Product Details
Essays in Radical Empiricism

Essays in Radical Empiricism
By William James

Price: $19.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

41 new or used available from $1.27

Average customer review:

Product Description

Essays in Radical Empiricism shows William James concerned with ultimate reality and moving toward a metaphysical system. The twelve essays originally appeared in journals between 1904 and 1906. James himself collected them to illustrate what he called “radical empiricism,” but this volume was not published until 1912, two years after his death. Included are such seminal essays as “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” The distinguished scholar and biographer Ralph Barton Perry, who edited this volume, called the essays essential to an understanding of James’s writings.

Radical empiricism takes us into a “world of pure experience.” In the essays, as introducer Ellen Kappy Suckiel notes, “James inquires into the metaphysically basic reality underlying the common-sense objects of our world. It is here that he defends his view that ‘experience’ is the sole and ultimate reality.” The essays deal with the applications of this “pure” or “neutral” experience: the general problem of relations, the role of feeling in experience, the nature of truth. Horace M. Kallen observed: “The fundamental point of these essays is that the relations between things, holding them together or separating them, are at least as real as the things themselves . . . and that no hidden substrata are necessary to account for the clashes and coherences of the world.”

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1088829 in Books
  • Published on: 1996-03-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 283 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal
Though not technically out of print, both of these titles are only available in hardcover editions selling for well over $100 apiece. These thrifty paperbacks make them much more accessible.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English, French

About the Author

Ellen Kappy Suckiel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James and Pragmatism and Religious Belief: A Study of the Philosophy of William James.

Customer Reviews

A Radical Excursion into Extreme Empiricism4
For the serious James scholar, this book is indispensible. For those of you who are not too familiar with Jame's ideas and their background, this book is probably too much - and too boring at that. Even for scholars of epistemology, this book can be rather frustrating. Originally written for his grad students at Harvard, the book lacks much in the way of context, and it is completely theoretical. Furthermore, it is filled with many untranslated passages, from German to Latin. I gave the book four stars because it could use some editing. This is the modern era: Latin is dead - even for the most serious philosopher - and German is no longer the language of Philosophy. The passages should be translated, and some of the more abstract essays should come with introductions. That said, the book is still a valuable contribution to empirical epistemology, laying out James of view of "radical empiricism" - where subjects and objects collide. Indeed, the book itself is a pure experience!