to the themes of Jamess thinking. Each chapter presents an innovative dialogic format, which reflects Jamess own dialogic writing style and it has something in common with Jamess own preference for what he called 'ambulatory' over 'saltatory' conceptions of knowledge. -- David Evans, Dalhousie University; author of Understanding James, Understanding Modernism

Author Bio

Matt J. Rossano is a retired Professor of Psychology. For more than thirty years, he taught at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is an evolutionary psychologist who has authored or co-authored scores of scholarly papers, book chapters, commentaries, reviews, and five previous books. His work has appeared in highly respected scholarly journals such as: Psychological Bulletin, Cognition, Current Anthropology, PaleoAnthropology, and Cambridge Archeological Journal; as well as more popular outlets such as: Mens Health, New Scientist, The Huffington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and Psychology Today. He is the author of several previous books including: Supernatural selection: How religion evolved (2010, Oxford University Press); Mortal rituals: What the story of the Andes survivors tells us about human evolution (2013, Columbia University Press); and Ritual in human evolution and religion: Psychological and ritual resources (2020, Routledge). He is also co-editor (and chapter author) on two recent volumes on psychology and cognitive archaeology (both published by Routledge).