Abstract

This is a very bold and exciting book that flies in the face of the standard interpretation of James’s philosophy as devoid of any systematic unity. Its thesis is that all of James’s writings from 1895 to the end of his life in 1910 are unified by his doctrine of radical empiricism. There is a narrow and broad use of “radical empiricism” in James’s writings. In its narrow sense it is comprised of a methodological postulate that restricts philosophers to the use of empirically vouchsafed terms and a phenomenological claim that relations are just as much directly given in experience as are sensible properties. Lamberth follows the broader use which includes these two tenets plus the doctrine of pure experience, along with other doctrines that James did not explicitly include, most notably pragmatism and panpsychism. According to Lamberth.