Ron: Ok, I'm still not sure I understand, either James, like the sensory empiricists, asserts that percepts are primary or he's not. If he is, then most of what he wrote is a refinement of sensory empiricism and can not or would not suit the term he chose, that of a "Radical" empiricism and would not correspond with the body of his arguements leveled at sensory empiricism.
I think what he points to is the idea that sensory empiricism IS in fact a kind of rationalism, this is the rationalism he builds his arguement against in his essays on radical empiricism. So you are correct, he does rail against rationalism, but its the rationalism of sensory empiricism. [Krimel] James is not writing "against" any kind of empiricists. He is writing "against" rationalism. In doing so he points to a certain defect in the prevailing empiricist view and seeks to correct it. He thinks this correction will suffice to dispense with whatever remains of idealism. He says for example: "The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes." Or this: "For rationalistic writers conceptual knowledge was not only the more noble knowledge, but it originated independently of all perceptual particulars. Such concepts as God, perfection, eternity, infinity, immutability, identity, absolute beauty, truth, justice, necessity, freedom, duty, worth, etc., and the part they play in our mind, are, it was supposed, impossible to explain as results of practical experience. The empiricist view, and probably the true view, is that they do result from practical experience." He is not saying that concepts aren't useful but if it doesn't tie back to perception somehow, so what? "It is possible therefore, to join the rationalists in allowing conceptual knowledge to be self-sufficing, while at the same time one joins the empiricists in maintaining that the full value of such knowledge is got only by combining it with perceptual reality again." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
