The Depths of Experience William James After the Linguistic Turn

This dissertation answers the question, how does one make theoretical appeals to experience without succumbing to foundationalism? Approaching the status of experience through the lens of the pragmatic tradition, this work culminates in a reconstruction and defense of the concept of experience in the thought of William James. I argue that by returning to James we can locate a model of experience that not only avoids what Sellars called "the myth of the given," but also enriches the pragmatic philosophical project by recoupling pragmatism's non-foundationalist pluralism to a thick notion of experience. Because neo-pragmatic critics have argued that a return to experience must entail appeals to foundationalism or representationalism, my dissertation constitutes not only a rethinking of the concept of experience, but the aims of pragmatic philosophy.;My argument contains two main threads: first, in Chapter I, I identify some of the motivations for and limitations of the linguistic nominalism advanced by the critics of experience within the pragmatic tradition. I argue that by utilizing an overly restrictive lens of language and discourse experience's critics narrow the scope of philosophical investigation to a concern with justification and our epistemic practices. As such, they omit and provide insufficient resources for addressing everyday issues that are central to appreciating the force of the pragmatic tradition (e.g., the concern with ethical or religious practices). Second, I begin to demonstrate those limitations by turning more specifically to my reconstruction and analysis of James' texts and arguments: the constitution of the subject (Chapter II), the role of the moral and existential in "The Will to Believe" and the Varieties of Religious Experience (Chapter III), and finally experience as it figures in James' radical empiricism (Chapter IV). What emerges is what I call a "pragmatic-existential" concept of expeirence. What this appeal to experience affords is a view wherein the presentation and enactment of a meaningful reality is always dependent upon but ultimately not reducible to our concepts or our discourse.