William James on Religion

208 Pages·2013·1.554 MB·English

by  Henrik Rydenfelt, Sami Pihlström (eds.)

Philosophers in Depth
Series Editors:Stephen Boulterrand Constantine Sandis
Philosophers in Depth is a series of themed edited collections focusing on particular aspects
of the thought of major figures from the history of philosophy. The volumes showcase a
combination of newly commissioned and previously published work with the aim of deep-
ening our understanding of the topics covered. Each book stands alone, but taken together
the series will amount to a vast collection of critical essays covering the history of philoso-
phy, exploring issues that are central to the ideas of individual philosophers. This project
was launched with the financial support of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research
at Oxford Brookes University, for which we are very grateful.
Constantine Sandis and Stephen Boulter
Oxford
Titles include:
Alison Denham (editorr)
PLATO ON ART AND BEAUTY
Philip Goff (editor)
SPINOZA ON MONISM
Leonard Kahn (editorr)
MILL ON JUSTICE
Arto Laitinen and Constantine Sandis (editors)
HEGEL ON ACTION
Katherine Morris (editorr)
SARTRE ON THE BODY
Charles R. Pigden (editorr)
HUME ON MOTIVATION AND VIRTUE
Sabine Roeser
REID ON ETHICS
Henrik Rydenfelt and Sami Pihlström (editors)
WILLIAM JAMES ON RELIGION
Daniel Whiting (editorr)
THE LATER WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE
Forthcoming titles:
Pierre Destree (editorr)
ARISTOTLE ON AESTHETICS
David Dolby (editorr)
RYLE ON MIND AND LANGUAGE
Edward Feser (editorr)
ARISTOTLE ON METHOD AND METAPHYSICS
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Also by Henrik Rydenfelt
PRAGMATISM, SCIENCE AND NATURALISM (co-editorr)
IDEAS IN ACTION (co-editorr)
PRAGMATIST PERSPECTIVES ( co- editor with Sami Pihlström)
Also by Sami Pihlström
NATURALIZING THE TRANSCENDENTAL
PRAGMATIC MORAL REALISM
“THE TRAIL OF THE HUMAN SERPENT IS OVER EVERYTHING”:
Jamesian Perspectives on Mind, World, and Religion
PRAGMATIST METAPHYSICS
TRANSCENDENTAL GUILT
PRAGMATIC PLURALISM AND THE PROBLEM OF GOD
CONTINUUM COMPANION TO PRAGMATISM (editorr)
William James on Religion
Edited by
Henrik Rydenfelt and Sami Pihlström
University of Helsinki, Finland
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Henrik Rydenfelt and
Sami Pihlström 2013
Chapters © Individual authors 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-34976-6
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Sami Pihlström and Henrik Rydenfelt
Part I
1 Religion and Pragmatism from
‘The Will to Believe’ toPragmatism 15
Wayne Proudfoot
2 Anti-Dogmatism as a Defense of Religious Belief 30
Charlene Haddock Seigfried
3 The Varietiesand the Cognitive Value
of Religious Experiences 56
Niek Brunsveld
4 Pragmatic Realism and Pluralism in Philosophy
of Religion 78
Sami Pihlström
Part II
5 ‘The Ethics of Belief’ Reconsidered 111
Susan Haack
6 Sensitive Truths and Sceptical Doubt 128
Henrik Rydenfelt
7 Reconceptualizing Evidentialism and the Evidentialist
Critique of Religion 145
D irk-M artin Grube
8 Possibility and Permission? Intellectual Character,
Inquiry, and the Ethics of Belief 165
Guy Axtell
Index 199
v
Acknowledgements
This book project was originally launched as a result of one of the many
workshops and/or conferences that the editors have co-organized both
together and with several collaborators over the past five years in all
the five Nordic countries with the Nordic Pragmatism Network (http://
www.nordprag.org). The workshop on pragmatism and the ethics of
belief took place at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in December
2008. Several of the papers included in the volume were presented in
their original versions at that meeting. However, some new ones were
invited as well. Two essays, those by Susan Haack and Wayne Proudfoot,
have also been published previously: Haack’s ‘“The Ethics of Belief”
Reconsidered’ first appeared in The Philosophy of R. M. Chisholm, eds.
P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1997), copy-
right by Open Court, while Proudfoot’s ‘William James on Religion
and Pragmatism’ appeared in Sats: North European Journal of Philosophy,
vol. 10, no. 2 (2010), copyright by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin (although
his contribution is based on his talk in Jyväskylä in 2008.) We would
like to express our sincere gratitude to the copyright holders for the
kind permissions to reprint, with minor editorial changes, these two
essays here. We are grateful to Dr. Constantine Sandis, the series editor
of Philosophers in Depth, as well as the editors at Palgrave Macmillan,
especially Melanie Blair, for their help and patience. We should like to
thank Mr. Taavi Sundell, one of the Research Assistants of the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies, for his valuable assistance in the
completion of the manuscript. We also duly acknowledge the financial
support from N OS- HS and NordForsk that the Nordic Pragmatism
Network has enjoyed in 2008–2012; this Nordic funding has made
this book as well as many other recent pragmatism-related projects
possible.
vi
Notes on Contributors
Guy Axtell is Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Religious Studies at
Radford University, Virginia, USA, where he also serves as Critical Thinking
Coordinator for Radford University’s general education sequence. He
is author of ‘Teaching James’ “The Will to Believe”’ (2001, Teaching
Philosophy) and numerous other recent articles in epistemology, meta-
physics, and philosophy of religion; he is often found blogging at
JanusBlog, the site he founded for news and discussion about all aspects
of contemporary virtue theory (www.janusblog.squarespace.com).
Niek Brunsveldreceived his PhD in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics
from Utrecht University’s Faculty of Humanities in December 2012,
where he was Junior Faculty in 2008–2012. He was Fulbright Visiting
Researcher at Harvard University’s Faculty of Divinity in 2010/2011.
His paper on ‘Putnam on truth (again). Conceptual truth in religion
and morality, and the risk of relativism’ received the Hilary Putnam
International Young Scholars Essay Prize in 2011.
Dirk-Martin Grube is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the
University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. His main publications include
the monograph Ostern als Paradigmenwechsel (2012) and the co- edited
volumeReligionsChallenged by Contingencyy(2008).
Susan Haack is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, Cooper Senior
Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of
Law, University of Miami. Her work includes Philosophy of Logics,Deviant
Logic, Fuzzy Logic,Evidence and Inquiry,Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate,
Defending Science—Within Reason, Pragmatism, Old and New, Putting
Philosophy to Work, and around 200 articles. Her work has been trans-
lated into 13 languages, and she has lectured around the world. Haack is
one of the tiny handful of living philosophers included in Peter J. King,
100 Philosophers: The Life and Work of the World’s Greatest Thinkers.
Sami Pihlström has since 2006 been Professor of Practical Philosophy
at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and since 2009 the Director of
the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He has published widely
on pragmatism, the problem of realism, philosophy of religion, and
transcendental philosophy. His books include Pragmatist Metaphysics
(2009) andPragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of Godd(2013).
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Wayne Proudfoot is Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion
at Columbia University. He is the author of Religious Experience (1985), of
articles on Peirce and James, and is working on religion and naturalism
in American pragmatism.
Henrik Rydenfelt is Researcher in Theoretical Philosophy at the
University of Helsinki. His recent publications are concentrated on a
pragmatist approach to normativity, addressing key questions in epis-
temology, meta-ethics, ethical theory and social philosophy. Rydenfelt
is the coordinator of the Nordic Pragmatism Network, assistant review
editor of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, associate editor
of Pragmatism Today, editor of Nordic Studies in Pragmatism, and a
member of the editorial board of theEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy.
Charlene Haddock Seigfried is Purdue University Professor Emeritus
of Philosophy. Key publications include William James’s Radical
Reconstruction of Philosophyy(1990) andPragmatism and Feminism (1996).
She editedFeminist Interpretations of John Deweyy(2002) and wrote intro-
ductions to Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics and The Long Road
of Woman’s Memory. Her awards include the Joseph L. Blau prize for
her paper on Jane Addams’s pragmatist influence on John Dewey and
the Herbert W. Schneider Award for distinguished contributions to
American Philosophy.
Introduction
Sami Pihlström and Henrik Rydenfelt (Editors)
The essays collected in this volume seek to provide an up-to-date and
comprehensive account of William James’ philosophy of religion. The
volume is divided into two parts. The first part discusses James’ pragma-
tism and his philosophy of religion at a relatively general level, while
the second one focuses on his b est-known idea in this field, the ‘will to
believe’ argument. Some of the essays are primarily historical, aiming at
a careful scholarly interpretation of certain aspects of James’ philosophy
of religion (in relation to his ideas in related fields, such as general
metaphysics and epistemology, as well as ethics); others focus on a
more systematic application of James’ views to key topics in this area of
philosophy, including the issue of realism and the ethics of belief.
This introduction will first offer a brief picture of James’ philosophical
life and works (section 1) and then consider his importance for the
philosophy of religion, both historically and regarding the contemporary
state of the art in this field (section 2). James’ famous, or notorious,
will to believe argument will be considered in section 3, while section 4
will very briefly summarize the main ideas of the articles included in
this volume.
Our present volume will, we hope, provide a balanced overview of
James’ philosophy of religion by contextualizing it both in his gene-
ral pragmatist thought and the current situation in the philosophy
of religion. The book is intended both for James scholars and for
n on-specialists, including students, who are seriously interested in
the philosophy of religion and want to get an overview of what this
classical figure thought about religious faith and experience. However,
the contributions are not introductory but are also intended as crucial
reference material for specialists on the philosophy of religion today.
Accordingly, while several books on James have been published over the
1