The Beyond Bohm 2024 series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.
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. Yet it avoids any facile solutions to the problem of philosophical skepticism. It supports the idea that the world can be scientifically described in terms of structural relations without lapsing into implausible scientistic reductionisms. But it is a truly radical vision of reality raising many immediately apparent objections (many of which date back to James’s original statement of the view). In this presentation, I aim to sketch out a version of Neutral Monism, canvas its virtues and try to at least deflect the main objections.