Who maintained that reality is pure experience independent of all thoughts ?
William James
William James, in his radical empiricism (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912, especially “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”), held that the primal stuff of reality is “pure experience” – the immediate flux of life prior to any conceptual division into subject and object, mind and matter.
For James, thoughts and things are not two different substances; the same bit of pure experience counts as “thought” in one context of relations and as “thing” in another. Pure experience is therefore prior to and independent of the conceptual work of thought.
Berkeley reduced reality to ideas perceived by minds (esse est percipi), Locke was a representative realist who distinguished material substance from the ideas it causes, and Bradley’s Absolute is a single all-inclusive experience reached precisely by showing that relational thought is self-contradictory – none of them takes reality as pure experience in James’s sense.
Hence, the answer is William James.
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