Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-4hhp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T07:06:33.512Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

18 - James and the Kantian tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Ruth Anna Putnam
Affiliation:
Wellesley College, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

One of the most interesting and problematic threads in the literature on James concerns the relationship between his philosophy and Kant's. It is difficult to imagine at first two philosophers farther apart than Kant and James. Kant was a lover of unity and systematicity, and exalted the absolute and necessary features of our experience; James had little patience with philosophical systems, thought there was much less unity to the world than often imagined, and denied there were any utterly indefeasible elements in our experience. These deep differences are undeniable. It is perhaps then no surprise when we find Richard Rorty arguing that James's pragmatism is part of what he thinks of as “the anti-Kantian revolution” (Rorty 1979, 7). Elsewhere he writes:

No other American writers have offered so radical a suggestion for making our future different from our past, as have James and Dewey. . . . Logical empiricism was one variety of standard, academic, neo-Kantian, epistemologicallycentered philosophy. The great pragmatists should . . . be taken as . . . breaking with the Kantian epistemological tradition altogether. (Rorty 1982, 160)

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×