The Radical Empiricism of William James (review)

280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY makes rewarding reading. White thinks there is tension in Peirce's thought between his careful, scientific thinking, represented in his early, sober version of the pragmatic criterion, and his extremely speculative metaphysics. The later realistic version of the criterion, according to White, is what gave rise to, or made possible, his speculative ventures. However, it must be pointed out that rightly or wrongly Peirce thought that his metaphysical views of tychism, and so on, do have testable, empirical consequences. This question, of course, is extremely complex and much is being written about it currently. Finally, the discussion of whether James anticipated the rejection of a firm distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions, as indicated previously, is worth close study. White points out in passing that Peirce accused Wright of leading James astray in this respect and observes that Wright was led in this direction by J. S. Mill. Indirectly then White is committing himself to the view that Mill is a precursor of Quine's and his own rejection of the distinction. This line of thought is interesting. It would be good to see this point developed in great detail elsewhere (it would have been out of place in the present volume). It may have been done already, but I do not know where. White's approach to the history of American philosophy in general is an important one, and he has done his usual good job of imparting a compelling quality to philosophical ideas and of getting to the heart of crucial issues. EDWARD n. MADDEN State University of New York at Buffalo The Radical Empiricism o/ William James. By John Wild. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969) Constructive philosophical work of great importance is often done by reexamining the thought of a philosopher from an earlier generation. John Wild's sympathetic, yet critical, treatment of the philosophy of William James is an excellent illustration of this fact. Wild's special historical interest is to show that James's broadly empirical approach to philosophy led him to insights which make an important contribution to the general phenomenological movement. Through his detailed exposition of all of James's work, from the early essays (e.g., "The Sentiment of Rationality" and "Reflex Action and Theism") and The Principles o/ Psychology to the later writings on pragmatism and radical empiricism, Wild clearly demonstrates that James both shared and anticipated many views held by phenomenologically oriented thinkers "who, about the turn of the century, became profoundly dissatisfied with the abstractness and artificiality of traditional, systematic philosophy, and turned to concrete experience and its real structures for firmer guidance" (p. 414). On the other hand, Wild's study of James is not merely historical scholarship. He believes that James's thought contains living insights that are important for us to appropriate now. As a result, his interpretation of James's views on knowledge, freedom, meaning, truth, etc., take the reader on a genuinely philosophical journey. Through an encounter with both James and Wild, the reader is led to consider almost every important philosophical question, and he is presented with ideas that can be helpful in working out positive solutions of his own. To illustrate these latter points, consider one of the important themes which Wild develops in his interpretation of James. Recent phenomenology emphasizes that the conceptual frameworks, theories, and language that we use in organizing our experience BOOK REVIEWS 281 are not the primordial factors of our lives. There is a more basic dimension of experience--prereflexive, preconceptual, and prelinguistic--which is characterized by feeling, "vagueness, and ambiguity, but which is also a direct cognitive access to existence. That is, this primordial level of our experience gives us genuine knowledge of reality. Conceptual and theoretical clarification may be required to bring this awarehess to light and to free it from confusion, but knowledge is not restricted to a conceptual or linguistic level, as many philosophers have argued. Knowledge is not only grounded in direct perception and feeling, but in one of its forms it exists there as well. A view similar to this intriguing thesis is articulated and defended by James, and Wild takes it to be...