PHIL-357 Lecture 1: phil357lec1
Document Summary
Page 19: introduction (xix) establishes his 2 goals: 1)to defend experience against philosophy as the backbone of religious life. Believes that experience will play a bigger role than philosophical arguments (ie arguments for the existence or non existence of god) James is an empiricist: someone who bases their philosophical standpoint on the idea that knowledge is justified by experience. So in regards to religion, experience will provide the basis for religious belief. Traditional empiricists (ie hume): rely on the idea of sense-data. Ie hume believed all our beliefs form from primary sense data. There is no knowledge about the world until we experience it through the senses. James is a radical empiricist : when we experience the world, we experience the world as a set of ideas; it comes from sense data but also requires concepts and meaning. Once one is familiar with an idea (ie marker) we do not depend so much on the incoming sense data.
