Abstract
David Hollinger points out that
[C]laims about the continuity between [William] James’ ‘The Will to Believe’ [1896] and Varieties of Religious Experience [1902] … are rarely engaged critically because many of the philosophers who address ‘The Will to Believe’ are not much interested in Varieties, and many of the religious studies scholars for whom Varieties is a vital text have relatively little invested in the agendas that drive philosophers’ interpretation of ‘The Will to Believe’.2
This already serious problem is compounded if we are specifically trying to understand and evaluate James’ ethics of belief, for as Gregory Pappas rightly notes, ‘the difficulty in reconstructing James’ position in the ethics of belief stems from the fact that there is no place where he explicitly presents it in a comprehensive and systematic way. Rather, it seems, a significant portion of his extensive writing is relevant to its unraveling.’3
In detail all the religious beliefs are illusory or absurd. How hold the dignity of the general function upright in this state of things? … It is a question of life, of living in these gifts or not living, etc. There is a chance todo something strong here, but it is extremely difficult.—James, Manuscript and Essay Notes1
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Notes
W. James (1988) Manuscript Essays and Notes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), #4476, p. 311.
D. Hollinger (2006) ‘Damned for God’s Glory: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture’ in W. Proudfoot (ed.) William James and a Science of Religions ( New York: Columbia University Press ), p. 11.
G. Pappas (1994) ‘William James’ Virtuous Believer’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 30 (1), p. 77.
James dedicated Pragmatism to Mill, ‘from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today’. W. James (1975 [1907]) Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 18.
I. Barbour (2000) When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco ), p. 23.
See also H. Jackman (1999) ‘Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 35 (1), pp. 1–37.
D. Hollinger (1997) ‘James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience’ in R. A. Putnam (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to William James ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press ), p. 80.
J. S. Mill (1859) On Liberty, chapter 3, URL: www.utilitarianism.com/ol/three.html (accessed 11 September, 2012 ).
W. James, ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’ (1979) in F. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. K. Skrupselis (eds.) The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 117–18. This is quite a contrast to Varieties and still later works like ‘Reason and Faith’, which asserts that ‘the religious question, we agreed, is a question about facts’.
W. James (1927) ‘Reason and Faith’, Journal of Philosophy, 24 (8), p. 199.
Gregory Fernando Pappas (1996) ‘ Open- mindedness and Courage: Complementary Virtues of Pragmatism’, p. 78, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 32(2), pp. 316–35. Pappas here quotes
W. James (1978) Essays in Philosophy ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ), p. 332.
W. James ( 1979 [1896]) The Will to Believe ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. xii.
Wernham writes that ‘The ladder is not advocacy but description … If one compares James’ will-to-believe doctrine and the ladder, one finds differences between them and similarities too. The will-to-believe doctrine is advocacy.’ J. C. S. Wernham (1987) James’s Will- To- Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press; 1st edn).
W. James (1917 [1910]) ‘Faith and the Right to Believe’ in Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 223.
On descriptive fideism and philosophical disputes about it, see also L. Pojman (1986) Religious Belief and the Will ( London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), chapter 9.
W. James (1987) Essays, Comments, Reviews ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press ), p. 115.
W. James ( 2002 [1902]) The Varieties of Religious Experience ( New York: Dover Publications ), p. 526.
J. E. Smith (1985) ‘Introduction’ in W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. xlii.
See I. Lakatos (1978) The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
The connections between James and Duhem are historical as well as logical, as Isaac Nevo points out. See Isaac Nevo, ‘Continuing Empiricist Epistemology: Holistic Aspects of William James’s Pragmatism’, The Monist 75 (1992), pp. 458–76. Given the basic correctness of Duhemian confirmation holism, Lakatos concludes that evaluation in science is comparative and historical: ‘But, of course, if falsification depends on the emergence of better theories ... then falsification is not simply a relation between a theory and the empirical basis, but a multiple relation between competing theories, the original “empirical basis”, and the empirical growth resulting from the competition’ (ibid., p. 35).
Other proponents of this sort of moderate fideism might be J. Welchman (2006) ‘William James’s “The Will to Believe” and the Ethics of Self-Experimentation’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 42 (2), 229–41;
J. Bishop (2007) Belief by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief ( Oxford: Oxford University Press);
and E. Suckiel (1997) Heaven’s Champion: William James’s Philosophy of Religion ( Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press).
R. Pouivet (2010) ‘Moral and Epistemic Virtues: A Thomistic and Analytical Perspective’, Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy, 15 (1), p. 2.
S. Napier (2009) Virtue Epistemology: Motivation and Knowledge ( London: Continuum ), p. 144.
S. Haack (1997) ‘The Ethics of Belief Reconsidered’ in L. Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm ( LaSalle, IL: Open Court ), p. 130.
James, The Will to Believe, p. 8. Compare how close the passage is to late James: ‘Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birthrights of our mind. Of course it must remain a practical, and not a dogmatical attitude. It must go with toleration of other faiths, with the search for the most probable, and with the full consciousness of responsibilities and risks’ (James, ‘Faith and the Right to Believe’, p. 113). On cognitive risk-taking and personal identity, see Jennifer Welchman’s “William James’s ‘The Will to Believe’ and the Ethics of Self-Experimentation,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.2 (2006), 229–241.
R. Audi (2008) ‘The Ethics of Belief: Doxastic Self- Control and Intellectual Virtue’, Synthese, 161 (3), p. 416.
R. Audi (2011) ‘The Ethics of Belief and the Morality of Action: Intellectual Responsibility and Rational Disagreement’, Philosophy, 86, p. 28.
R. A. Christian (2009) ‘Restricting the Scope of the Ethics of Belief: Haack’s Alternative to Clifford and James’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 77 (3), p. 489.
J. Rawls (1995) Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 249. We err gravely in trying to reduce ‘reasonable’ people and reasonable ‘disagreement’ to the elusive evidentialist’s notion of synchronic rationality or evidential ‘fit’. If the Overlap Thesis is correct, and helps us, as Haack has argued, to conceptualize the sources of normativity that an ethics of belief draws upon, then reasonable habits of inquiry, proper intellectual motivation and a more holistic account of the relationship between ‘overbeliefs’ and their grounds, is clearly called for.
P. Clayton (1989) Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion ( New Haven: Yale University Press ), p. 41.
R. Pouivet (2002) ‘Religious Imagination and Virtue Epistemology’, Ars Disputandi, 2, pp. 3–4.
M. Moffett (2007) ‘Reasonable Disagreement and Rational Group Inquiry’, Episteme, 4, p. 360.
N. Murphy (1997) Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective (Scottsdale, PA: Pandora Press), p. 18. What James calls ‘intellectual operations’ related to religion (James, Varieties, p. 433) include primarily those of our overbeliefs, those of philosophy, and those of a science of religion.
M. Thune (2010) ‘Religious Belief and the Epistemology of Disagreement’, Philosophy Compass, 5 (8), p. 713.
G. Pappas (1994) ‘William James’ Virtuous Believer’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 30 (1), p. 86.
J. Dewey, The Middle Works, Vol. 12: 1899–1924 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), p. 220. See Pappas, ‘William James’ Virtuous Believer’, for comments. James, of course, also contrasts the evidentialist’s universal ‘veto’ of experiments of living with an alternative personal and social ethic highlighting ‘the spirit of inner tolerance, which is empiricism’s glory’, returning us to the Rawlsian concerns treated above.
G. Gutting (1982) Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism ( West Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press ), pp. 175–6.
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Axtell, G. (2013). Possibility and Permission? Intellectual Character, Inquiry, and the Ethics of Belief. In: Rydenfelt, H., Pihlström, S. (eds) William James on Religion. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317353_9
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