>> MARTIN JAY: The American Enlightenment included an empiricist moment, a moment in
which the important of the body, the importance of sensation, the importance of evidence from
the senses trumped any sort of deductive rationality any sort of received wisdom, any sort of doctrinal
authority.
[musical woosh]
>> DOUG ANDERSON: Empiricism is an old term. It comes from, initially from the notion of
quack doctors in the middle ages, empirics, people who went around and tried to diagnose
folks just sort of off the cuff, what you would call an alternative medical person today.
But it eventually came to mean, in its most generic form, that everything we know in the
world comes by way of our experience. Perception.
And most of the American philosophers would, in that sense, call themselves Empiricists.
>> MARTIN JAY: The Lockean moment in the early British empiricism played an important role
also in the ideology of the certainly the 18th century in America.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: The British empiricists are most often identified as John Locke, and
David Hume, and in many ways Bishop Berkeley who is an idealist as well, but his idealism
carried with it the traits of this
This theory of being that says that everything is apart, with the nominalism.
The claim was that the universe is constituted of little bits and pieces and that there are
no, sort of general connectors and relations, it?s just the little bitty pieces.
And so what perception does is take these little bitty pieces in and we reflect them
in a very straightforward way in our minds so it?s just facts and then perceptions, or
percepts, and then we take the percepts and we can do all sorts of things with them in
terms of science.
>> MARTIN JAY: And so, one would argue, I think, that the residue of Lockean empiricism
which you even find in religious figures like Jonathan Edwards is one of the first moments
in which the importance of a certain version of experience became, I think, paramount.
>> JOHN E. SMITH: He was quite a unique figure. He assimilated philosophical ideas and ideas
of the Enlightenment with his theological tradition.
>> LARRY HICKMAN: Yes, I think there is something distinctive about the American strand of philosophy
that goes from the Puritans up through Edwards through Emerson and I would include Jefferson
and Whitman here and also through the Federalist Papers, through the work of Chauncey Wright
and Nicholas Saint John Green and Charles Peirce.
>> MARTIN JAY: But its often argued that it isn?t really until the time of Oliver Wendell
Holmes and then James, Dewey, and their followers that experience as a kind of God-term, we
might say, developed the priority in American philosophy.
>> RICHARD BERNSTEIN: Philosophy in America really becomes a, really comes into its flowering
in the post-Civil War period in terms of what we would recognize as philosophy. This very
broad sense, which you could talk about people?s views on things and that comes earlier but
it really is in the post-Civil War period with the figures and the prominent figures
that we begin to identify like Peirce and James and Dewey and Royce and Mead. I mean
this is a great period of flowering at the end of the nineteenth century.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: But what other empiricists, radical empiricists, phenomenologists
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: Peirce also said that the first order of business of philosophy is,
phaneroscopy as he put it in his quirky way, or phenomenology.
>> DOUG ANDERSON: and others later in the history of this tradition, tried to show is
that there?s much more to be seen and observed and experienced than this nominalistic, sort
of, thin version that we got from what I would call British empiricism in the history of
British empiricism.
>> BRUCE WILSHIRE: a phenomenology, a description of how the world actually grabs us, hot off
the griddle of the world as William James put it.
>> MARTIN JAY: They were also very interested in what might be called the expansion of experience
beyond its purely scientific and empiricst notions in the Lockean sense. So someone like
James, in particular, developed a notion of radical empiricism which expanded the idea
of experience beyond pure sensations to something deeper that included feelings, included a
kind of level of interiority as well as a level of immersion in the world that could,
in fact, admit even religious experience. And one of, of course the great books that
James wrote, ?The Varieties of Religious Experience?, was an attempt to be as welcoming as possible
to non-scientific experiences, give them a certain, at least, validity as something to
be questioned rather than something to be dismissed out of hand.