Abstract
William James was a man 150 years ahead of his time; meaning, he is still beyond us even today. At the very end of his life, he enjoined science to study the “fall of the threshold of consciousness, ‘tho’ we may not understand what we are looking at either in this generation or the next.” Contemporary neuroscience is only now beginning to awaken to James’s metaphysics, particularly his radical empiricism, as central to addressing the so-called Hard Problem—the relation between the brain and the mind. These range from the “biochemical theology” of Francis Crick to Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology based on an embodied or enactive approach. Understood in the context of new developments in neurophenomenology, James’s radical empiricism then appears to have direct application to the future of scientific psychology.
It has seemed to me that the 6 hours that the trustees of the Lowell Fund have done me the honor to place at my disposal, could not be better spent than in taking a single subject, the brain, and seeing exactly how much recent investigations have explained its action and particular how much they may be said to have cleared up or made less mysterious the action of consciousness in each one of us. (William James, Manuscript Lectures, 1988, p. 31)
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Taylor, E. (2013). Déjà Vu: William James on “The Brain and the Mind,” 1878 – A Comment on Current Trends in Neurophenomenology Defining the Application of James’s Radical Empiricism to Psychology. In: Gordon, S. (eds) Neurophenomenology and Its Applications to Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7239-1_4
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