Abstract

Unlike classical empiricism, radical or transcendental empiricism poses, as the genetic basis of experience, a strictly impersonal plane. The “pure experience”, which lays at the heart of experience as a subject-object relation, is a transcendental radically desubjectified: it is an I that is an It, it is the abominable Neutral depicted by all the existentialist philosophies. The main thesis of radical empiricism, which characterizes the so-called “minor line” of modern philosophical thought, can be stated as follows: the immediate is the basis, that is to say, the cause, of the mediation. Radical empiricism rehabilitates then the notion of “intellectual intuition”, which coincides in the end, according to this perspective, with the real constitution of every “actual entity”.