In his famous lectures at Oxford University in 1908 and 1909, William James made a sustained and eloquent case against absolute idealism and intellectualism in philosophy. Ever since Socrates and Plato, the philosophy of the absolute had held sway-the emphasis on essence at the expense of concrete appearance, the insistence on a coherent universe, abstract, timeless, finished, enclosed in its totality. James's own thinking led him to renounce monistic idealism and the intellectualization of all "truth." Going against the grain of entrenched philosophy, James argues in A Pluralistic Universe...