Essays in Radical Empiricism
Assigned by 1 of the 9 reading lists
Twelve essays James published in journals in 1904 and 1905 and planned as a book, collected after his death by Ralph Barton Perry. The opening essay asks whether consciousness exists and answers that it is a function, not an entity. The others develop a metaphysics of pure experience, in which mind and matter are the same stuff related in different ways, relations are as directly experienced as the things they relate, and the world is a pluralistic universe rather than a block, held together by the connections that experience itself supplies rather than by any substance underneath.
We recommendEssays in Radical EmpiricismDover, 2003A cheap complete reprint of the 1912 collection; the Harvard critical edition is the scholarly text.
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- Written
- 1904-1905 (collected 1912)
- Form
- Treatise
- Language
- English
- Length
- Medium · 140 pp120 to 300 pages
- Difficulty
- Difficult4 of 5 for a first-year reader
Why it's on the list
Asking whether consciousness exists, and answering that it is a function rather than an entity, struck at the assumption shared by Descartes and his critics alike that there is a mental stuff set over against the physical, and opened the way to every later attempt to treat mind and matter as two arrangements of one thing. Proposing that the world is made of pure experience, neither mental nor physical until it is taken up in one context or another, gave the twentieth century its first neutral monism, which Russell adopted and which still shapes the philosophy of mind. Insisting that relations are as directly experienced as the things they relate, that the conjunctions and transitions between experiences are themselves felt, answered Hume's atomism from within empiricism and made the radical empiricism radical. Concluding that the universe is pluralistic rather than a block, held together by the connections experience supplies and never finished, gave James's pragmatism the metaphysics it had lacked and the open universe that his ethics required.
Key themes
- Knowledge and truth
- Insisting that relations are as directly experienced as the things they relate answered Hume's atomism from within empiricism and made the radical empiricism radical.
- The self and identity
- Asking whether consciousness exists, and answering that it is a function rather than an entity, struck at the assumption that there is a mental stuff set over against the physical.
- Nature and the cosmos
- The world is made of pure experience, neither mental nor physical until taken up in one context or another, and the universe is pluralistic rather than a block.
- Science and method
- The method is to admit into philosophy only what is experienced, and to exclude nothing that is, which lets relations in and substances out.
Which edition to read
Our pick
Essays in Radical Empiricism
Dover, 2003
A cheap complete reprint of the 1912 collection; the Harvard critical edition is the scholarly text.
Amazon: the Dover edition, opens in a new tabBookshop.org: the Dover edition, opens in a new tab
Overview
About one hundred and forty pages, twelve essays James published in journals in 1904 and 1905 and planned as a book, collected in 1912 after his death by Ralph Barton Perry. The opening essay asks whether consciousness exists and answers that it is a function, not an entity.
The others develop a metaphysics of pure experience, in which mind and matter are the same stuff related in different ways, relations are as directly experienced as the things they relate, and the world is a pluralistic universe rather than a block.
What happens
Does consciousness exist? James denies that consciousness is an entity or stuff, and argues that the same experience, a room for instance, is counted as physical when taken with the history of the house and as mental when taken with the history of the person, the difference lying in the relations and not in the material.
A world of pure experience. Radical empiricism admits into philosophy only what is experienced and excludes nothing that is, and since relations are experienced, the connective tissue of the world is given directly and no transcendental glue is needed.
The thing and its relations. James answers the objection that the same experience cannot be in two places by showing that a thing’s relations to other things are what it is in each context, and that the paradox is only verbal.
How two minds can know one thing. He argues that two minds share an object when their experiences terminate in the same experience, and that the common world is built up from such terminations rather than assumed beneath them.
Activity and the experience of it. The feeling of effort and the experience of causation are real parts of experience and not illusions, and the question of whether we are really active is one that experience itself has to answer.
Pluralism. The closing essays defend a universe that is many and growing, held together by the connections experience supplies and never completed, against the monism of the absolute idealists, and prepare the ground for A Pluralistic Universe.
How to read it
Read the opening essay’s denial of consciousness as a denial of a stuff rather than of experience, and notice that James is trying to keep everything we feel while dropping the entity that was supposed to feel it.
Pay close attention to the claim that relations are experienced, and to how it answers Hume from within empiricism rather than from outside it.
Notice the example of the room, in the house and in the biography at once, and use it to understand what pure experience means before the term becomes abstract.
Consider the pluralistic universe of the closing essays, and ask what the metaphysics gives to the pragmatism and the ethics of the will to believe.
Read these essays alongside Russell’s Analysis of Mind to see the neutral monism James proposed taken up by a philosopher of a very different temperament, and what changed in the taking.
Questions it raises
- If consciousness is a function and not an entity, what is it that performs the function, and has James answered the question or renamed it?
- Can the same experience really be both mental and physical depending on its relations, and does the example of the room prove it or only make it vivid?
- Are relations directly experienced, as James claims against Hume, and how would one show that the feeling of because is not an inference?
- What does a pluralistic universe, held together piecemeal and never finished, do to the idea of truth, and does it leave room for the truth pragmatism needs?
- Why did James leave these essays uncollected, and does the book Perry made from them say what James would have said?
- What did the neutral monism James proposed become in Russell and later philosophy of mind, and does the current interest in it vindicate him?
Highlights
Consciousness, James argues, is the name of a nonentity; there is no aboriginal stuff or quality of being contrasted with that of which material objects are made, but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and that function is knowing.
Close paraphrase of the collection's most famous claim.
The world is made of pure experience, a single stuff that counts as mind when taken in one set of relations and as matter when taken in another, the same room being at once in the physical world and in a personal biography.
Paraphrase of the neutral monism the essays develop.
Relations are as directly experienced as the things they relate: the conjunctions, the withs and nexts and becauses, are felt in the stream of experience, and the universe they connect is pluralistic, held together piecemeal and never finished.
Paraphrase of the doctrine that makes the empiricism radical.
