The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

If William James (the philosopher) could come back to visit William James (the web site), I think that he would be pleased. Frank Pajares’s W. J. (the site) is perhaps best described as "state of the art," but the phrase "award winning" also comes to mind. His efforts have earned high marks from reviewers at Philosopher’s Web Magazine, Infoseek, WebCrawler, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

Pajares, who received his Ph. D. from the University of Florida, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University. His photo and curriculum vitae can be found at www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/pajares.html.

Those who are not acquainted with the details of W. J.’s life may wish to begin their tour with the chronology, which comes complete with photos. There are also several biographical sketches, including the entire first chapter of Linda Simon’s excellent 1998 biography, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James.

Along with C. S. Peirce and John Dewey, William James was one of the founders of American Pragmatism. Born in 1842, he was three years younger than Peirce and seventeen years older than Dewey. In 1873 he began teaching physiology courses at Harvard and by 1875 he was offering courses in psychology. In 1878 he began a twelve year writing project that culminated in the publication of The Principles of Psychology. From 1885 until his retirement he taught courses in philosophy.

James’s "popular" lectures still claim a wide readership, and his technical works on psychology, religion, and philosophy still motivate research by specialists in those fields. In psychology he coined the term "stream of consciousness." He was also one of the inventors of the James-Lange theory of the emotions and one of the founders of functionalism. His work in the psychology of religion, acknowledged as groundbreaking at the time, remains a source of continuing insight. His version of pragmatism and what he termed his "radical empiricism" provide incisive analyses of some of the most recalcitrant philosophical problems of his day—and ours. James died in 1910, at the age of 68, only three years after his retirement from teaching.

Those who are already familiar with the details of James’s life may wish to go directly to his publications, which are presented on several levels. At the most basic level there are brief quotations that Pajares and others have selected from among their personal favorites. At the next level there is a collection of "essays, excerpts, and reviews." At the most sophisticated level researchers can find complete texts of The Will to Believe, Essays in Radical Empiricism, and The Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as a number of articles, such as "The Moral Equivalent of War" and "The Ph.D. Octopus." The Principles of Psychology and Talks to Teachers are still under construction.

Why work with The Principles of Psychology on a computer when it is available in several convenient print editions, including the award winning critical edition published by Harvard University Press? In a word, serious researchers may wish to do character-string searches to supplement their work with the critical edition. Among the site’s other research tools are bibliographies, reviews of works about James, excerpts from some of those works, and even some of James’s letters.

One of the strengths of W. J. (the site) is its generous collection of links. Some of them lead to other sites that focus on some aspect of James’s life and work. For those who want to get in touch with other W. J. fans, there are links to discussion groups, chat rooms, and other interactive venues. There are also links to sites devoted to James’s fellow Pragmatists C. S. Peirce, G. H. Mead, and John Dewey. (There is, I am pleased to report, a link to The Center for Dewey Studies).

At first I found W. J. (the site) a bit cluttered. Pajares’s love of .gifs and gewgaws appears to rival his affection for W. J. himself. But after browsing the site for a few minutes I got past the sparkle and on to the substance. The site is in fact well organized and designed to appeal to a wide variety of users, from grade school students to professional philosophers.

I do have a couple of reservations about the content of the site. For one thing, Pajares’s Powerpoint© models of the pragmatic theories of knowledge and truth are simplistic. Neither model seems to capture what are generally regarded as James’s and Dewey’s key innovations, including their instrumentalism and their anti-spectatorial view of knowledge-production. There is nothing that reflects James’s famous "focus and fringe" model of perception or his evocative treatment of the relationship between existence and abstraction. Nor is there anything that indicates that Dewey contextualized "facts" as "facts-of-a-case" and functionalized "ends" as "ends-in-view." Pajares’s model of the pragmatic theory of truth, which characterizes the relationship between ideas and reality as "agreement," seems more appropriate as a model of a correspondence theory of truth. There is none of the dynamism of James’s argument that "truth becomes true, is made true by events." Nor is there is anything of Dewey’s robust reconstruction of truth as "warranted assertibility."

My second reservation is really more of a generic complaint about the way in which web sites, including this one, tend to deal with source notes, editorial attribution, and textual commentary. In far too many cases there is little or no information about provenance of a text, a photo, or a sound file. With a few exceptions, such as Michael Nielsen’s edition of The Varieties of Religious Experience, one is just left guessing which editions of James’s work have been transcribed, who the editor of the HTML version was, what type of editorial procedures were employed, and so on. In other words, there is little or no information about who stands behind the authenticity and the integrity of the text. This is a particularly pressing problem for those of us who utilize web sites as teaching tools and urge our students to employ rigorous research techniques.

Even though William James (the site) handles these problems fairly well, the same cannot be said of some of its linked sites. This is a matter that will eventually have to be addressed by accomplished webmasters such as Pajares, who take their work seriously.