One could not lead the scientific life William James did and not be some kind of empiricist.
As an undergraduate he accompanied naturalist Louis Agassiz on field research in Brazil. In 1873, having obtained his only university qualification, an MD, he began his Harvard career teaching comparative physiology, and by the end of the decade he was an experienced teacher and researcher in physiology, anatomy, and natural history, and director of the Harvard anatomical laboratory and museum.
When in 1880 he relocated to the philosophy department, James struck his new colleagues as out of place, “an irresponsible doctor, not even a college graduate, a crude empiricist, and vivisector of frogs.”1James identified with the effort of German researchers to merge physiology with psychology and philosophy. Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt had been appointed professor of philosophy first at Zurich, then Leipzig, and comparable promotions went to Helmholtz and Lotze. They were James's models. He admired their impartial distance from the militant materialism (Spencer) prevalent in Britain and worrying America. They were scientifically trained, yet successfully taught philosophy and psychology, and owed their philosophical stature to their scientific accomplishments. James would be that too, straddling disciplines, up to date with the sciences, sensitive to morality and religion, and not simplistic in philosophy.2
He saw himself as inheriting an empiricist legacy in philosophy. “I am... myself a complete empiricist so far as any theory of human knowledge goes.” In context, he means a fallibilist: nothing in knowledge is certain, all is revisable (though not all at once). That is one profile of empiricism, first drawn in Alexandrian medicine. A less insipid empiricism is James's thesis that to be real a thing must admit of empirical detection and verification. The conjectural existence of a being immune to empirical verification is empty and dogmatic. “Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real.” It need not
Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001.
be observed or even observable, but must be continuous with the observed. “Reality, howsoever remote, is always defined as a terminus within the general possibilities of experience.” This idea, radical as it may seem, is still not the epitome of James's radical empiricism.3