Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Hovering around ...

... William James part 8: Agnosticism and pragmatic pluralism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In the Varieties, he had found that the higher religious emotions – those associated with profound conversions and saintly lives – commonly give rise to a monist view of ultimate reality. (There is an all, and it is One.) But he wondered about such absolutism. What he disliked about it was its reifying tendency. He feared that the abstract language it fosters forgets the "thickness of reality". He wanted a philosophy that rested on experience, not logic, because life exceeds logic. In this sense, he was an empiricist, and a "radical empiricist" to boot – as in "rooted". He believed our experiences are rooted in reality, for all that we will misunderstand what's real, and get it wrong.

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