[MD] Best way to know James

[John Carl]

I don't know why I bother when all I get is personal criticism (as
opposed to any sort of rational critique) but important knowledge is
important whether anybody likes it or not.  Therefore I offer you:

Interpreters of James have struggled for decades with how to
understand his radical empiricism and his forays into the idea of pure
experience.  They have done so with little success.

I will confidently claim that the best understanding of these ideas is
the one presented in this chapter, and in the context of this book; it
requires that one investigate closely the other thinkers with whom
James was in meaningful dialogue (and of course I have only looked at
a few) no matter how temperamentally averse to them James's
contemporary followers may be.  These thinkers include Royce, Bowne
and Howison at the least.

It is close to shameful that it should come as news to anyone that
James's theory of individuality is adapted to and from Royce's and is
a personalist theory, or that James's radical empiricism is a
postulate in Royce's sense, proposing a norm for philosophy and a way
of grasping the personal principle and the temporal principle without
overly abstract universals and that the problem of immediacy is the
same as the problem of pure experience, treating discontinuity on a
par with continuity.  But that is how the best account goes, or so I
claim.

Auxier, Time, Will and Purpose, pg 240