References
- The many books and articles on James from the perspective of the European phenomenological tradition, such as Bruce Wilshire's William James and Phenomenology: A Study of the Principles of Psychology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), are an exception. But although they do not reduce all issues of method by the classic American philosophers to the pragmatic method, they presuppose a Husserlian or Heideggerian model of phenomenology and investigate James's writings (usually restricted to Principles) insofar as these anticipate or fail to sufficiently develop the prescribed phenomenological model. By contrast I am trying to reconstruct James's methodology of concrete experience insofar as it structures the whole range of his investigations and on its own terms. Rather than looking over my shoulder to see how it measures up to later models of phenomenology, I am concerned to recover its original formulation and develop it further so that its strengths and weaknesses as a historically earlier and alternative phenomenological paradigm can become available for contemporary assessment.
- William James, The Principles of Psychology, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, orig. 1890), vol. II, 1280. Abbreviated in the text as PP.
- Hare and Chakrabarti argue that James was an ‘epistemological realist’ and that it is “systematically misleading, if not altogether false” to claim that he is a ‘phenomenalist’ (231–232). They do say that this is not the same as phenomenology but their characterization of epistemological realism also puts it at odds with their definition of phenomenology as “a method of descriptive analysis of subjective processes without any claims as to what does or does not exist” (232–233, n4). “The Development of William James's Epistemological Realism,” Maurice Wohlgelernter, ed., History, Religion, and Spiritual Democracy (New York: Columbia, 1980), 231–245.
- For the crisis of confidence in philosophy brought on by the increasing success of science see, for Europe, Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) and Gerard Radnitzky, Contemporary Schools of Metascience (New York: Humanities Press, 1970) and for America see Daniel J. Wilson, “Science and the Crisis of Confidence in American Philosophy,” Trans. C.S. Peirce Soc., 23 (Spring, 1987), 235–262.
- In his privately bound collection of Hodgson's essays James marked this sentence from Hodgson, “Common-Sense Philosophies,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. I, no. 2, (1888), 25. This is now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, no. WJ 539.19, p. 21. See also my “Hodgson's Influence on James's Organization of Experience,” Pragmatism Considers Phenomenology, Robert Corrington, Carl Hausman, and Thomas M. Seebohm, eds., (Washington, D.C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1987), 187–202.
- William James, The Meaning of Truth, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 80, 46. Abbreviated in the text as MT.
- Quoted in H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1981), 2nd ed., 520.
- Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale, 1986), 298–299.
- William James, Pragmatism, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 95–113. Abbreviated in the text as Prag.
- William James, Some Problems in Philosophy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 108. Abbreviated in the text as SPP.
- “The whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like ‘the Latin Language’ or ‘the Law'…Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law” (Prag, 116).
- William R. Woodward says that the “fruitful tension” between James's emphasizing the physiological foundation of the problem of freedom and determinism and also insisting on the need for existential choice “was lost when behaviorists developed one side of James’ theory of action and existentialists pursued the other.” “Introduction,” William James, Essays in Psychology, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1983), xxxvii.
- See my “The Philosopher's ‘License’: William James and Common Sense,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 19 (Summer, 1983), 273–290.
- Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1935), vol. II, 369.
- Nicholas Rescher. Methodological Pragmatism (New York: New York Univ., 1977)
- Perry, Thought, II, 538.
- This crisis is explained in William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 94–97.
- See chapter six, Pragmatism, 95–113, and The Meaning of Truth, 44–60, 154–159.
- Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1982), 173–4. For second quote see Ellen Kappy Suckiel, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James (Notre Dame, Notre Dame, 1982), 12. See also Myers, 96–97.
- Ralph Barton Perry, “Preface,” William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969 [1920]), ix.
- William James, The Will to Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 73.
- “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built” (PP, I, 640).
- Edward H. Madden, in his introduction to The Will to Believe, cannot make sense of James's claim in the Preface that his concept of radical empiricism is the thread that binds the essays together and thinks that “the detailed analyses of pure experience in Essays in Radical Empiricism are simply irrelevant to the claims made in The Will to Believe” (xi-xii). The explanation just given ties the two together and makes it difficult, in turn, to understand how the empiricists whom Madden says “accept the general thesis of radical empiricism, that relations are as epistemically irreducible as the elements of classic British empiricism” but “nevertheless totally reject James's fideism” can do so in light of James's explanation that such relations can only become cognitively available through the focalized attention of selective interest. It is this same operation that he argues in Principles is the very definition of the freedom that grounds morality (PP, II, 1166). For James's arguments that it is impossible to say what the world is apart from our beliefs and values, see WB, 54, 165ff, 224.
- For the larger project of which Principles is the first step, see my “On the Metaphysical Foundations of Scientific Psychology,” The Philosophical Psychology of William James, Michael H. DeArmey and Stephen Skousgaard, eds., (Washington, D. C.: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, 1986), 57–72.
- Perry, Thought, II, 475.
- Perry, Thought, II, 475–476.