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
pp. 89-114
in: Susan Gordon (ed), Neurophenomenology and its applications to psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
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.
