Abstract

This paper traces William James's famous “temperament thesis” according to which the philosophical stance that individuals take depends on their “temperaments.” It seeks to understand James's conception of temperament by locating James within a set of contemporary investigations that linked the sources of mental, and even higher, intellectual processes to the physiological and organic constitution of the individual. The paper argues that James understood temperament along the reflex-arc model and discusses the implications of that physiological account of temperament for James's overall conception of philosophy.