Paul J. Croce

When I first read William James’s essay “The Will to Believe” (1896), I thought, “That’s a clever way to address secular and scientific challenges to religion and spirituality. And I then thought, “I wonder how he developed those ideas?” From that question, I have written two books, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), which is about the circles of influence around young James (his family, his teachers, his friends) and the uncertainties that began to circulate around science and religion in the mid-nineteenth century; and Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2017), about James’s responses to those influences and those issues. I discovered that in the formative years of his youth adulthood, with painful struggles and deep learning, his period of “weakness [and]…exhilaration” prodded his development of a “decisive ambivalence,” which would establish the basis of many connecting threads in his far-flung life work in psychology, philosophy, religious studies, social commentary, and more. During these years, he developed his commitment to mediating contrasting points of view, and to finding the relation of material and immaterial dimensions of life, such as science and religion, body and mind, and objective and subjective experiences.

While researching and musing on James, I have been teaching American cultural and intellectual history at Stetson University in DeLand, FL. As with James, I am drawn to teaching about topics that generate deep values debate (aka, topics your grandparents tell you not to bring up at the dinner table): on science and religion, war and peace, environmental and health care debates, political ideologies, and the 1960s as the first years of our times. I encourage students to learn from people and ideas they disagree with. I’ve also served as Chair of the Forum for History of Human Science and President of the William James Society. In cooperation with Harvard’s Houghton Library, I organized an international conference on the hundredth anniversary of his death in 1910 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wjsymposium/). And my article, “Reaching Beyond Uncle William,” History of Psychology (2010) provides an overview of a century of William James in theory and in life; it received the Best Article Award from the American Psychological Association, Division 26, History of Psychology.

With inspiration from public intellectual James, I also write essays for The Public Classroom, https://pubclassroom.com and the Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-j-croce/.