Inbox: - Some of the essays in The Will to Believe, especially ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’, show James at his best. - The Varieties, esp lectures - Nietzsche and James: A Pragmatist Hermeneutics. Paper looks good. - Is life worth living - How to make our ideas clear - Kaag Sick Souls and Healthy Minds https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691192161/sick-souls-healthy-mind - Read reviews - Sounds like [[=Richard Rorty]] noticed the [[=Nietzsche]] connection. - William James on habit: https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/tt8.html With such relations between religion and happiness, it is perhaps not surprising that men come to regard the happiness which a religious belief affords as a proof of its truth. If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true — such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the “immediate inferences” of the religious logic used by ordinary men. ## Cheryl Misak on James (Cambridge Pragmatists) James ignited the philosophical rage of the hard-headed realists Russell and Moore by seeming to suggest in his ‘The Will to Believe’ and ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’ that if the hypothesis of God’s existence makes one’s life more bearable, then that is a kind of evidence that God exists.