Supporting the study, critique, and appreciation of American philosophy and culture--"American Studies"-- in the tradition of William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, Emerson, Thoreau, et al... This site was constructed initially to support an Independent Readings course at Middle Tennessee State University in the Spring 2021 semester.
Having the Will to Believe and Respecting the Believing of Others – A Justification of Faith in Religious Matters from The Will to Believe
PREFACE This is an essay on believing. What is a belief, and how do we come to believe? Do you believe that God exists? 'Do you believe in God?' is a question we all are asked by others and of ourselves at one time or another. The answer is either 'yes', 'no', or 'I don't know'; a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic. The theist believes in God; the atheist believes in not-God. Both believe. How do they know their belief is the true belief? What makes a belief true?
This is an essay on William James's famous essay, The Will to Believe, and the lessons to be learned from it. In his essay, James provides a justification for a believer's faith in God, and the basis for respecting the religious believing of others. He provides lessons in the psychology of believing. He shows what it means for a thing or proposition to be true. He shows how our psychological nature determines what we believe when objective proof of a fact is lacking, and how we can, through believing, create a fact. In the end, he argues that certain people, those who are strongly inclined to believe in God, ought to summon the courage to believe. Summoning courage is an act of will — the will to believe.[1]
INTRODUCTION Imagine a conversation that begins with these questions: Do you have religious faith? Do you believe the teachings of your religion are true? Do you believe the teachings of other religions are false? Do you believe that other religions' believers believe that the teachings of their religion are true and yours false? Whose teachings are true? These questions will necessarily lead to a discussion about belief, the truth of a belief, and faith. If you say you believe in God and the teachings of your particular religion, why do you? How did you come to your beliefs? Is there objective evidence of the truth of your beliefs? You can through your intellect and rational thought know that Abraham Lincoln existed, but what evidence can you provide the skeptic of God's existence?
Ultimately your answer must come down to a 'leap of faith'. You choose to believe. You know God exists because something inside of you, your very nature, tells you so...
"What I seek to demonstrate is that James's integrated view is best understood as beginning with radical empiricism - as traditionally understood from the perspective of the posthumously collected Essays in Radical Empiricism - and including pragmatism. More importantly, however, James's world-view must also be taken to incorporate several crucial modifications to these more familiar views: namely, a modified and expanded notion of rationality on a spectrum between intimacy and foreignness, and a moderately panpsychist interpretation of reality that allows for the possibility of superhuman (or "supernatural") entities or activities. On my reading it is probably better to refer to James's overall view as "radical empiricism" rather than "pragmatism," but it is also crucial to take this radical empiricism to include several critical refinements to the views familiar from Essays in Radical Empiricism."
"William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought Book 5)" by David C. Lamberth: https://a.co/c1AJiQN
Dear Brother Hobhouse,—Don't you think it a tant soit peu scurvy trick to play on me ('tis true that you don't name me, but to the informed reader the reference is transparent—I say nothing of poor Schiller's case) to print in the "Aristotelian Proceedings" (pages 104 ff.)[54] a beautiful duplicate of my own theses in the "Will to Believe" essay (which should have been called by the less unlucky title the Right to Believe) in the guise of an alternative and substitute for my doctrine, for which latter you, in the earlier pages of your charmingly written essay, substitute a travesty for which I defy any candid reader to find a single justification in my text? My essay hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough. It made of tolerance the essence of the situation; it defined the permissible cases; it treated the faith-attitude as a necessity for individuals, because the total "evidence," which only the race can draw, has to include their experiments among its data. It tended to show only that faith could not be absolutely vetoed, as certain champions of "science" (Clifford, Huxley, etc.) had claimed it ought to be. It was a function that might lead, and probably does lead, into a wider world. You say identically the same things; only, from your special polemic point of view, you emphasize more the dangers; while I, from my polemic point of view, emphasized more the right to run their risk... Letters II
Mainly for me it means the pragmatist tradition, although I’ve gotten very interested recently in earlier figures like Emerson: so Emerson, Thoreau, the Concord group as well. I’m a big fan of Bruce Kuklick’s work on the history of American philosophy. But mainly I’m interested in the pragmatists and in James and Dewey more than Peirce. And then some of the neo-pragmatists: Dick Rorty and Hilary Putnam, less Bob Brandom and Huw Price, but also Cheryl Misak and Dick Bernstein. So it means basically the pragmatist tradition though I’ve started to take it back to earlier figures. I think both James and Dewey were significantly influenced by the Concord group and by Emerson in particular.
I have to say I really have a soft spot for James. There are lots of things in James that I greatly like but for me Dewey is the pinnacle. I think I say in at least one place that I think Dewey was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century—and I firmly believe that.
Sometimes James is too good a writer for his own philosophical good, so the problem is that his sense of style gets in the way, and he muddles and fuzzes some of his concepts because he can’t bear to use the same phraseology twice. That leads to unclarities and ambiguities. But there are wonderful things in James: I think “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” is a brilliant essay; I think the “The Will to Believe” is great; I think some of the early essays are fantastic; I think the Pragmatism lectures are very rich; The Varieties of Religious Experience is extraordinary. As James gets more scholarly and scholastic I think he’s less interesting.
How did you become an American philosopher?
It’s hard for me to identify as an American philosopher since I’m in danger of saying something both true and false at the same time. I actually am an American citizen, but I don’t think many people would consider me a true American. I was born in Britain and so under one description it’s a bit odd for me to say I’m an American philosopher. But I am a philosopher who is profoundly influenced by the American tradition. I’m also influenced by the logical empiricist tradition, particularly by people like Hempel and Reichenbach. I’m somebody for whom the American tradition is dominant, but it’s also inflected by Hempel, Reichenbach, and Kuhn. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a major work for me. I think it’s interesting that Kuhn himself was influenced by the pragmatists at a time when they weren’t at all fashionable. I think had Neurath lived the pragmatists and logical empiricists would have been closer. Hempel had some sympathies for Dewey. And then Ernest Nagel of course, who was Dewey’s colleague, and you can see Nagel continuing the pragmatist tradition, and you also have Quine and Goodman. Later on Putnam goes back to it in I think some very interesting ways and Ruth Anna Putnam does as well.
I’ve told the story many times about how I got interested in Dewey. I arrived at Columbia in 1999 and Isaac Levi said to me, “Look, Sidney Morgenbesser’s housebound and he’d appreciate it if you went over to visit him sometime.” So I went and I enjoyed talking to Sidney so much that I would go see him every week and I would always come out walking on air. I’d written this book called Science, Truth, and Democracy and I gave a copy to Sidney. The next time I went he said, “you sound just like Dewey. You ever read any Dewey?” And I said “no, it’s so difficult.” And Sidney said, “you need to read The Quest for Certainty” and so I went away and read it. In Dewey I found all these thoughts that I’d struggled to reach for years. I thought, my God, there’s so much in this. And then I read everything.
How would you describe your current research?
So I’ve recently been writing—in fact I’ve just published in the last year—the first two parts of what’s envisaged as a trilogy on pragmatism. The first part is a book called Moral Progress which is distinctly Deweyan and quite short and the second is is a big fat book with an Emersonian title: The Main Enterprise of the World (which comes from “The American Scholar”). Its subtitle is Rethinking Education. It began with an attempt to redo Dewey’s Democracy and Education but it just grew enormously. The third part of the trilogy is tentatively titled Homo Quaerens: Progress, Truth and Values. Now my line here is that “Homo sapiens” is a complete rubbish. We’re not “wise”. Homo cognoscens would be more accurate, but still an over-statement. “Homo quaerens”: we’re the species that inquires. We try to know, we try to find things out. In my book, I focus on inquiry, trying to craft a successor discipline to epistemology, in a Deweyan spirit. It’s an attempt to develop a theory of inquiry that will cover not just the sciences but also everyday inquiries of all sorts: inquiry into value and into mathematics and into religion and so on.
In the meantime, I have a short book coming out called What’s the Use of Philosophy? And I’m going to do another Deweyan-inspired book called Bringing Home the Goods. There’s this line in Experience and Nature where Dewey says, “as empirical fact, however, the arts, those of converse and the literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human perception” (LW 1:322) So, Bringing Home the Goods seems to me a good title for showing how works of literature bring home some really essential points. I may at some point write a short book on James. I’m having a great time just because I’ve got all this stuff inside my head that seems to want to come out.
What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?
Well, I do lots of things: I do still sometimes write in philosophy of science; I do other philosophical things. I love listening to music and I love delving into works of literature. Since the pandemic came, and after a 50-year hiatus, I started writing poetry again, so I write poetry from time to time. And I run and I like to walk and I like to go to concerts and I like to cook and I like to see my grandchildren. It’s a pretty good life.
What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?
Well, those are two different questions. My favorite works in American philosophy are written by John Dewey and I do think that Dewey is almost impossible to read unless you read more than one of his works. I’m not sure what I would pick out as my favorite work of Dewey’s: that’s terribly hard to answer. I think people should read Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, Human Nature and Conduct, Reconstruction in Philosophy, Democracy and Education, A Common Faith, and The Public and Its Problems. If we read those that would be good.
But if I had to recommend one book that we ought to be reading, I think it would either be James’ The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy or Pragmatism. Those are accessible, as single books, in a way that Dewey’s books aren’t. But what I want to say is this: read several of Dewey’s books. If that doesn’t count as an answer I’ll go either for The Will to Believe or Pragmatism, and probably Pragmatism, but there are things in The Will to Believe that I think are really important for people to read, like “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” american-philosophy.org
"INTRODUCTION THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS COUNTRY W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil Richard Rorty (1931–2007) is best known to the wider public as the philosopher who predicted Trump. During the 2016 presidential election, eerily prescient warnings from his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that existing forces of American politics might set the country on a road to fascism, went viral on social media. With neither the left nor the right showing concern for the growing economic disparities in America, he contended in 1998, a large swath of voters already experiencing the negative impact of globalization would become acutely disillusioned with the political establishment. Suffering from economic inequality and insecurity, these mostly white, working-class citizens would feel that they had nowhere to turn for advocacy on their behalf, since conservatives had neglected their interests and liberals were rejecting their values. "At that point, something will crack," he prophesied, and "the nonsuburban electorate would decide that the system had failed." They would start looking around for a populist "strongman" who would pay homage to their fears. He would be elected to the Oval Office and ultimately roll back the progressive achievements of the previous decades. "Jocular contempt for women," Rorty predicted, would come back into vogue, along with racial and ethnic epithets thought to have been defeated. "Media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war," would be manufactured to distract citizens from exploitation by the "super-rich" and "the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates" would be stoked. "This strongman leader, he concluded, "will be a disaster for the country and the world." 1 The same premises that led Rorty to predict Trump generated other predictions and warnings: predictions about a new civil war in America, a new feudalism in the West, and a new, brutal world order resulting from global overpopulation. These potential outcomes are universally grim and look even more probable now than when Rorty first envisioned them. He may well turn out to be the philosopher who predicted not only the 2016 election but the political upheavals still ahead of us. This book gathers these and other Rortyan prophecies about the dark and disturbing currents still coursing through the bodies politic in America and around the globe. It also contains essays that show that, if he were alive today, Rorty would be uneasy about the label "the philosopher who predicted Trump." Not because it diminishes the contributions to perennial philosophical subjects that made him one of the most cited American thinkers of the twentieth century. Quite the contrary, he would be uneasy about the label because, judged from the theoretical perspective he advocated, it makes his philosophical contributions look too important. It suggests that he predicted Trump thanks to some superior philosophical acumen and thereby strengthens the traditional image of philosophers as people whose special expertise allows them to see the world more clearly than everyone else. Rorty believed that image to be mistaken and argued that taking it seriously was one of the reasons why the American academic left, which he believed to be "overphilosophized," was failing miserably. These diagnoses and critiques, still of enormous relevance to understanding how the contemporary left, in the United States and elsewhere, has boxed itself into a corner, are included here as well. What Can We Hope For? also conveys Rorty's pragmatic philosophy of democratic change. It contains his recommendations for concrete reforms to ameliorate injustice and inequality and his positive vision for what safeguarding our democracy and our highest aspirations requires. He understood that the integrity of democracy depends on stable and secure institutions like a free press, a free judiciary, and free elections. He also grasped that democracy requires a moral community that must be actively cultivated, grounded in our sense of who we and our fellow citizens are and should become. These essays outline Rorty's strategies—more timely now than ever—for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust."
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— What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty
https://a.co/064zo9B
The debut episode ofStrange New Worlds includes a wonderful Jamesian speech from Captain Pike, to the warring parties of an alien planet the federation has contaminated with a glimpse of warp technology they weren't ready for.
“I choose to believe that your destinies are still your own. Maybe that’s why I’m here: to remind you of the power of possibility...right up until the very end life is to be worn gloriously. Because, ‘til the last moment, the future’s what we make it. So, go to war with each other. Or, join our federation of planets and reach for the stars. The choice is yours.”
That's Jamesian, on my reading, because it echoes WJ's forward-looking, risk-taking, ready-for-anything attitude of openness to possibility, of refusal to be locked into a deficient actuality. "No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance."
