Although William James is best known today for his association with American pragmatism, in the later and most prolific years of his life he was more apt to characterize his central philosophical interest as the advancement of “radical empiricism,” a metaphysical Weltanschauung of his own invention. In the 1909 preface to The Meaning of Truth, James appealed to radical empiricism as the principal justification for his continued concern with the maelstrom of pragmatist and anti-pragmatist warfare, writing:

Although numerous works have taken radical empiricism seriously since James's death, little attention has been devoted to the development of the view in his work prior to the flurry of articles that introduced radical empiricism to James's philosophical contemporaries in 1904–5.

In chapter 2 I seek to redress that oversight, detailing James's turn from psychology to metaphysics in the early 1890s and demonstrating that the bulk of James's metaphysical ideas date, in significantly developed form, from as early as 1895. Before moving to that historical account, in this chapter I offer a relatively brief, systematic analysis of James's radical empiricism in order to provide a basis for the discussions of the rest of the book. My analysis in this chapter is based predominantly on the articles of 1904–5.