Abstract

The final chapter of this dissertation attempts to discover James' philosophy of mind in general. It concludes that his three methods of psychology are in fact complementary and taken together provide an intelligible, non-dualistic framework which overcame many of the problems and paradoxes of traditional epistemology while clearing the field for modern psychology. ;A closer look at the Principles, however, reveals that this is not the case. There has been a general failure on the part of these commentators to recognize that James' method included three interrelated perspectives of mental phenomena. His "phenomenology of experience" attempted to analyze the experience of consciousness without the encumbrances of traditional suppositions. Chapter I of this dissertation discusses his arguments in the Principles which propose such an analysis. ;But mentality cannot be properly understood without reference to the physical system in which it operates. Both the neurological substrata of intelligence and the environment in which mentality operates must be examined. Chapters II and III of this dissertation consider his functional and physiological analyses of mentality. These analyses are then compared to various problematic discussions by James in his later works. ;For the most part commentators have been sympathetic to James' project, citing the difficulties faced by this pioneer in the field of psychology. The dualism is taken to be methodological. In order to overcome the difficulties of introspectionism, these writers maintain, he was forced to differentiate the mental from the physical in a radical manner. He supposedly accepted a mind-body dualism in the Principles uncritically in order to get on with his science. ;William James' philosophy of mind has posed a significant problem of interpretation for commentators since the publication of The Principles of Psychology. An ambiguity arises in this work when James simultaneously postulates a dualistic psychology while rejecting the theoretical hypothesis of the soul. Going to great lengths to supplant the soul hypothesis with the alternative conception of the non-substantial "passing thought," he nevertheless retains a strict subject-object dualism.