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William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: The true foundation for a science of consciousness?
Eugene Taylor History of the Human Sciences 2010 23: 119 DOI: 10.1177/0952695110363644 The online version of this article can be found at: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/23/3/119

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William James on a phenomenological psychology of immediate experience: The true foundation for a science of consciousness?
Eugene Taylor Saybrook University, USA

History of the Human Sciences 23(3) 119130 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0952695110363644 hhs.sagepub.com

Abstract Throughout his career, William James defended personal consciousness. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), he declared that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought. But while writing it, he had been investigating a dynamic psychology of the subconscious, which found a major place in his Gifford Lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. This was the clearest statement James was able to make before he died with regard to his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism, which essentially asked Is a science of consciousness actually possible? Jamess lineage in this regard, was inherited from an intuitive psychology of character formation that had been cast within a context of spiritual self-realization by the Swedenborgians and Transcendentalists of New England. Chief among these was his father, Henry James, Sr, and his godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, James was forced to square these ideas with the more rigorous scientific dictates of his day, which have endured to the present. As such, his ideas remain alive and vibrant, particularly among those arguing for the fusion of phenomenology, embodiment and cognitive neuroscience in the renewed search for a science of consciousness.

Corresponding author: Eugene Taylor, Graduate College of Psychology & Humanistic Studies, Saybrook University, 747 Front Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, USA. Email: etaylor@igc.org

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Keywords consciousness, phenomenology, pluralism, pragmatism, radical empiricism, scientific method

Consciousness in the Context of Natural Selection

William James began his scientific career in 1861, just after publication of Darwins Origin of Species (1859). As a younger colleague of the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, a key figure in Darwins inner circle, he argued for the impact of personal consciousness on the biological evolution of human beings, while everyone else remained concerned strictly with the biology of the plant and animal species and whether or not God created the earth in a single instant.1 Jamess point was that the laws of natural selection were operable in the social as well as the biological sphere, and that a persons individual choices shaped the social sphere just as much as the social sphere adapted to and also influenced the physical environment (James, 1865a).2 Today, sociologically, we might think of the acceptability of strip mining or the dumping of toxic waste as effluent, which can, however, exterminate species. Individually, think of the beloved poet, revered by all, who is, let us say, a quadriplegic, married with children. In the wild, he would have been an animals easy dinner, unable to fend for himself, and hence unable to procreate. Individuals within his society, however his auditors, his friends and family, and his wife and children have all made the commitment to see that he survives, not just marginally, but well, so that the world can have poetry. Individual choice has determined the course of social evolution, which has in turn thwarted the forces of biological evolution from eliminating him, insuring instead the propagation of his kind.

Jamess Psychology of Individual Differences

James again took up a defense of personal consciousness when he challenged the Social Darwinists who believed that the survival of the species always trumped the biological destiny of the individual. As an example refuting this idea, he published on natural selection and its application to the state of consciousness found in the solitary genius. Geniuses are those who see analogies that the rest of us do not see, which allows them to envision possibilities that no one has ever conceived or that were previously thought impossible. They achieve those goals by themselves, showing the rest of us what is possible, and we follow after them once the original trail has been blazed. The condition of the mind of the genius is the key, however. Natural selection says that even if there are only a few choices, selection is going to occur anyway. This is the mind of the average man or woman. The ferment always going on in the mind of the genius is different because it creates a greater abundance of possibilities. Selection, then, has a better chance of being successful at a higher level of adaptation because the choices are so much better (James, 1880). His was a psychology of individual differences. He agreed that there was very little difference between individuals, but he also believed that what difference there was, was very important (James, 1897a).
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Consciousness is What Occupies the Center of the Rational Waking State

James carried these ideas into his Principles of Psychology (1890), in which he reluctantly adopted the positivists epistemology by declaring that psychology is the scientific study of states of consciousness as such and that he intended to presume from the outset that the thinker was the thought, so no unseen guiding hand behind the world of appearances was necessary to posit the mechanism by which thought occurred (James, 1890).3 In that work, he took his primary focus to be an analysis of the mental object at the center of attention, since this was the primary focus of the budding field of experimental psychology in the first place and in agreement with the majority of laboratory experimentalists who subscribed to the doctrines of associationism. In The Principles we could say that he was espousing what we would call today a cognitive psychology of consciousness.

The Stream of Consciousness

His contribution was that consciousness is a stream that flows ever onward and that what psychologists studied had to be understandable in this context. What we hold in the center of attention keeps changing. The stream of waking rational consciousness is always a stream of both thought and feeling, however, not the study of a single abstract thought alone. This stream of thought and feeling he said had five distinguishing characteristics: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness; within each personal consciousness thought is always changing; within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous; it always appears to deal with objects independent of itself; it is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects chooses from among them, in a word all the while.

The problem was that James had become involved with the British psychical researchers and the physiologists and neurologists associated with the so-called French experimental psychology of the subconscious in the 12 years that it took him to write his Principles of Psychology. He came to believe that their work produced conclusive scientific evidence for the reality of multiple states of consciousness, all occurring simultaneously in the person, not just one single state within which all psychological phenomena occur. If true, he concluded, this meant that experimental psychology might not be anything more than a colossal elaboration of the ego, if these changing states were not taken into account. This also meant that the subject and the object of its perception were linked at more than one level. Waking rational consciousness may make it appear that subject and object were distinct, even constructing an entire psychology based on this idea, when in reality they may remain intertwined. This caused James to have second thoughts about his original, more positivistic conception of the stream of thought.
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Consciousness as Interdependent with Objects

Following this thread, when he produced his Psychology: Briefer Course in 1892, he made one important omission (James, 1892).4 From the list of characteristics of the stream of consciousness, he eliminated number 4, that the stream of consciousness always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. Evidence from the psychical researchers seemed to indicate that people and objects might be connected in many ways independent of the senses. There were numerous cases of hallucinations at the moment of death between loved ones, even if the event occurred at great distances. Hypnotic rapport showed decisively that individuals could be influenced subconsciously, meanwhile believing they were acting independently. Needed was an entirely new epistemology for the way experimental psychology was conducted, beyond the positivistic assumptions he had fielded in The Principles. There he had said that there was no other alternative to the positivists at the time. After all, he reasoned, every new science must be positivistic to begin with, but sooner or later it will be renovated by philosophy. He was hatching a plan to conceptualize just such a new epistemology and the elimination of a world independent of the perceiver turned out to be one of the germinating thoughts that would soon evolve into his metaphysics of radical empiricism. However, it was still an unfinished idea by 1894, when he gave his presidential address before the American Psychological Association, entitled The Knowing of Things Together (James, 1895).5 Though he broadcast there what was to come, he did not name it until the preface of his Will to Believe in 1897.6 There, he called it radical empiricism for the first time. He was an empiricist not a rationalist, he said, but his theory was radical because he did not confine empiricism to sense data alone. By it he meant the entire range of human experience, a redefinition that scandalized the laboratory experimentalists as well as the budding analytic philosophers.

A Dynamic Psychology of Subconscious States

In the interim he had also been investigating further a dynamic psychology of the subconscious. He studied cases of psychic mediumship and also cases of multiple personality. Automatic writing and hypnosis had become his methods of inquiry and his reading in these areas became extensive. He became an expert hypnotist, and encouraged his students to take up automatic writing. He even took a few patients into his home for treatment. He was named Harvards first Professor of Psychology from 1889 to 1898, during which time he taught philosophy, as well as abnormal psychology. He fielded the first graduate course in experimental psychopathology at Harvard, and summarized the literature on a psychology of the subconscious in the professional journals. These endeavors culminated in 1896, when he delivered a series of eight Lowell Lectures in Boston on Exceptional Mental States (Taylor, 1983). The lectures outlined a dynamic psychology of the subconscious within the individual and then demonstrated its working in the social sphere. Of particular importance were the examples of multiple personality, where the secondary self showed characteristics superior to those exhibited in the normal everyday waking state. Consciousness, he proposed there, was a field with a focus and a margin, where the margin controls meaning and is in a constant state of
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expansion and contraction as the stream flows ever onward. The periphery or penumbra of waking consciousness leads inward to the hypnogogic state, a portal into subconscious states where the contents of consciousness are expressed as mental images. Beyond the hypnogogic state is a spectrum of possible states ranging from the psychopathic to the transcendent, waking consciousness being one of them, probably somewhere in the middle, its purpose being the preservation of the biological organism, which is the primary vehicle for the experience of these other states. On the one hand we have dissolutive states, leading to the breakdown of personality, and on the other we have evolutive states, higher states of consciousness indicative of where the human species could possibly develop in the future. Further, an emphasis on these states psychotherapeutically represents an appeal to the growth-oriented dimension of every personality and is a source of healing as well as the actualization of our highest ideals. These ideas remained largely unexpressed in print and appeared only here and there in unpublished correspondence and in shorter works, and James never went back to finish writing out the Lowell Lectures on Exceptional Mental States. Instead, he bequeathed their content to a younger generation of students, such as Gertrude Stein, Boris Sidis, E. E. Southard, William Healy, L. Eugene Emerson and others, while his attention was distracted toward the articulation and development of his doctrine of pragmatism, which was launched in 1898 and quickly became an international movement (James, 1898). Radical empiricism was at the core of his thinking and noetic pluralism, a dynamic psychology of the individual, represented the second of his tripartite metaphysics, but the further elaboration of these into a more formal system had to wait as well, as a spirited defense of pragmatism dominated his energies.

Mystical Consciousness and Ultimate Transformation

Then, while raising questions about the history and philosophy of the way psychology was being conducted, he received the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion in 1897. Due to delays and ill-health, he tried to cancel but then just delayed their delivery while he recuperated. The contents of the lectures, however, found their way into the flourishing field of psychotherapeutics, helping to launch the so-called Boston School of Psychopathology (Taylor, 1982). A dynamic psychology of the subconscious also found a major place in his Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, delivered at the University of Edinburgh, when they were finally published as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902 (James, 1902).7 In that work, James told his audience, he approached his subject as a psychologist of religion. We may interpret his method as phenomenological; that is, he said he would take as his database the documents humains, meaning first-person accounts of how individuals understood religious experience across cultures (1902: 3). By religion, he then declared, he intended to refer solely to religious experiences that took place within the individual. He would not be concerned with the history of doctrines, the content of holy texts, the hierarchy in the priesthood, or the separate teachings of the denominations. Further, he maintained that the core of religious experience centered on the awakening of mystical states of consciousness and that the road to them lay through an exploration of the personal subconscious that is, a dynamic psychology of the subconscious states. Mystical states,
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he said, could be presaged by a simple insight. They could be represented by a series of experiences that lead to a major attitude readjustment. Or they could more obviously be recognized as a full-blown transformation of personality. In any event, they carried a sense of knowledge unplumbed by the discursive intellect and could even possibly be its very source. At the same time, a test for their efficacy lay not in where they come from, but in terms of their ability to influence the moral and aesthetic quality of daily living. As such, the Gifford Lectures constituted historically the clearest statement James was able to make before he died with regard to his developing tripartite metaphysics of pragmatism, pluralism and radical empiricism. They also represented the culmination of his search to understand consciousness as an object of scientific study. He had begun with a consideration of consciousness in the context of natural selection, which led him to the study of the object at the center of waking awareness. These studies took him to the periphery of waking rational consciousness, which is a margin that is continually changing, and into the psychology of the emotions and mental imagery, which leads to the domain of multiple states of consciousness across a spectrum from the psychopathic to the transcendent.

By What Criteria is a Science of Consciousness Possible?

The issue for James from then on was to ask what were the sufficient criteria defining the scientific study of consciousness. His answer was to peel away the rhetoric around the arguments and look at the primary presuppositions underlying how the scientific study of consciousness was being conducted. What he found among his colleagues was contradictory, self-serving, illogical, and not in any way related to the true facts of human experience. His answer was in his tripartite metaphysics. Radical empiricism, the core of his philosophy, referred to pure experience in the immediate moment before the differentiation between subject and object (James, 1912). Pluralism, or what he more specifically referred to as noetic pluralism, meant that each person was capable of having these transformative experiences, but that they might not be the same from person to person. And finally, his pragmatism was a way of evaluating truth-claims about the nature of ultimate reality, especially where there are obvious and seemingly irreconcilable differences between each persons version of the ultimate. It may be instructive to step back for a moment and ask just what these constructs pertained to in Jamess mind. My interpretation is that James had carried on an objective study of the different dimensions of consciousness possible for human beings to experience over a 40-year period and after The Varieties in 1902 he was then forced to ask How would such a science be possible? This question led him back to the basics of human perception and to the means by which experience and beliefs become fused. I have maintained elsewhere that I believe that with his tripartite metaphysics, James was trying to construct a formal philosophy patterned after Charles S. Peirces categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (Taylor, 2008). He just never had an opportunity to finish the task, as he died somewhat prematurely.
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The Meaning of Phenomenology

In letters exchanged with C. S. Peirce in 1904, where Peirce gives his response to Jamess seminal article on radical empiricism, Does Consciousness exist?, James maintained that psychology is always constructed out of phenomenology.8 Jamess answer to his own question about consciousness was that, no, it did not exist as an independent entity such that it could be objectively studied by science like any other object in nature. It is not a thing, it is a process. Consciousness did exist, however, but it was always a function of someones personal consciousness somewhere. The problem was, if true, this would invalidate its objective study, since consciousness cannot study itself without confronting the subjective element. Even the most objective data of the investigation always had to be interpreted by someone. As well, rational consciousness in science was notorious for being able only to investigate the phenomena of its own state, and had no way to gain control over alternative states, except to investigate them experientially, or to infer them indirectly through dreams, hypnosis, automatic writing, or other methods of tapping into consciousness beyond the margin, which the experimentalists and analytic philosophers were unwilling to do. Peirce disagreed and maintained instead that, yes, phenomenology was foundational to all of science, but that, in and of itself, it was not psychology. Peirce was interested in the separate disciplines that contributed to the origin of science, while James was interested in the problem of consciousness for understanding the individual. This led James to look at the phenomenology of the science-making process itself. For Peirce, the problem was one of classification. For James, it was the articulation of a psychology that was able to account for the entire spectrum of human experience, which included more than just our urge to do science. The place where he began was his radical empiricism that nothing ever comes to consciousness in the life of the individual except in the immediate moment. What the individual did with what came to him or her and what she or he added produced his or her view of the world as well as her or his effect on it. Ultimately, however, the individual remains always functioning in immediate experience. This difference is important, for several reasons. A case in point is the phenomenological psychological method of Amedeo Giorgi, an experimental psychologist and student of the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl (Giorgi, 1970). Giorgi affirms the all-important distinction between the natural and human sciences articulated by Wilhelm Dilthey, and phenomenology as laid down in systematic form by Husserl. Merleau-Ponty maintained this tradition and Giorgi has followed in this tradition of European continental philosophy. He is a critic of Carl Rogers more existential-humanistic interpretation of phenomenology and opposed to Jamess claim that phenomenology is foundational to all science, on the grounds that to accept this claim represents psychologism. As well, he does not subscribe to the idea of a dynamic psychology of the unconscious, nor Buddhist epistemology as phenomenological. Nor is he an advocate of the lineage of Religionswissenschaft, which represents a method of scholarship in the phenomenology of religions and the comparative study of religions. Nevertheless, his phenomenological psychological method has become a major force in such fields as existential-humanistic and transpersonal psychology, human science, and other fields such as nursing at the level of the doctoral dissertation. He has also written on Jamess
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radical empiricism, but as a means to put forward his own method rather than to tease out what James actually might have been getting at. Phenomenology for Giorgi is basic to all the sciences, but he does not see psychology as foundational to them. In this he is more in agreement with Peirce than James. Giorgi also does not acknowledge any kind of uniquely American lineage of phenomenological psychology. I, on the other hand, see James as precisely in this lineage, having inherited the intuitive psychology of character formation of the Swedenborgians and Transcendentalists which he transmuted into a psychology of individual differences, the scientific study of consciousness and a defense of the power of religious belief. His Varieties was clearly a phenomenological study and his tripartite metaphysics was grounded in the experience of pure consciousness in the immediate moment before the differentiation of subject and object. Hegel notwithstanding, this would rank James as a firstgeneration phenomenologist in psychology, along with other figures such as Brentano and Stumpf, suggesting that Husserl, who followed, had no exclusive purchase on the term. Jamess influence can be traced through a cross-disciplinary arc and included such figures as Carl Jung in the realm of depth psychology, Niels Bohr in quantum physics, Paul Tillich in theology, and Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May in humanistic psychology. Rogerss point of view would be a moment in the tradition of a uniquely American, Jamesean interpretation of phenomenology. Giorgi, however, would not agree with such an interpretation.

James and Modern Neurophenomenology

Meanwhile, today, the revolution in consciousness within the neurosciences proceeds apace, particularly where there is a certain niche of literature arguing for the fusion of phenomenology, embodiment and cognitive neuroscience. The goal of neuroscientists, in essence, is to solve the Hard Problem the relation between the brain and the mind, between having theories about experience versus actually experiencing something. The neurophilosophers as a class who have emerged as spokespersons for the solution to the Hard Problem, however, are all trained in the classical philosophies and continue to generate an epistemology based on the rational ordering of sense data alone. Basically they are as a class Kantians, and they remain objectivists and also reductionists. The newer voices, however let us call them neurophenomenologists, the name they have given themselves maintain that Husserlian phenomenology posits a scientific approach to understanding first-person experience, a point that even Giorgi would agree with. The new investigators call this First Person Science.9 Meanwhile, traditional approaches in science classically represent Third Person Science the objective study of anything through the rational ordering of sense data alone. Second Person Science injects the idea of intersubjectivity into the relation between the subject and the object and tries to generate a body of empirical evidence based on objective measurements from cognitive neuroscience, some kind of qualitative measure of embodiment, and more qualitative phenomenological accounts by the subject, meanwhile taking the predilections of the experimenter into account (Thompson and Varela, 2001; Varela, 1996; Varela and Shear, 1999). An example might be the administration of a memory task while a subject is in an fMRI showing the activity of the brain in real time, while the subject is describing
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what he or she is experiencing. In this regard, Max Velmans goes a step further and argues for a reflexive element in every experiment in which the experimenter remains cognizant of his or her own biases, actions and interpretations at every stage of the experiment (Velmans, 2000).10 The key here is a focus on the phenomenology of the science-making process itself, suggesting that the solution to the Hard Problem might lie along the lines of a new understanding of the relation between the experimenter and the subject of the experiment. Recognition of the value of phenomenology may have to occur in the thinking of neuroscientists in general, but at the same time, the presuppositions underlying the way science is presently conducted may also have to undergo a change. Neuroscientists are not unaware of Jamess contribution to this discussion, as we see in the very different contemporary theories generated by such figures as Francis Crick and Francisco Varela who self-consciously borrowed from James to elaborate their own understanding of a modern science of consciousness (Varela, 1999; Crick and Koch, 1990).

Consciousness in Non-Western Psychologies

Moreover, theories of consciousness from non-western cultures demonstrate the limits of Giorgis claim that to accept psychology as foundational to all forms of science is some form of psychologism. The stages of consciousness leading to asamprajnatasamadhi in Yoga, the conception of personality in Buddhism as skandha, a heap or conglomeration of conditions, to be transcended on the path to liberation; the stages of meditation involving the practice of non-attachment to the arising and decaying of a cognitive thought; and so on: all represent conceptions of interior consciousness in indigenous, non-western psychologies. James himself was aware of some of these non-western systems and actually may have drawn on the metaphysics of Samkhya-Yoga for his conception of pure experience (purusha) for his own idea of pure consciousness before the differentiation of subject and object (Taylor, 2008). If we account for the contribution of non-western epistemologies, objective science, in other words, may be more indelibly linked to the process of self-knowledge within the interior life of the investigator than has been previously acknowledged. This is the purport of Jamess position that psychology constitutes the foundation of both the natural and social sciences.11 Consciousness does not exist except as a function of someones consciousness somewhere. The question is, regarding our advancement toward a science of consciousness, will those who champion human science be able to take the next logical step beyond the historical bifurcation of the natural and human sciences, and reconsider psychology itself as epistemology? To do so may allow us to reposition a more phenomenologically oriented psychology of immediate experience as foundational to experimental psychology and to science in general, as James himself maintained in 1910 (James, 1910). Psychology should continue to study the fall of the threshold of consciousness, he said at that time, but then he accurately predicted, though we shall not come to fully understand these phenomena either in this generation or the next.12

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Notes
1. Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce, close friends of Jamess, were interested in the problem as well. See Wright (1873) and Peirce (1878). Darwin had asked Wright directly to address the problem, while Peirce, though he remained ambivalent to Darwins ideas, nevertheless took them into account with regard to the application of the laws of natural selection to the evolution of language. See also Taylor (1981, 1990). 2. See also James (1865b). 3. See his preface, vol. 1; his chapter 1; and his chapter on The Stream of Thought. 4. See his chapter which he now called The Stream of Consciousness, p. 151. 5. See also chapter 2 in The Meaning of Truth (James, 1909), under the title of The Tigers in India. 6. See the preface in James (1897b). 7. See particularly his chapters on The Divided Self and its Unification and also his chapter on Mysticism. 8. Analyzed in Taylor and Coffman (2005). 9. See also Chalmers (1995). 10. Suppose, for instance, every scientific paper had a statement as to the authors philosophical epistemology? 11. James alludes to this link in Pragmatism (1907), where he discusses noetic pluralism and also the relation of the one to the many. 12. The overall point of this article was adapted from Taylor (1995), since that article fell on deaf ears when it first came out. See also Taylor and Young (1998).

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James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green. James, W. (1907) Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green. James, W. (1909) The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longmans, Green. James, W. (1910) A Suggestion about Mysticism, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7(4): 8592. James, W (1912) Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. R. Barton Perry. New York: Longmans, Green [posthumous publication]. Peirce, C. (1878) How to make Our Ideas Clear, Popular Science Monthly 12 (January): 286302. Taylor, E. I. (1981) The Evolution of William Jamess Definition of Consciousness, Revision: Journal of Knowledge and Consciousness 4(2): 407. Taylor, E. I. (1982) The Boston School of Psychotherapy: Science, Healing, and Consciousness in 19th Century New England, eight lectures sponsored by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the Boston Medical Library in cooperation with the Lowell Institute, delivered at the Boston Public Library, MarchApril. Taylor, E. I. (1983) William James on Exceptional Mental States. New York: Charles Scribners Sons. Taylor, E. I. (1990) William James on Darwin: an Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 602: 733. Taylor, E. I. (1995) Radical Empiricism and the New Science of Consciousness, History of the Human Sciences 8(1): 4760. Taylor, E. I. (2008) William James on Pure Experience and Samadhi in Samkhya-Yoga, in K. R. Rao, A. C. Paranjpe and A. K. Dalal (eds) Handbook of Indian Psychology. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, India/Foundation Books, pp. 55563. Taylor, E. I. and Coffman, D. (2005) James on Phenomenology: Peirces Response to Does Consciousness exist?, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, LA, for the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Taylor, E. I. and Young, J. (1998) The Conundrum of Consciousness, Historically and Philosophically Considered, Cienca e Cultura [Journal of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science] 47:6165. Thompson, E. and Varela, F. J. (2001) Radical Embodiment, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5(10): 41825. Varela, F. J. (1996) Neurophenomenology: a Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem, Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 33050. Varela, F. J. (1999) The Specious Present: a Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness, in J. Petitot, F. J. Varela, B. Pachoud and J. M. Roy (eds) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 266314. Varela, F. J. and Shear, J., eds (1999) The View from within: First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6: 23 [special issue]. Velmans, M. (2000) Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge/Psychology Press. Wright, C. (1873) The Evolution of Self-Consciousness, North American Review; reprinted (1877) in C. E. Norton (ed.) Philosophical Discussions by Chauncey Wright. New York: Lennox Hill, pp. 199266. 129

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Biographical Note
Eugene Taylor holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Psychology. His primary academic affiliation is Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University. He is also a lecturer on Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and senior psychologist on the Psychiatry Service at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the author of, among other titles, William James on Exceptional Mental States (1982); William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin (1996); with R. Wozniak (eds), Pure Experience: The Response to William James (1996); and, forthcoming, William James and the Spiritual Roots of American Pragmatism.

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