scholarly journals The Problem of Experience in E. Voegelin’s Philosophy

Problemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dovydas Caturianas
Keyword(s):  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Positive Meaning ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
Late Works

The paper deals with the problem of E. Voegelin’s notion of experience: the positive meaning of this concept is not specified in any of the author’s works. Based on W. James’s ‘‘Essay on Radical Empiricism” and Voegelin’s late works, it is shown that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness is rooted in James‘s concept of “pure experience”, which essentially sought to close the epistemological chasm between subject and object, phenomena and noumena. According to this notion, mental and physical, subjective and objective realities are merely derivative aspects of a certain primordial pure experience, which is more elementary and fundamental than the two former aspects of reality. Finally, the article exposes other implications of this connection with James’s philosophy for E. Voegelin’s theory of consciousness.

scholarly journals The Problem of Experience in E. Voegelin’s Philosophy

Problemos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dovydas Caturianas
Keyword(s):  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Positive Meaning ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
Late Works

The paper deals with the problem of E. Voegelin’s notion of experience: the positive meaning of this concept is not specified in any of the author’s works. Based on W. James’s ‘‘Essay on Radical Empiricism” and Voegelin’s late works, it is shown that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness is rooted in James‘s concept of “pure experience”, which essentially sought to close the epistemological chasm between subject and object, phenomena and noumena. According to this notion, mental and physical, subjective and objective realities are merely derivative aspects of a certain primordial pure experience, which is more elementary and fundamental than the two former aspects of reality. Finally, the article exposes other implications of this connection with James’s philosophy for E. Voegelin’s theory of consciousness.

James and Hume

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yumiko Inukai
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Discrete Elements ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
The World ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
The Subject

James contends that the rejection of conjunctive relations in experience leads Hume to the empirically groundless notion of discrete elements of experience, which James takes as the critical point that differentiates his empiricism from Hume’s. In this chapter, I argue that James is not right about this: Hume not only allows but employs experienced conjunctive relations in his explanations for the generation of our naturally held beliefs about the self and the world. There are indeed striking similarities between their accounts: they both use the relations of resemblance, temporal continuity, constancy, coherence, and regularity, and the self. Also, objects are constructed out of basic elements in their systems—pure experience and perceptions, respectively. Although collapsing the inner and outer worlds of the subject and object into one world (of pure experience for James and of perceptions for Hume) may seem unintuitive, this is exactly what allows them to preserve our ordinary sense of our experiences of objects.

The Beginning of Radical Empiricism

Empiricisms ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 289-305
Author(s):  
Barry Allen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Pure Experience

William James introduced the expression “radical empiricism.” The chapter explains what was supposed to make empiricism radical, and why James thought that was worth trying to do. That requires explaining the connection between radical empiricism and other themes in James’s work, including pluralism and the idea of pure experience. His work belongs to an effort from the latter nineteenth century to make empiricism more consistently empirical by overcoming the legacy of Ockham and nominalism, and it is this anti-nominalist animus that radicalizes James’s empiricism.

Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. Maraldo
Keyword(s):  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
Political Essays ◽  
Nishida Kitaro

Considered Japan’s first original modern philosopher, Nishida not only transmitted Western philosophical problems to his contemporaries but also used Buddhist philosophy and his own methods to subvert the basis of traditional dichotomies and propose novel integrations. His developmental philosophy began with the notion of unitary or pure experience before the split between subject and object. It developed to challenge other traditional opposites such as intuition and reflection, fact and value, art and morality, individual and universal, and relative and absolute. In its organic development, Nishida’s philosophy reacted to critiques that it neglected the social dimension with political essays that sometimes aligned it with Japanese imperialism. It culminated in the ‘logic of place’, a form of thinking that would do justice to the contradictory world of human actions.

James’s Radical Empiricism: Sensation and Pure Experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
The World ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
The Law ◽  
Nomic Structure ◽  
The Mind

This chapter examines the concept of sensation in William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). Like empiricists before him, James thought that the contents of the mind are built up from sensations; this is the sensationalism of the Principles. But for him, this interior location is secondary to sensation’s first location, which is exterior to the mind. In James’s psychology, the interiority and exteriority of sensations are differentiated by their role in the economy of the mind. In his radically empiricist metaphysics, the economy of the mind will become the economy of the world. The law-governed dualism of mind and body persists, even if these categories are anachronistic from a metaphysical viewpoint. The world of pure experience retains the nomic structure introduced in the Principles, and as such it is not autonomous from the physical. The physical is rendered pure-experiential, but its relationship to the mental, also now rendered pure-experiential, remains governed by scientific law. The chapter then considers how, in the Principles, James’s sensationalism is tied to his cerebralism.

Motivating Metaphysics: From Radical Empiricism to Process

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-38
Author(s):  
Russell J. Duvernoy
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Pure Experience

This chapter explores motivations for speculative thinking in terms of the respective risks of certainty and creativity. Following their interests in thinking conditions of novelty and creativity, both Whitehead and Deleuze challenge Kantian meta-philosophical criteria that privilege apodictic certainty. The chapter then explores how such speculative thinking has historical roots in William James’ radical empiricism and especially the concept of pure experience. It shows how Whitehead’s diagnosis of the “bifurcation of nature” arising out of inconsistent commitments to metaphysical materialism and epistemic empiricism is refigured through radical empiricism. Finally, it raises the possibility of a realism that does not presume the necessary locus of a constituted metaphysical subject.

scholarly journals “Pure Experience” and the Problem of Order in the Early Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arūnas Gelūnas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Systematic Character ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
Nishida Kitaro

The article focuses on the analysis of “pure experience” (junsui keiken), one of the key concepts in the early philosophy of Nishida Kitarō, major Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, as reflected in his first important book An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyu). Notwithstanding its Zen Buddhist origin, Nishidean “pure experience” bears strong similarities with the philosophical perspectives of such “psychologically oriented” western thinkers as Wil/iam James and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Nishida, being in constant dialogue and discussion with the western philosophical tradition, was in constant search of the “logic of the East” as different from that of the West. In contrast to a classical western rationalist position treating perceptive experience as a passive, nebulous and non-discriminating state of consciousness, and reflection as active and creative, Nishida argues for a “systematic character of consciousness” from the very start, “when there is still no subject and object”. Therefore it seems productive for the purposes of the present article to link the concept of “pure experience” to one of the most fundamental philosophical categories, to that of order. For; we strongly believe, it is here that the obvious differences between Nishida and his western counterparts is revealed, bringing him close, however; to the “artistic standpoints” of such western authors as Nietzsche and the above mentioned French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty.

Paradoxes of Pure Experience: From the Radical to the Transcendental with James and Deleuze

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Russell J Duvernoy
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Transcendental Empiricism ◽  
Pure Experience ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This paper investigates the relationship between James’ radical empiricism and Deleuze’s study of the genesis of sense without a transcendental subject as necessary condition. It shows that James’ concept of pure experience changes the form of relation between mind and world. Considering how to conceptualize experience without a fixed metaphysical or transcendental subject destabilizes ontological identity, leads to a founding conceptual divergence from traditional phenomenology, and motivates Deleuze’s efforts towards transcendental empiricism. The paper reads Deleuze’s work on the genesis of sense in this context, arguing that one important result is an ontological pluralism. Such pluralism is crucial in considering how meaning can be made between and across differences and is in keeping with radical empiricism’s openness to life’s complexity.

Subject and object.

1978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nini Praetorius
Keyword(s):  
Subject And Object
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document