"Essays in Radical Empiricism" - читать интересную книгу автора (James William)

for it that of an absolute experience
not due to two factors. But they were not

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1 Articles by Bawden, King, Alexander, and others. Dr. Perry is
frankly over the border
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quite radical enough, not quite daring enough
in their negations. For twenty years past I
have mistrusted 'consciousness' as an entity;
for seven or eight years past I have suggested
its non-existence to my students, and tried to
give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities
of experience. It seems to me that the hour
is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.
To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists
seems so absurd on the face of it -- for undeniably
'thoughts' do exist -- that I fear some
readers will follow me no farther. Let me then
immediately explain that I mean only to deny
that the word stands for an entity, but to insist
most emphatically that it does stand for a
function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff
or quality of being, contrasted with that of
which material objects are made, out of which
our thoughts of them are made; but there is a
function in experience which thoughts perform,
and for the performance of which this

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quality of being is invoked. That function is
_knowing_. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary
to explain the fact that things not only
are, but get reported, are known. Whoever
blots out the notion of consciousness from his
list of first principles must still provide in some
way for that function's being carried on.

I

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition
that there is only one primal stuff or
material in the world, a stuff of which everything
is composed, and if we call that stuff
'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of relation
towards one another into which portions of
pure experience may enter. The relation itself