Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I have never read anything by Renan and it isn't a project I'm likely to launch for myself any time soon. So I can only know what the fuss was about second or third hand. Here is a passage referencing Renan in William James' VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. James is discussing the I-don't-care or nothing-matters-anyway state of mind. He says that the phrase "all is vanity" is "the relieving word in all difficult crises for this mode of thought, which that exquisite genius Renan took pleasure, in his later years of sweet decay, in putting into coquettishly sacrilegious forms which remain to us as excellent expressions of the 'all is vanity' state of mind." I'd be curious to know if any reader knows Renan well enough to recognize this description as apt or to quarrel with it as not.

“One drop of blood too much or too little in the brain can make our life unspeakably wretched and hard…But the worst is when one does not even know that this drop of blood is the cause. But ‘the Devil’! Or ‘sin’!” - F. Nietzsche, Daybreak.

So: what is the philosophical significance of the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, otherwise known as the "nebular hypothesis," which nowadays rules the roost of origin-of-solar-system views? In chronology, by the way, Kant was way ahead of Laplace, although Laplace gets his name on the theory due to his more analytical, mathematical treatment of the subject. And I've just put Laplace's picture in here. Now, is there any worthwhile connection we may draw between Kant the astronomer and Kant the philosopher? I think there is. The nebular hypothesis is a blow (how serious a blow I leave to the reader's own intuition, but surely some sort of a blow) to the single most psychologically powerful argument for the existence of a Providential, supernatural Being -- the argument from design. After all, the solar system, with its marvellous equilibrium and its subtle but overwhelming predictability, is Exhibit A for the designedness of the universe, is it not? Yet Kant's...

I've discussed trolley problems before. This is a new version, in a new philosophical context.  One common issue in the philosophy of religion is: does religious belief help people act morally? If so, how?  Nietzsche famously contended that the "death of God" had great implications for morality, for the transvaluation of values, implications which he welcomed. Many theists accept that judgment, but dis-value what Nietzsche valued.  Many atheists and agnostics deny that there is any such implication. One interpretation of Nietzsche's somewhat cryptic comments on the subject is that the idea of equality -- that my life is worth as much as yours, or in a variant that no quantitative comparison can or should be made between my life's value and yours -- is a religious presumption at heart. It depends upon the background notion that we are all alike creatures of the same Creator and it will not long outlast the death of that idea.  In that spirit, Brian Leite...

"So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or Sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ." So wrote the forbidding fellow now known as St. Paul. I only recently discovered that there is some ecclesiological dispute as to what this passage in the letter to the Colossians means. I was surprised by that, though, because the meaning seems to me pretty clear. That is a text written almost in anticipation of William James and his now-famous stress on the personal and experiential significance of religion over the trappings, the ritual, the rules. James put it this way: Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; -- so...

Some random reading again. Probability in the Philosophy of Religion. 2012. Much of the text is available on Google books . One big question in the P of R that involves probability in some sense is the evidence for miraculous events. Suppose a theist puts it forward as one of his reasons for belief in God that "only this belief can explain the parting of the Red Sea." One classic response, formulated for example by David Hume, is that the historical evidence for the event can never be greater than the improbability of the event. So it is always more rational to believe that the alleged miracle didn't happen, and the chain of testimony that has brought us news thereof is at fault, than to believe that it did happen, and qualify our belief in laws of nature in the process. This seems, then, squarely an argument about probability, and some of the contributions to this collection address it. One of the contributions that does is written by Benjamin C. Jantzen, of...

"In one sense at least the personal [side of] religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches, when once established, live at second-hand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; -- so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who continue to esteem it incomplete." VARIETIES O F RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

I mentioned last month that I was reading Simon Schama's new book, THE STORY OF THE JEWS. I should say now that I did make a discovery in there I consider valuable. This was the first time I have ever come across the name Yehudah Halevi. That isn't because he is obscure, only a reflection on my ignorance. Schama gives him a lengthy passage (given the presumptions and format of the book) from p. 278 to 291. Halevi was born in Spain, possibly in Toledo, in the late 11th century. He lived much of his life passing back and forth between Moorish-held and Christian-held areas of that peninsula, what Schama calls a perilous shuttling between rival sets of persecutors of Jews, seeking at any moment the more bearable life in the one zone or the other. He died in 1141, either on the way to Palestine or soon after having arrived. His philosophical significance is as one of several philosophers within the three great monotheisms (the three "peoples of the book" if y...

I was thinking recently about the different ways that different theists complete the phrase "I believe in God because...."  Thinking here of the reflective believers, those who are interested in answering the question, not those who, say, simply adopted the beliefs passed on to them as children and have never questioned them. Adopting the pronoun "Him" from convention and for convenience. 1. Mystics: "I believe in God because I am personally in touch with Him." 2.  Mysticists: "I believe in God because the last guy who spoke is credible, and until I have my own such experience I rely upon his." 3. Rationalists: "I believe in God because logically sound proofs, from plausible premises, lead to the inference that He exists." 4. Fideists: "I choose to believe in God despite the fact that there is no very powerful because." The fideists can presumably be subdivided further. Even if there is no overpowering "bec...

Some words from Immanuel Kant. He certainly isn't an oracle of this site, but as regular readers will recall I sometimes bring him in to liven things up, especially in his capacity as a philosopher of religion. This is from his commentary on the Book of Job: "Job speaks as he thinks, and with the courage which he, as well as every human being in his position, can well afford; his friends, on the contrary, speak as if they were being secretly listened to by the mighty one, over whose cause they are passing judgment, and as if gaining his favor through their judgment were closer to their heart than the truth. Their malice in pretending to assert things into which they yet must admit they have no insight, and in simulating a conviction which they in fact do not have, contrasts with Job's frankness -- so far removed from false flattery as to border almost on impudence -- much to his advantage." This confirms a point I made once before in this blog. If theology ...

During the course of my last exchange with reader Henry on the Jamesian "will to believe" and related notions, I admitted that I had not done justice to the argument James is making in the final pages of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, and I promised to try again on another day. So this may as well be the day. The material I have in mind begins in a minor key, in the middle of a chapter (Lecture XIX) unpretentiously titled "Other Characteristics." James had promised to treat of manifestations of religions his previous 18 lectures had neglected, and he had begun with its aesthetics, moving on to the practice and experience of prayer. Then he says, "The last aspect of religious life which remains for me to touch upon is the fact that its manifestations so frequently connect themselves with the subconscious part of our existence." He means by "the subconscious part" what we in the early 21st century more often call the "subliminal,...

I'll here continue yesterday's discussion on William James' skepticism about  the argument from design, which was in turn continuing a discussion from the week before. In my recent exchange in the comments section of this blog with Henry, I observed that there has been an alliance, in the development of the philosophy of religion, between fideists and unbelievers. A fideist by standard definition is one who embraces a religious creed and who sees that embrace (Faith) as valuable in itself, and  again who sees it as "in some sense independent of, if not outright adversarial toward, reason." James's essay on the "will to believe" is a rather moderate expression of fideism. He is certainly not advocating an adversarial relationship with reason, but he does argue that there are matters reason doesn't decide, and that in these matters an intellectualized expression of human will -- Faith -- may and in fact must step in. It is good that Faith ...

Last week I wrote an entry about the "argument from design," and William James' negative view of it. This week, prompted by a commenter there, I'll add some thoughts. I quoted James writing thus:  " When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement ... so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively." Henry objected. He saw two arguments here, one on the assumption that order is an objective fact, the other on the denial of that assumption. 1) Assuming order is an objective fact, it is equally so that there is a lot of disorder too, which vitiates the proposed inference that there is an order-loving Creator. 2) But order isn't an objective fact, it is subject...

A participant in Yahoo!Answers asks: "Who is the best atheist philosopher?  Out of Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Democritus, etc. who is the greatest/best atheist philosopher of all time?" I answered thus: -----------------------------------------------  Since you've said "etc." I guess we can move beyond your list. I have to answer: George Santayana. A word of bias acknowledged: I'm a Jamesian pragmatist in philosophy myself, and I find reasonable an act of "will to believe" in a God whose existence I can not prove, as part of my effort to lead a productive and satisfying life on earth. But you didn't ask for best fideist. You asked for best atheist. And Santayana, who was something of a protégé of James, became that. He combined Plato in matters of value with Democritus in matters of existence, a fascinating combination. Here's a quote: "Now I was aware, at first in...

"One must hope and indeed one can hope, and such hope is practical. For it honeys the rim of the cup of duty." That's Vincent McCarthy, part of his effort to explain philosophy of religion by one Immanuel Kant. McCarthy certainly has a way with words, on Kant's behalf or on his own. I love "honey" as a verb. McCarthy's book is called "Quest for a Philosophical Jesus," a name that politely parodies the English-translation title of a more famous book by Schweitzer. You can read large parts of it for free through the magic of Google Books. The subtitle is perhaps more specifically revealing about the contents: "Christianity and Philosophy in Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling."