W William James Lucas McGranahan Chicago, IL, USA Definition “Father of American psychology” who pioneered a functionalist and Darwinian approach to the field, popularized the philosophical school of American pragmatism, and influenced the modern study of religion. Introduction: Life and Works William James was born into an affluent family in New York City in 1842. He was the son of a minor philosophical author and brother of acclaimed American novelist Henry James. James studied to be a painter as a teenager but enrolled in Harvard’ s Lawrence Scientific School in 1861. He first studied chemistry but quickly switched to anatomy and physiology, which he used as a basis for studying medicine. His education included a naturalistic expedition to South America in 1865–1866, as well as a trip to study the new science of psychology in Germany in 1867–1868. James earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1869 and was hired by Harvard as Instructor in Physiology in 1872. He taught physiology, psychology, and phi- losophy at Harvard before retiring in 1907. As a Harvard faculty member James was instrumental in establishing psychology as a pro- fessional discipline in the United States. Known as the “father of American psychology,” James taught the country’ s first physiological psychol- ogy course in 1875, supervised its first disser- tation on a psychological topic in 1878, and published its first important treatise on psy- chology, The Principles of Psychology , in 1890. James’ s Principles is distinguished from prior psychologies by its “positivist” methodology, that is, its emphasis on observable correlations and eschewal of unobservable spiritual entities. This methodology, combined with its Darwinian perspective, makes it a distinctively modern psy- chological text. Along with its abridged version, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892/1985b), James’ s Principles was the key textbook in the field for a generation. Finally, James’ s psychology lab- oratory at Harvard, founded in 1875, was also argu- ably the country’ s first. (James’ s student G. Stanley Hall is sometimes given this honor for his later, but more advanced, laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.) Although The Principles of Psychology made James a respected academic, he was also a radical, eclectic, and popular thinker. During the 1890s, James distanced himself from laboratory psy- chology and championed the study of esoteric abnormal psychology and paranormal phenom- ena. At the same time, he increasingly lectured # Springer International Publishing AG 2018 J. Vonk, T.K. Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_463-2