Beyond Bohm 2024, Part 2 – The Relations Between Russellian Monism, James’s Radical Empiricism and Bohm’s Implicate Order

The Relations Between Russellian Monism, James’s Radical Empiricism and Bohm’s Implicate Order

with William Seager

Sunday August 11
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 
2-hour session.

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

Willam James’s Radical Empiricism and cognate views going under the  general title of Neutral Monism encompass a picture of reality with many  attractive features. It presents a straightforward and intuitively attractive solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. It endorses a view of perception and cognition which puts us in direct contact with the world, indeed, in direct contact with the fundamental  nature of reality, where mind does not mirror nature so much as inhabit it. It supports the idea that the world can be scientifically described in terms of structural relations without lapsing into implausible scientistic reductionisms. One aspect of James’s view that has been little explored is the its relation to some views of David Bohm’s. In particular, what is the relation between Bohm’s “Implicate Order” and what James called “Pure Experience”? There is a question whether Bohm’s view dovetails with James’s, or whether it is more akin to what has come to be called “Russellian Monism”. I’ll argue that Bohm’s view might well count as a form of Neutral Monism, but point out some key differences between Bohm and James.

William Seager is Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has been working on the the philosophy of mind and especially the problem of consciousness for about 45 years, but still hasn’t gotten very far. Two recent books of his are Theories of Consciousness (2nd ed. 2016) and The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism (2020).