Radical Empiricism: William James and Gilles Deleuze

Both William James and Gilles Deleuze labeled their philosophies "radical empiricism." In this context, this essay explores the similarities and differences between James's radical empiricism (particularly as it is present early inches Principles of Psychology) and Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" (particularly as set forth in The Logic of Sense). These accounts then inform a view of philosophy understood as a creative art. This art demands flexible habits--what James termed "genius"--in a changing world. Accordingly, radically empirical accounts of creativity and genius are sketched.

Paradoxes of Pure Experience: From the Radical to the Transcendental with James and Deleuze

This paper investigates the relationship between James’ radical empiricism and Deleuze’s study of the genesis of sense without a transcendental subject as necessary condition. It shows that James’ concept of pure experience changes the form of relation between mind and world. Considering how to conceptualize experience without a fixed metaphysical or transcendental subject destabilizes ontological identity, leads to a founding conceptual divergence from traditional phenomenology, and motivates Deleuze’s efforts towards transcendental empiricism. The paper reads Deleuze’s work on the genesis of sense in this context, arguing that one important result is an ontological pluralism. Such pluralism is crucial in considering how meaning can be made between and across differences and is in keeping with radical empiricism’s openness to life’s complexity.

James and Deleuze: Trains and Planes

This essay examines the relationship between William James’s radical empiricism and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism by considering how dominant technologies of locomotion and travel in their respective historical times influenced their thinking and the style of their prose. Highlighting the imagery of trains and ground movement in James and planes and flight in Deleuze, I suggest that each constructs an empiricism that resonates with and reacts to the emerging forms of mass movement in his own time. The essay serves as an invitation to read James and Deleuze together with attention to the aesthetic qualities of their writing and as united in an ongoing project of honing philosophy to the pace of its time.

Unmeasuring ourselves'

This paper aims to introduce key Deleuzian concepts as they engage with the discipline of psychology. This will be done through an exploration of his work, in particular the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia co-written with Felix Guattari. As with Deleuze’s project itself, the paper has a critical element and a constructive one. Critically, it identifies the concerns that Deleuze alerts us in relation to the three main traditions within psychology (behaviourism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology) and provocatively introduces the notion of stupidity to signal the ways in which psychology has lost its intellectual horizon, by putting itself at the service of State and religious norms through a number of assumptions that are taken for granted, assumptions that constitute the silent and insidious common and good sense that holds the so called ‘rational project’ glued together in modern science.The second, more constructive, part aims to introduce key elements in Deleuze’s project as a way to engage with the possibilities that Deleuze brings to the discipline. The elements considered include a shift from an emphasis on epistemology to metaphysics, the centrality of difference (and variation) instead of identity (and stability), a shift to a relational type of knowledge rather than one that is representational and the articulation of the tensions between history and processes of emergence (becomings). Ultimately, the Deleuzian provocation to the discipline is to engage with a psychology to come through the articulation of a renewed and radical empiricism.

Philosophy of Science Analytic Feminist Approaches

Feminist philosophy of science in the analytic tradition converges towards feminist empiricism that comes in three types: critical contextual empiricism, radical empiricism, and standpoint empiricism. Each type of feminist empiricism provides important resources for feminist philosophers of science especially when they seek to solve the bias paradox. The bias paradox arises when one aims to criticize some biases as epistemically harmful while at the same time acknowledge that some other biases are epistemically beneficial. The challenge is to understand how pernicious bias can be distinguished from an innocuous one. Critical contextual empiricism aims to solve the bias paradox by introducing epistemic norms for scientific communities and radical empiricism by subjecting biases to empirical testing. Standpoint empiricism emphasizes the importance of generating new evidence by empowering disadvantaged social groups. While feminist philosophers of science have abandoned the ideal of value-free science, they have not given up the concept of objectivity. Objectivity of scientific knowledge comes in degrees and depends on how well scientific communities facilitate criticism and succeed in eliminating pernicious bias.

The Problem of Experience in E. Voegelin’s Philosophy

The paper deals with the problem of E. Voegelin’s notion of experience: the positive meaning of this concept is not specified in any of the author’s works. Based on W. James’s ‘‘Essay on Radical Empiricism” and Voegelin’s late works, it is shown that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness is rooted in James‘s concept of “pure experience”, which essentially sought to close the epistemological chasm between subject and object, phenomena and noumena. According to this notion, mental and physical, subjective and objective realities are merely derivative aspects of a certain primordial pure experience, which is more elementary and fundamental than the two former aspects of reality. Finally, the article exposes other implications of this connection with James’s philosophy for E. Voegelin’s theory of consciousness.

The Problem of Experience in E. Voegelin’s Philosophy

The paper deals with the problem of E. Voegelin’s notion of experience: the positive meaning of this concept is not specified in any of the author’s works. Based on W. James’s ‘‘Essay on Radical Empiricism” and Voegelin’s late works, it is shown that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness is rooted in James‘s concept of “pure experience”, which essentially sought to close the epistemological chasm between subject and object, phenomena and noumena. According to this notion, mental and physical, subjective and objective realities are merely derivative aspects of a certain primordial pure experience, which is more elementary and fundamental than the two former aspects of reality. Finally, the article exposes other implications of this connection with James’s philosophy for E. Voegelin’s theory of consciousness.

The empiricism of Michel Serres a theory of the senses between philosophy of science, phenomenology and ethics

The paper presents the philosophy of the French philosopher Michel Serres, with an accent on his working method and unusual methodology. Starting from the thesis that the empiricist trait of Serres? philosophy remains underexposed if one simply receives his work as that of a structuralist epistemologist, Serres? monograph The Five Senses (1985) is then discussed in more detail. Here we see both a radical empiricism all his own and a closeness to phenomenology. Nevertheless, perception and language are not opposed to each other in Serres. Rather, his radical thinking of a world-relatedness of the bodily senses and an equally consistent understanding of a sensuality of language - and also of philosophical prose - are closely intertwined.