William James Studies was launched a little over a year ago. We are pleased with the response it has generated so far. On average the journal receives 36 “visits” daily. We use “visits” as a way to measure access to the site, rather than the more common “hits,” because it records only an individual’s initial access of the site and not each time that individual accesses a page. We find the number of visits to the site to be a more accurate—that is, less inflated—measure of how much interest the journal is generating. While 36 visits a day is certainly a good start, we expect the number of visits to continue to increase as more issues become available. We are also pleased by the level of interest in the journal from individuals outside of the United States. So far we have recorded visits from over 40 countries.
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This issue continues our practice of featuring addresses by past presidents of the William James Society, presented at annual meetings of the American Philosophical Association: John J. McDermott’s history of the critical editions The Works of William James and The Correspondence of William James and William Gavin’s “‘Problem’ vs. ‘Trouble’: James, Kafka, Dostoevsky and “The Will to Believe.” We also offer articles by Kristin Boudreau, Mathew Foust, Sami Pihlström, and Charles Hobbes that in their own ways commemorate the centennial of the publication of James’s Pragmatism. In addition, we include essays by Todd Lekan, Michael Slater and Henry Samuel Levinson that focus on other aspects of James’s work. We are especially pleased to be able to provide book reviews for the first time.
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As always, we are grateful to Paul Arroyo for his help in getting this issue out and to the University of Illinois Press for housing the journal. We particularly want to express our gratitude to our reviewers for their timely review of submissions and to all those who submitted essays to the journal. We continue to be impressed by the quality of submissions, and we hope that you will enjoy reading the essays in this issue as much as we have. We look forward to receiving submissions to future issues.
William James Studies is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing high quality, scholarly articles related to the life, work and influence of William James.
