著者
山根 秀介
出版者
日本哲学会
雑誌
哲学 (ISSN:03873358)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.2017, no.68, pp.215-230, 2017-04-01 (Released:2017-06-14)
参考文献数
3

William James’s pragmatism has been criticized since it was first proposed. In particular, his claim that whether an idea is true or not must depend on the effect which it has on our experiences invites the criticism that pragmatism is a form of subjectivism and anti-realism. According to this criticism, if any idea considered as useful is true, the criteria of truth set by pragmatism depend on the time and situation, and so are only arbitrary and relative; therefore, a true idea is a figment of some human imagination which has no connection with objective reality.However, James repeatedly objected to this criticism. He claimed that his pragmatism did not make truth vague and uncertain, that one could certainly get access to reality by true ideas and that in this sense he was a realist. The purpose of this study is to show, by analyzing the theory of truth in James’s pragmatism, that he understood the agreement of our ideas with reality in a different way from other theories, and constructed a characteristic realism of his own.In James’s view, truth as the agreement of an idea with reality is realized by certain actions that the idea leads to, namely, by a process of verification that one can practically follow, and reality is a mixture of sense experiences and previous truths one has already acquired. This study considers an action performed to know reality as a kind of intuition, and explains that the truth established by the action transforms reality. Reality as inevitable not only presses one to be subject to it: one can also act on and change it. James insists that an action as intuition embodies our knowledge of reality, and also contributes to the creation of reality in the sense that it newly produces truths and adds them to reality. For James, this interaction between human beings and reality, and the constant modifications occasioned by it are the actuality of our concrete world.
著者
山根 秀介
出版者
宗教哲学会
雑誌
宗教哲学研究 (ISSN:02897105)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.36, pp.57-70, 2019-03-30 (Released:2019-05-22)

In his Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, William James accounted for and developed his own theory of truth. For James, truth is the agreement of an idea with reality and this agreement has to be verified in our actual experience. From this point of view, reality means sensible experience. These notions about truth, reality and experience are not so difficult to understand as long as we deal with ordinary or scientific matters. However, are these concepts true of religious matters? Religious phenomena transcend our sensible experience, so people tend to think there is an essential difference between two kinds of experiences. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James tries to reveal the nature of religious experience. James doesn’t think that these two experiences are completely different. He qualifies religious experience and reality as ‘quasi-sensible’, and this attitude isn’t incompatible with that of Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth in which experience is considered to be sensible. The purpose of this paper is, by reading carefully The Varieties, to elucidate what the religious experience and reality are, focusing on what is meant by the adjective ‘quasi-sensible.’ For James, in religious experience, people are affected through their sensible experience by religious reality called ‘subliminal’ or ‘the more’, and so an individual consciousness turns out to be surrounded by the vast superhuman consciousness.
著者
山根 秀介
出版者
宗教哲学会
雑誌
宗教哲学研究 (ISSN:02897105)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.33, pp.69-81, 2016-03-31 (Released:2017-03-10)

It is often said that William James and Henri Bergson share a lot of ideas on philosophy: the importance of direct experience, the anti-intellectualism, the notion of reality as changing, etc. There is, however, a fundamental difference between them, which is strongly connected with the core of James’s philosophical thought as well as that of Bergson’s. The purpose of this study is to compare the pluralistic ontology in James and the ontology of pure duration in Bergson, thus to elucidate the similarity and difference between the two, and finally to find out where the difference comes from.It is true that both the ontology of James’s “radical empiricism” and that of Bergson’s “pure duration” agree to admit the plurality of our experience, consciousness, and universe. Especially, “the discontinuity-theory” of the former and the concept of “unities of duration” of the latter form the base of the plurality in a surprisingly similar way. Nevertheless, they differ in how to consider the unity of multiple beings. On the one hand, Bergson observes that each element of duration is determined by the whole, and reflects it at the same time; the unity of duration is holistic and organic. On the other hand, James thinks that this unity is not real and insists the absolute multiplicity of elements. This opposition is derived from the difference in the notion of “relation”.
著者
山根 秀介
出版者
京都大学文学研究科宗教学専修
雑誌
宗教学研究室紀要 (ISSN:18801900)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.10, pp.127-148, 2013-11-29

Dans la longue histoire de la philosophie occidentale depuis la Grèce antique, de nombreux philosophes ont discuté sur le problème complexe de l'un et du multiple. Ce problème concerne l'ontologie, c'est-à-dire la philosophie première, et est un des problèmes les plus importants pour le historien de la philosophie. Cette étude vise à saisir la «durée» bergsonienne dans "Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience" sous l'angle de l'un et du multiple, et à définir leurs rôles et leur relation réciproque. L'«unité» nous servira alors de notion-clef. La durée bergsonienne est une unité qui forme sa propre totalité, et elle est en même temps constituée d'unités qui sont ses propres éléments. L'un et le multiple que Bergson considère comme réels et propres à notre durée sont inséparables, ils sont les deux côtés de la même pièce. Ainsi on ne peut traiter un seul des deux moments de la durée, et on ne peut donc pas considérer la théorie de la durée soit comme un monisme soit comme un pluralisme. Les multiples de la durée sont en eux-mêmes indivisibles et hétérogènes. Les unités changent sans cesse et font partie de la durée entière, en même temps qu'elles composent, en se pénétrant, la durée entière, qui est elle-même une unité et qui évolue elle aussi perpétuellement.