Abstract

William James described his system as “too much like an arch built only on one side.” Donald Crosby’s project is to chart the dimensions of the arch, repair it in certain places, and continue its construction. He endorses a Jamesian empiricism according to which “pure experience” is the ultimate context within which we come to judgments about reality, but he resists James’s allusions to pure experience as the stuff from which the world is made. The metaphysical question is answered by “radical materialism,” Crosby’s label for his revision of James’s pluralism.James insisted that experience is prior to the discriminations that we find within in it. Most people, for example, must be taught to listen for...