ABSTRACT
In his first lecture on pragmatism, James writes that “the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” (P: 11). Such a provocative claim has generally been understood as a reductionist conception of philosophy. But James’s notion of temperament is far from being clear and unequivocal. The claim of this chapter is that James oscillates between three different uses of such notion, each corresponding to far-reaching thinking throughout his works: (1) Romantic expressivism: a philosophic system is the expression of a unique individual character; (2) scientific ethologism: the choice of a philosophy depends on the constitutional temperament or vital needs of the individual; and (3) logico-ethical dispositionalism (LED): philosophical doctrines embody and exhibit general dispositions of mind, intellectual and moral attitudes. This chapter attempts to explicit more firmly this tri-distinction by presenting, for each meaning, its origin in James’s intellectual context of his time, its presence and development within James’s works, the way it allows James to elaborate a specific conception of the nature of philosophy, and its internal difficulties and its tensions with the two other meanings. The chapter claims that LED is and should be taken as the superior meaning, the one the most in tune with pragmatism.
