Quote of the Day (William James, on Pragmatists)

“A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.”— American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

Quote of the Day (William James, on What We Don’t Believe)

“As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use."—William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)