The objective of this paper is to elucidate the content of the argument presented by the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) in his “Is Life Worthliving?”, a lecture given in 1895 at the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association and published a few years later, in 1897, in the compilation entitled The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy [La voluntad de creer y otros ensayos en filosofía popular].
The characteristic claim of the group of thinkers who referred to themselves as “The Vienna Circle” and who formed the philosophical movement now known as “Logical Positivism” was their acceptance of the so-called verifiability principle. Put briefly, the verifiability principle is an empiricist criterion of meaning which says that only those statements that are verifiable by (i.e., logically deducible from) observational statements are cognitively meaningful. Statements that do not satisfy the verifiability principle were taken to be cognitively meaningless, statements that failed to describe any state of affairs.
