WILLIAM JAMES: “PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT, OPTIMISM OF THE WILL”

Abstract

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, centenary edition, foreword Micky James, intro. Eugene Taylor and Jeremy Carrette (Routledge, 2002)

Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Harvard University Press, 2002)

William James and a Science of Religions, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (Columbia University Press, 2004)

William James has a secure reputation as a pioneer psychologist and as a founding father of the philosophy of pragmatism. In his own time, however, he was best known and most popular among the laity for “The Will to Believe” (1895) and for The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), which were defenses erected on behalf of religion in an increasingly secular world. Religious liberals treated the Bible as one human document among others and Christian faith as one tradition among many, but they “sought to salvage what they could of traditional belief, piety, and ethic.” James was part of this movement that took science, empiricism, and modern philosophy as a point of departure, but his contribution to it was distinctive, original, and (in his own idiom) unusually “tough-minded.”