William James

William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders of functional psychology and the leading exponent of pragmatism. The brother of the novelist Henry James, he spent his career at Harvard, where he established one of the first psychology laboratories in the United States. His major works — The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907) — defined the distinctively American contribution to modern philosophy and shaped how psychology developed as a discipline.