I only recently encountered a brief discussion of the Jamesian will to believe in the context of climate change. It appears as a chapter in an anthology, Philosophical Tools for Climate Change (2024), prepared at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. One odd feature of this book is that, although all the other chapters have an author credited by name on the table of contents, the will-to-believe chapter goes uncredited. So I don't know to whom we owe it. The anonymous author chiefly wants us to recall James' point that some choices are forced. They are (as we say in the 21st century) binary. Either I act in a certain way or I don't. Either I attend my usual religion service this weekend or I don't. There may be many reasons why I don't -- difficulty with transportation, loss of the underlying beliefs, conversion to a different set of beliefs and attendance at another service. Whatever. But if someone is interested in whet...
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William James delivered his now-notorious essay on "The Will to Believe" first as a guest lecturer, a guest of the combined "Philosophical Clubs" of Yale and Brown University in 1896. That's important to remember because it gives one a sense of who is the "we" is when James talks about what "we" believe. Ivy League students almost all (possibly all) white men from well-off families. I will contend in what follows that there was an esoteric message in this essay, a message that was likely very clear to many if not most of those in the hall, but the salience of which faded with the passage of time. The pertinence of a key contemporary reference came to seem quaint. So the esoteric meaning has become utterly inaccessible until recovered by -- well, by me. Just now. In the passage below, James is making the point that we take a wide range of our beliefs on authority - we believe a lot on no evidence or personal consideration of our own. T...
I'm not an Aristotle scholar, and in fact I'm too indolent to do any research on his thought, so I'll just state something about which I have wondered and I'll consider that my responsible blogosphere citizenship for the day. Aristotle famously characterized virtues as the golden mean between vices. The usual example seems to be: courage. It is a mean between impetuous action on the one hand, cowardice on the other. Temperance is likewise between anhedonia and hedonism --between the inability to experience pleasure and the inability to master one's pleasures. So far so good. Likewise, I remember hearing somewhere (and remember the indolence problem mentioned above) that justice for Aristotle is the mean between severity and leniency. I wonder though about wisdom, the virtue otherwise known to the ancients as prudence. Is that also a mean between two vices and, if so, what are the vices? My guess would be credulity on the one hand, and an excess of skepticism...
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 ...
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...