James’s positivism is different from Comte’s, Clifford’s, and the logical positivists’. Notably, it presupposes a difference between natural–scientific inquiries and the metaphysical inquiry he calls radical empiricism. Equally importantly, the positivism of James’s great book, The Principles of Psychology, studies the cerebral conditions of the will. This cerebralism is necessary background for understanding James’s voluntarism, the will–to–believe doctrine that came later. James’s positivism goes hand–in–hand with his value pluralism; they are responsible for different domains of inquiry, natural-scientific and ethical, respectively. (...) It is a mistake to impose a “master moral syllogism” onto the former, implying that all facts are constituted by the will as guided by a utilitarian moral principle. Cerebral shaping of the will occurs not only through the “front door” of experience, especially in the formation of habit, but also through the “back stairs” of mutation and natural selection, which creates brains suited to different pursuits. The brain is no tabula rasa. (shrink)

William James advocated a form of finite theism, motivated by epistemological and moral concerns with scholastic theism and pantheism. In this article, I elaborate James’s case for finite theism and his strategy for dealing with these concerns, which I dub the problems of suffering. I contend that James is at the very least implicitly aware that the problem of suffering is not so much one generic problem but a family of related problems. I argue that one of James’s great contributions (...) to philosophical theism is his advocacy for the view that adequate theistic philosophizing is not so much about cracking this family of problems, but finding a version of the problem to embrace. (shrink)

This symposium contribution discusses the conception of ontology which is used in Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

When William James published Pragmatism, he gave it a subtitle: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. In this article, I argue that pragmatism is an epistemological method for articulating success in, and between, a plurality of practices, and that this articulation helped James develop radical empiricism. I contend that this pluralistic philosophical methodology is evident in James’s approach to philosophy of religion, and that this method is also exemplified in the work of one of James’s most famous (...) students, W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically in the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Sorrow Songs.” I argue that “Sorrow Songs” can be read as an epistemological text, and that once one identifies the epistemic standards of pragmatism and radical empiricism in the text, it’s possible to identify an implicit case for moderate fideism in “Sorrow Songs.” I contend that this case illuminates the pluralistic philosophical methodology James worked throughout his career to develop, and that the James-Du Bois approach to philosophy may even help locate the epistemic value of other religious practices, beyond the singing of hymns, and identify terrain mainstream philosophy has long neglected. (shrink)

James's moral philosophy is a valuable resource for environmental philosophy because it reveals and impugns some deep, unhelpful assumptions about the relationship between moral theory and the moral life. In particular, James's ethics demonstrates that the debates in environmental ethics are better regarded as disputes about ideals of the kind of self and world we want, rather than as disputes over abstract propositions about the intrinsic value of nature.