The Unity of William James's Thought (review)

Wesley Cooper's book on William James ought to be considered and reviewed from two different perspectives: first, as a contribution to the ongoing understanding of James's work and its implications for future development in the classical tradition in American philosophy; and second, as an analytical analysis of some of James's ideas as they pertain to specific epistemic issues occupying analytical philosophy for over a century. Viewed through the former lens, the book fails to explain or locate James's developing understanding in the context of the classical American tradition. In fact, the book makes every attempt to ignore the pragmatic tradition in American thought and views James's ideas as isolated linguistic propositions to be "duly anatomized."

With regards to the latter, Cooper does a masterful job of presenting the various positions in the neo-pragmatic movement regarding James's writings on consciousness, mind-body, truth, personal identity, and the nature of reality. Working within the framework of nineteenth- and twentieth-century analytical philosophy and the issues framing its philosophy of mind, Cooper's argument can be put as follows: real philosophy has metaphysical aspirations that are obviously at odds with pragmatism, radical empiricism, and post-modernism's interpretation of James. Setting aside these non-metaphysical interpreters of James, some serious commentators in the logical positivist's tradition made serious attempts to reconstruct and offer James's work as a genuine metaphysical alternative for contemporary considerations.

These commentators, however, failed to see the consistency and logical implications in James's work due to their insistence on reading James as a strict naturalist and realist. In fact, despite James's own biographical insistence on overcoming his dualism, Cooper argues that it is only through reconstructing James as a strict Kantian-dualist that one can grasp the unity in the diverse writings and positions of his work. Cooper further suggests that it was James's pre-occupation with radical empiricism that mostly compromised his work, and the work of his commentators. As such, Cooper's unifying thesis claims to not only have saved James's work from bad commentators, but also from himself and a bad philosophical vision with no serious metaphysical aspirations.

Cooper struggles with, as well as rejects, some past and present interpretations of James as a neutral monist (A.J. Ayer), a naturalist (J. Flanagan), a panpsychist (Marcus Ford), and a phenomenologist (Bruce Wilshire), as well as a score of related issues in the philosophy of mind. He also identifies seven obstacles in James's work that need to be theoretically resolved in order to arrive at a systematic understanding of James's work as a serious foundation for a "constructive" metaphysical theory. The identified obstacles, of course, are highly question begging and thus highly revealing. Consider the first and fifth obstacles: the apparent fundamentality of the physical world (no duality) and James's own pragmatism (which is at odds with philosophy's metaphysical aspirations). In other words, if James can be read as holding metaphysically to a trans-empirical reality and as giving up his naturalism and view of experience, then his work can be seen as a serious challenge to contemporary metaphysical work.

According to Cooper, the obstacles, as well as previous interpretations of James, failed to unify his thoughts since they overlook the uncompromising dualism in James's thought. Cooper writes, "There is a theoretical unity to James's writings. [It is] a view of his system as having two-levels, empirical and metaphysical, [that] helps bring this unity into clear relief"(7). On the physical level, James is indeed a naturalist and a pragmatist about truth and reality, etc., [d1]while on the metaphysical level, he is committed to objectivity and permanency. James's commitment to the metaphysical level, furthermore, is to be found in his Principles of Psychology and in particular...