William James's Pragmatic Theory of Truth

William James (1842–1910), a Harvard professor of physiology, psychology, and eventually philosophy, gave pragmatism its widest public audience. In a landmark address at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 1898, titled "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," James publicly credited Peirce with originating the pragmatic method some two decades earlier, an acknowledgment that first drew wide philosophical attention to Peirce's largely scattered and unpublished 1870s writings. James then developed the doctrine at length in the lectures collected as Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), delivered first at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December 1906 and repeated at Columbia University in January 1907, a book that became a bestseller and made "pragmatism" a household term in American intellectual life.