ABSTRACT
Twenty-three years have elapsed since William James startled the world with his article entitled ‘Does “consciousness” exist?’ In this article, reprinted in the volume called Essays in Radical Empiricism, he set out the view that ‘there is only one primal stuff or material in the world’, and that the word ‘consciousness’ stands for a function, not an entity. He holds that there are ‘thoughts’, which perform the function of ‘knowing’, but that thoughts are not made of any different ‘stuff ’ from that of which material objects are made. He thus laid the foundations for what is called ‘neutral monism’, a view advocated by most American realists. This is the view advocated in the present volume. In this chapter, we have to ask ourselves whether there is anything that we can call ‘consciousness’ in any sense involving a peculiar kind of stuff, or whether we can agree with William James that there is no ‘inner duplicity’ in the stuff of the world as we know it, and that the separation of it into knowing and what is known does not represent a fundamental dualism.
