Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Below is my response to the question "is the teleological argument strong enough to convince an atheist?" within Yahoo!Answers: [The regular reader of the blog, or even someone who has just glimpsed at the title of this blog, will be unsurprised to see that the bulk of it consists of a quotation from the works of William James.] Obviously, if someone is an atheist, it is because that person has not been convinced by such arguments (all adult atheists have heard such arguments). So in a sense the answer is trivially "no." But you may want to know whether the argument has sufficient force to persuade an ideally rational atheist. I have to say that in its usual forms anyway, the argument seems to me rather week. William James put his finger on one of the weaknesses of the argument when he wrote (in a footnote to lecture 18 of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE), " When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees th...

A friend recently asked me, as a Jamesian, about spirituality. She wrote, quite perceptively, that spirituality "is one of those words that everyone uses but likely means something different by it.    Lack of precision about this term causes difficulties in discussing matters of the mind, soul, consciousness, and the like." I replied: ------------------------------------------------------  I doubt that James often used the term, surely not in the loose way in which it is used today as an all-embracing New-Agey thing.   I think I know what you have in mind though, and what in James answers to it. He was of the opinion that the human spirit was at its best if it had come through a storm, if you will. Not only coming through a storm, but internalizing it to a degree, keeping some of the storminess inside you -- that, to James, was key to psychic health, to what one might well call spirituality. Not the effort to live only u...

Gertrude Himmelfarb has a lengthy discussion of William James in a recent weekend issue of  The Wall Street Journal. This discussion was apparently inspired by a recent book by the French philosopher, Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists. Botton thinks religion simply false (the world is just a mechanical push and pull of undesigned particles), but thinks that religions ( a word both plural in semantics and institutional in emphasis) valuable nonetheless, because they offer music, architectural achievement, rituals, community, feasts, etc. Atheism can't do that, and the failure of the old Comteans rather illustrates this point, so Botton thinks atheists should make their peace with religions. That is just a starting point for Himmelfarb, though, who wants to talk about James, not Botton. As Botton is an unorthodox sort of atheist, a neo-atheists if you will, James was an unorthodox sort of believer, a neo-believer. About half way into her essay (at a point...