James: Radical Empiricism

Zitat

„I give the name of ‚radical empiricism‘ to my Weltanschauung. Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction.“ (p. 37) #James #RadicalEmpiricism #Weltanschauung

James: Philosophic Knowledge

Zitat

„No philosophic knowledge of the general nature and constitution of tendencies, or of the relation of larger to smaller ones, can help us to predict which of all the various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are likeliest to prevail.“ (p. 187) #James #knowledge

James: The Physical World

„In the physical world we make with impunity the assumption that one and the same material object can figure in an indefinitely large number of different processes at once.“ (p. 129) #James #PhysicalWorld

James: Experience in its Immediacy

Zitat

„Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent. The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes. Its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties. They are not intellectual contradictions.“ (p. 94) #James #Experience

Thoughts and Things

Zitat

„»Thoughts« and »things« are names for two sorts of object, which common sense will always find contrasted and will always practically oppose to each other.“ (p. 5) #WilliamJames #CommonSense #Empiricism