Audiobook · read by volunteers
Essays in Radical Empiricism
William James (1842–1910)
Read by Carl Manchester, D.E. Wittkower, ML Cohen, frankjf, Kirsten Ferreri, Leon Mire, Hugh McGuire, Gesine, Ezwa · 15 chapters · 6 h 45
About the book
Does consciousness exist? William James's answer, in the opening essay of this collection, is a provocative no, at least if consciousness is imagined as a separate substance, and it sets the tone for a book in which he works out his most radical philosophy. Essays in Radical Empiricism, edited and published after his death, collects the pieces in which James argues that experience itself, in all its relations, is the basic stuff of the world. Among the titles are Does Consciousness Exist? and A World of Pure Experience. James writes with vigour and an unusual clarity for a philosopher. Carl Manchester, D.E. Wittkower, ML Cohen and six other LibriVox volunteers share the fifteen sections in about seven hours.
Introduction
William James (1842-1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher who taught at Harvard. His Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, helped found the modern discipline, and he wrote influentially on the psychology of religious experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Together with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey he is counted among the founders of pragmatism, the philosophical movement that judges ideas by their practical consequences.
Essays in Radical Empiricism was edited by his colleague Ralph Barton Perry and published in 1912, after James's death. It brings together articles from the last years of his life, in which he developed a philosophy that he called radical empiricism. Its main claim is that relations between things are as much a part of experience as the things themselves, and that no hidden entity such as an absolute or a mind-substance is needed to hold the world together. The ideas influenced later philosophers, among them Bertrand Russell and the American realists.
The recording has fifteen sections, beginning with the editor's preface, and lasts about six hours and fifty minutes. Several LibriVox volunteers share the reading. The material is demanding, yet James's lively style and his readiness to use homely examples make it more approachable than many works of philosophy. It is an excellent choice for anyone interested in the origins of modern ideas about mind, experience and reality. Each essay can be taken on its own, and the collection gives a reliable impression of James's way of thinking.
Public domain
William James died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text