The Stream of Consciousness: XXIV. James Contra the Intellectualists (Second Part)

Abstract

James presented a number of compelling arguments against those theorists whom he called the “Intellectualists”: a) for holding that mental states of the mundane Jamesian qualitative kind cannot provide us with our awareness of relations; and b) for introducing purely conceptualizing mental acts to do the job from on high. In his classic account of mental life, James found no use for purely conceptualizing mental states, whether in relation to our awareness of objective relations or in relation to our awareness of anything else. All of the mental states that constitute the stream of consciousness—and therefore, in James's view, all mental states that occur in us—are of the qualitative/cognitive kind, whether they are minimal conceivings of the sensation kind or they have the most abstract objects. I continue in the present article to discuss James's responses to the Intellectualists. I discuss in particular how James addressed their claim that an account of the apprehension of universals requires the theoretical introduction of mental states purportedly resembling universals, namely, purely conceptualizing mental acts.