Since locke, introspection has been generally defined as a form of observation. this is true, for example, of the classical tradition in psychology exemplified by wundt and titchener. recent experimental work by cognitive psychologists continues to treat introspection as a mode of observation while denying its alleged success in identifying cognitive processes. besides psychologists, philosophers such as james, ryle, and quinton are discussed, and they, too, define introspection as a type of observation analogous to perception. the present article calls attention (...) to other concepts of introspection that are important but that have figured less prominently in the history of philosophy and psychology. it is agreed here that, so far as the goals of self-knowledge and self-control are concerned, a concept of introspection other than that of observation is the significant one. explicating the nature of this alternative concept of introspection and its relevance for self-knowledge is the major aim of the article. (shrink)

James argued that time is a sensation, and the main point of this paper is to deny that claim. The concept of the specious present is explained, indicating how it clarifies the concept of "the present moment." But neither it nor an argument used by Mach and James show time to be a sensation. The analysis presented here requires distinguishing concepts of sensation from concepts of temporal relations. James' view is really a theory that time-as-duration is sensed. But this assumes (...) that the description of time as sensed is also a description of time as an objective property of independent events. This is nowhere established, and making it plausible is a recurrent problem for philosophies like neutral monism and radical empiricism. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive interpretive and critical analysis of the thought of one of America's foremost phiolosophers and psychologists- William James.

Books on William James quickly succeed one another nowadays, but the best and most durable to appear is Richard Gale’s The Divided Self of William James. What makes the book exceptional is its intimate grasp of James’s thought and of the thinker behind it. Gale’s interpretations of texts, meticulously selected from the corpus of James’s writings, are valuable as criticisms but even more as widening our sights on James’s favorite philosophical targets. Gale has made James his intellectual colleague for many (...) years, contributing brilliant articles to Jamesian scholarship along the way, and the insights gained from that collegial association now come together in this wonderfully original and stimulating volume. (shrink)

I offer here a solution to a mystery about William James's theory of the self. Among the many students of James who have been mystified is Gerald Myers, who expresses surprise in William James: His Life and Thought that, given the religious and mystical overtones of his later metaphysics, James did not abandon the apparent bodily self of the earlier Principles of Psychology for a “nonbodily, spiritual, and mysterious referent for the first-person pronoun,” instead of consistently adhering “to (...) his claims that the body is at the center of any experience of self, that nothing nonbodily shows itself definitely to introspection, and that nothing about using I makes a mystery of the self”. The mystery is particularly deep because James explicitly avowed the coherence of the Principles treatment of the self with the later metaphysical treatment, such as the material in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Arguing in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” from the Essays that a metaphysics of pure experience should replace the dichotomy between consciousness and the body, James adduces in support his earlier discussion of the self: “In my Psychology I have tried to show that we need no knower other than the ‘passing thought’.” On the other hand, Myers observes, “if telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition actually occur,” as James was disposed to think, “our everyday equation of the self with bodily experience will surely require some revision”. Then too James's religious convictions as expressed in The Varieties of Religious Experience would also seem to call for revision of the earlier equation. James wrote there, for instance, that “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance” and that “union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end.” “Yet instead of suggesting how his psychological concept of the self might have shifted during the progression from Principles to the metaphysics of pure experience,” Myers comments with a note of puzzlement, “James wrote in his later period that this concept was a natural ally if not the original herald of that metaphysics.”. (shrink)

This almost self-contained introduction to higher recursion theory is essential reading for all researchers in the field.

, a notion of forcing over E, the E-closure of L, is said to be effective if every sideways -generic extension preserves E-closure. There are set notions of forcing in E that do not preserve E-closure. The main theorem below asserts that is effective if and only if it is locally proper, a weak variant of Shelah's notion of proper.

This book contains the material for a first course in pure model theory with applications to differentially closed fields.

Our ultimate purpose is to give an axiomatic treatment of recursion theory sufficient to develop the priority method. The direct or abstract approach is to keep in mind as clearly as possible the methods actually used in recursion theory, and then to formulate them explicitly. The indirect or experimental approach is to look first for other mathematical theories which seem similar to recursion theory, to formulate the analogies precisely, and then to search for an axiomatic treatment which covers not only (...) recursion theory but also the analogous theories as particular cases.The first approach is more general because it does not depend on the existence of analogues. A concrete mathematical theory, it seems, need have no such analogues and still be important, as e.g. classical number theory. In such a case, an axiomatic treatment may still be useful for exhibiting the mathematical structure of the theory considered and the assumptions on which it rests. However, it will lack one of the most heavily advertised advantages of the axiomatic method, namely, the “economy of thought” which results from an uniform theory for several different and interesting cases: we cannot hope for this if, by hypothesis, we know of only one particular case. In contrast, the second approach, if successful at all, is bound to achieve such “economy” because we start out with several interesting particular cases. Another possible virtue of the second approach is that of field work over insight: the abstract pattern that we are looking for and hoping to formalize in axioms, may not be evident in any one mathematical theory, but may spring to the eye if one happens to look simultaneously at several theories which happen to realize the pattern. (shrink)