Public Theology, the Ethics of Belief and the Challenge of Divine Hiddenness

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-407
Author(s):  
Owen Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
William James ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

AbstractThis article considers the claim made by William Clifford that no belief should be held without sufficient reason and its implications for belief in God and public theology. Responses to Clifford, notably by William James, have tended to emphasize the personal side of religious belief. Public theology assumes a means for settling disputes through rational argument. However, David Hume and Immanuel Kant raised significant challenges to belief in God, and this developed during the nineteenth century into a rejection of public theology. This article traces the intellectual history behind Clifford's claim, and argues that, by the time that Freud offers his claim that belief in God is immature, the justification for public theology has been undermined. By clearly identifying the challenge facing public theology, this article lays the framework for constructing a response to the critique of reason given by Kant and the scepticism of Hume. If public theology is to be defended, this response is both necessary and timely.

De scheepseigenaar en de gelovige: William Clifford over God, bewijs en doxastische verantwoordelijkheid

2007 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Rik Peels
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
William James ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Extensive Analysis ◽  
William Kingdon Clifford ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

At the end of the nineteenth century, in his famous essay ‘The Ethics of Belief’ the well-known mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford offered a powerful argument against religious beliefs. This article first gives an extensive analysis of Clifford’s evidentialist argument by placing it against the background of his evidentialist epistemology. Second, some arguments of William James, Clifford’s most famous critic, are expounded and criticised. Although there is some plausibility to these arguments, they are insufficient to refute Clifford’s evidentialism. Third, the author presents some problems for Clifford’s evidentialism, having to do with evidentialism as a moral thesis and with doxastic involuntarism, and offers some new arguments against Clifford’s evidentialist argument. Clifford’s argument against belief in God, as it stands, turns out to be untenable.

Henry James and the Art of Impressions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Henry James ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
William James ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
History Of

Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.

4. Divine hiddenness and the nature of faith

2018 ◽  
pp. 52-63
Author(s):  
Tim Bayne
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
William James ◽  
Divine Hiddenness ◽  
Belief In God

Assuming—as theists invariably do—that God wants to be recognized and worshipped, why does God not make Godself manifest? Perhaps God is ‘silent’ because God doesn’t exist. ‘Divine hiddenness and the nature of faith’ considers both the hiddenness objection and the benefits of divine hiddenness: that divine hiddenness is a precondition for moral agency; that if God’s existence were evident to us then any relationship that we might have with God would be inauthentic; and that belief in God is more virtuous when it is based on faith. It also discusses the thoughts of W.K. Clifford, William James, and Søren Kierkegaard on religious belief.

William James and the Ethics of Belief

Philosophy ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 58 (225) ◽  
pp. 353-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.L. Doore
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Main Principle ◽  
Insufficient Evidence ◽  
Widespread Agreement ◽  
The Will ◽  
American Style ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that William James's well-known attempt to justify religious faith in ‘The Will to Believe’ is a failure. But despite the fact that James wrote his essay as a reply to the ‘tough-minded’ ethics of belief represented by such thinkers as W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley, the reasons commonly given today for rejecting James's position seem to be mostly based on the same principle of intellectual ethics that motivated Clifford and Huxley. Clifford, it may be recalled, maintained that ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’. Although this is a rather rhetorical way of stating it, the principle is basically the same one adhered to by most scientists and philosophers who consider themselves rigorous and ‘objective’ thinkers. Even philosophers not associated with the hardheaded modern Anglo-American style of empiricism commonly pledge their allegiance to such a principle. For example, Brand Blanshard (who is an epistemological idealist) holds that the ‘main principle’ of the ethics of belief is that one should ‘equate one's assent to the evidence’ and he then goes on to criticize James, on the basis of this principle, for advocating self-deception and intellectual dishonesty.

The Morality of Religious Belief

1985 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-557
Author(s):  
Clyde Nabe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
William James ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

Van Harvey's The Historian and the Believer appeared nearly a century after W. K. Clifford's ‘The ethics of belief’. Harvey is critical of the epistemological supports of religious belief in a way strikingly similar to Clifford's criticisms. But Clifford's view did not go uncriticized in the intervening period. William James for instance used Clifford's essay as a foil for his argument in ‘The will to believe’. Now here is Clifford's argument again offered in twentieth century garb in Harvey's book. That a view so similar to Clifford's can arise again a century later, and after strong criticism, suggests that there is some important integrity to that view, and that that view strikes a responsive chord in the ear of many contemporary human beings. This paper intends therefore to examine Clifford's and Harvey's works in order to uncover what makes their shared view attractive.

James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Hollinger
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
William James ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Ethics Of Belief

This chapter presents a comparative reading of W. K. Clifford's 1877 treatise, “The Ethics of Belief,” and William James' 1897 essay, “The Will to Believe.” It provides an interpretation of each in the distinctive contexts of England in the 1870s and New England in the 1890s. It argues that Clifford displayed more sensitivity than James did to the consequences of belief. This is an ironic reversal of roles in the story of a great pragmatist who insisted that “the whole defense of religious faith hinges upon” the action that faith requires or inspires. James' “The Will to Believe” should be understood not only as an artifact of its author's agony about the fate of Christianity in the age of science, but also as a product of his political complacency. Clifford had a much more modern understanding than James did of the function of belief systems in society and politics.

Contexts (I)

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-94
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
William James ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Way

Chapter 2 begins the book’s intellectual history of the impression from the seventeenth century to the twentieth (which continues in Chapter 3). These contexts come from two movements, empiricism and aestheticism. Chapter 2 explores empiricist contexts, arguing that James’s impression owes much to empiricist philosophy (John Locke, David Hume), and nineteenth-century empiricist psychology (James Mill, J. S. Mill, Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, William James). By tracking the word ‘impression’, we can see that Locke and Hume’s stress on first-hand observation, and on thought as a kind of perception, are contexts for James’s conception of the imaginative but observant novelist, for the epistemological demands he makes on his readers, and for the way he represents his characters’ consciousnesses, especially in recognition scenes. Nineteenth-century empiricists’ divergence as to the agency of the subject in consciousness is reflected in James’s characters whose impressions by turns assault them from the exterior, or are partly fictions of their own making.

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