WILLIAM JAMES: “PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT, OPTIMISM OF THE WILL”

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-287
Author(s):  
CUSHING STROUT
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Secular World ◽  
The Will ◽  
Point Of Departure

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, centenary edition, foreword Micky James, intro. Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (Routledge, 2002)Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Harvard University Press, 2002)William James and a Science of Religions, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (Columbia University Press, 2004)William James has a secure reputation as a pioneer psychologist and as a founding father of the philosophy of pragmatism. In his own time, however, he was best known and most popular among the laity for “The Will to Believe” (1895) and for The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), which were defenses erected on behalf of religion in an increasingly secular world. Religious liberals treated the Bible as one human document among others and Christian faith as one tradition among many, but they “sought to salvage what they could of traditional belief, piety, and ethic.” James was part of this movement that took science, empiricism, and modern philosophy as a point of departure, but his contribution to it was distinctive, original, and (in his own idiom) unusually “tough-minded.”

George Fox as a Mystic

1913 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Josiah Royce
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Ultimate Result ◽  
George Fox

This paper is but a fragmentary contribution to that study of the “Varieties of Religious Experience” which William James has so significantly brought to the attention of students of human nature. I propose to sketch some personal peculiarities of the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, and in the end to show what place was filled in his life by what may be called his experiences as a mystic. Every one knows that the typical Quakers have made prominent amongst their spiritual exercises what they call “silent worship” as conducted in their meetings, and that they have held that this “silent worship” often brings the worshipper under the direct influence of the movings of the Divine Spirit. I have here no concern with any question as to the truth or as to the ultimate merits of this or of any other tenet of George Fox or of his followers. I intend simply to show the place that the experiences of silent worship occupied in the mental life of Fox himself, and why he found this form of what is technically called mysticism a valuable feature of his religious consciousness. This study will bring us into somewhat closer contact with the mental complications of a remarkable personality—a personality in which the normal and the abnormal were in a very interesting way united. We shall see how certain tendencies that, in another context, would have proved highly dangerous to the sanity of their possessor were so combined in Fox that the ultimate result was prevailingly good, both for himself and for his environment. Religious history contains many instances where men whose mental life showed numerous abnormal traits still were so constituted that they retained their essential self-control and accomplished a great work. The study of Fox presents one more such instance, and may also possess genuine psychological interest.Since my discussion deals with Fox as a mystic, I shall first have to explain what one technically means by mysticism in religion. Then I shall have to show that Fox had many traits which were not those of the typical mystic. And, finally, I shall try to point out what part Fox's mystical tendencies played in determining certain aspects of his mind and of his career.

William James

Philosophy ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Slater
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Radical Empiricism ◽  
Empirical Psychology ◽  
The Will

William James (b. 1842–d. 1910) was the most influential American philosopher and psychologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the founding father of empirical psychology in the United States. A thinker of unusually broad interests and abilities and a physiologist by training, James rose to international prominence with the publication of his monumental The Principles of Psychology (originally published in 1890), but devoted roughly the last twenty years of his life to popular lecturing on philosophical and psychological topics and to the articulation and development of his philosophical views, the seeds of which can be largely found in Principles. He is perhaps best known to philosophers today as one of the originators of pragmatism (along with Charles Sanders Peirce), and for his defense of innovative and controversial philosophical doctrines such as radical empiricism and “the will to believe.” In addition to Principles, James’s most famous works are The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (published first in 1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (published in 1902), and Pragmatism (first published in 1907).

scholarly journals Transformationen der Kantischen Postulatenlehre im „Cambridge Pragmatism“ (Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce)

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-75
Author(s):  
Ludwig Nagl
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
The Will ◽  
Josiah Royce ◽  
Modern Experience

The “Cambridge pragmatists”, Charles S. Peirce, William James and Josiah Royce, are at least in two respects significantly indebted to Kant: first, as von Kempski, Apel and Murphey have shown, with regard to the epistemological issues investigated in pragmatism; secondly, with regard to the various pragmatic approaches to religion, something which has been long overlooked. These approaches are best understood as innovative re-readings of Kant’s postulates of freedom, immortality, and God. Since Hilary Putnam pointed out — in his 1992 book Renewing Philosophy — that James’s essay, “The Will to Believe”, in spite of having received a great deal of hostile criticism, is in “its logic, in fact, precise and impeccable”, James’s thoughts are considered by many contemporary philosophers (by Charles Taylor, e.g., and by Hans Joas) as particularly inspiring. James’s approach is based on the modern experience of secularism and interprets Kant’s “postulate” as the “option” to believe. A deepening of the debate on the relevance of Kant’s analysis of the horizon of religious hope with regard to human praxis for a pragmatism-inspired philosophy of religion can be expected from a detailed discussion of the thoughts of Peirce and Royce, of thoughts, which, in complex ways, relate to, as well as criticise, James’s individuum-focused interpretation of religious faith.

Spiritual Goods and the Content of Religious Belief

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-241
Author(s):  
Mark R. Wynn
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
William James ◽  
Basic Structure ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Divine Nature ◽  
The Will ◽  
Perfect Being Theology

This chapter considers how the conception of spiritual goods that has been introduced in earlier chapters may provide a framework for the assessment of theological narratives. In brief, a narrative will make more of a demand upon us, in spiritual terms, to the extent that its truth would enable the realization of hybrid goods that run broad and deep. In this chapter, we call this the principle of spiritual good, and compare it with other ways of trying to map the basic structure of religious thought, notably the ‘great-making principle’ that has been propounded in perfect being theology. This second principle offers a divine-nature-focused route into the question of what we are to think in religious terms, whereas the proposal we are developing begins rather with the nature of spiritual goods, and is to that extent more human-nature-focused. We consider how the principle of spiritual good may enable us to integrate otherwise apparently quite disparate fields of enquiry, and how it may throw light on the entrenched character of some disagreements in philosophical theology. We also compare this principle to a related principle that William James presents in his essay ‘The Will to Believe’. James is also interested in the idea that prospective spiritual ‘benefits’ may provide a measure for the adequacy of religious thought, but the benefits with which he is concerned are, characteristically, psychological in nature, unlike hybrid goods, which have inherently a theological structure.

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