Abstract

This dissertation challenges the conventional interpretation of William James's individualism with a reading from the perspective of self/other relations. By reevaluating James's pragmatism, radical empiricism, doctrine of pure experience, and ethics, this thesis submits that James attempts to avoid the subject/other metaphysics of traditional philosophy that disregards the other. Each chapter takes up each of these topics, traditionally read from the perspective of epistemology and/or metaphysics, and highlights the implicit ethical themes motivating James's philosophical vision: his critique of determinism brings forth free will, a foundational question for ethics; his examination of the problem of perception disallows the appearance/reality, subject/object dichotomies; his distrust of idealism reveals his criticism of totalizing impulses; and his phenomenological description of experience offers an intersubjective reciprocity. These analyses coalesce into an account of James's pluralism as a relational ontology, best understood as a self-other relation that is inter-woven into the very fabric of existence. It is further demonstrated that James's novel conception of the expanded, processive self-other relation articulates an understanding of the finite processes of experience while remaining within an open horizon embracing of difference