Abstract
This essay examines how William James conceptualized the philosophy of religion, including his view about the future of religion, for the purpose of aiding our own view on the future of this field in the present age. It focuses on three different aspects of his thought about religion against a backdrop of the centrality of our evolutionary, creaturely frame. First, I talk about selected pre-Varieties essays, in which James focuses on the relations of thought and action. In so doing, I will note where theism fits in for James then, and attend to his very straightforward conceptual generalizations about what religion implies. Second, I talk about James’s psychological findings about religion, glossing some of the details of Varieties with regard to the individual and social aspects of religion. And third, I turn briefly to the developed “pragmatic” and “radical-empiricist” period of James’s thought, where he delineates religion’s connection to his pluralistic meliorism. This culminates in a clear suggestion that the twenty-first century is not likely to see humankind evolving “beyond” religion, in any meaningful sense.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dinitia Smith, “Another Top 100 List: Now It’s Nonfiction,” The New York Times, April 30, 1999. First place went to Henry Adams, third to Booker T. Washington, and fourth to Virginia Woolf, so James was in fine company, despite the problems with such lists.
- 2.
- 3.
Wyman was more of an influence on James than Aggasiz, according to Perry, and certainly, James’s ideas resonate more with Wyman than with Aggasiz’s denial of Darwinian evolution. See Perry 1935, 1:208–9. Please note that in the interest of promoting open access, I make all references to public domain editions when possible. For writers who publish in English, normally I refer to the original copyrighted edition, which is most likely to be out of copyright and available in public resources such as Google Books and the Open Library, among others.
- 4.
James’s similarities to Kant should be evident. Kant argues on both theoretical and practical grounds that our move to theism is driven by certain needs of reason, and he plays this out differently in terms of intellectual coherence of the natural and intelligible, as well as in terms of a guarantor of justice. James takes God in similar ways, but doesn’t give any basis for understanding why God shares our interests, a point that Kant situates in the formal structure of reason. Rather, for James, it seems more that we can only recognize a God who shares our better interests, but that we do recognize this God (or power). And, moreover, this is for James motivational, a point which Kant fully resists.
- 5.
This is a belief that James will, eventually, seek to justify with his defense of the right to believe.
- 6.
“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to the divine.” James 1902, 34.
- 7.
Proudfoot (1987) Religious Experience.
- 8.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” 1841, 47. C.f.:, James’scomments about the plural and competing forms of rationality in A Pluralistic Universe (1909b).
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Lamberth, D.C. (2021). William James Revisted: “Pragmatic” Approaches to Religion. In: Eckel, M.D., Speight, C.A., DuJardin, T. (eds) The Future of the Philosophy of Religion. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_16
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