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James, Clifford, and the scientific conscience

In Ruth Anna Putnam (ed.), The Cambridge companion to William James. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 69--83 (1997)

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  1. The metaethics of belief: An expressivist reading of "the will to believe".Jeff Kasser & Nishi Shah - 2006 - Social Epistemology 20 (1):1 – 17.
    We argue that an expressivist interpretation of "The Will to Believe" provides a fruitful way of understanding this widely-read but perplexing document. James approaches questions about our intellectual obligations from two quite different standpoints. He first defends an expressivist interpretation of judgments of intellectual obligation; they are "only expressions of our passional life". Only then does James argue against evidentialism, and both his criticisms of Clifford and his defense of a more flexible ethics of belief presuppose this independently-defended expressivism. James (...)
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  • Hypothesis, faith, and commitment: William James' critique of science.Jack Barbalet - 2004 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34 (3):213–230.
    William James is remembered as the philosopher of pragmatism, but he was principally the founder of modern scientific psychology. During the period of his most intense scientific involvement James developed a trenchant critique of science. This was not a rejection of science but an attempt to identify limitations of the contemporary conceptualization of science. In particular, James emphasized the failure of science to understand its basis in human emotions. James developed a scientific theory of emotions in which the importance of (...)
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  • The Will to Truth and the Will to Believe: Friedrich Nietzsche and William James Against Scientism.Rachel Cristy - 2018 - Dissertation, Princeton University
    My dissertation brings into conversation two thinkers who are seldom considered together and highlights previously unnoticed similarities in their critical responses to scientism, which was just as prevalent in the late nineteenth century as it is today. I analyze this attitude as consisting of two linked propositions. The first, which Nietzsche calls “the unconditional will to truth,” is that the aims of science, discovering truth and avoiding error, are the most important human aims; and the second is that no practice (...)
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  • Science, Religion, and “The Will to Believe".Alexander Klein - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1):72-117.
    Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific beliefs can both be justified by a unitary (...)
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  • Review of C. Koopman, Pragmatism as Transition. Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. [REVIEW]Roberto Frega - 2009 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 1 (1).
    Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...
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  • Justification and Critique: The Will to Believe and the Public Dimension of Religious Belief.Ulf Zackariasson - 2016 - William James Studies 12 (2).
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  • Split mysticism: William James's democratization of religion.Paul Croce - 2012 - William James Studies 9 (1).
    James’s approach to religious experience has a reputation for appealing only to the spiritual elite. After all, he set aside average churchgoers in favor of those with “direct personal communion with the divine”; not many live up to that lofty standard. But his approach to this “personal religion,” in The Varieties of Religious Experience and in less direct ways throughout his work, shows another side to his religion. Within church structures and even without institutions, he maintained, there is spiritual potential (...)
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  • Scientific personae in American psychology: three case studies.Francesca Bordogna - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (1):95-134.
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  • Scientific personae in American psychology: three case studies.Francesca Bordogna - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (1):95-134.
    This paper studies the constellations of attitudes––sentimental, moral, epistemological, and social––that three leading psychologists active in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America took to be essential to the production of scientific knowledge. William James, G. Stanley Hall, and Edward Titchener located the virtues and traits proper to the scientific frame of mind, and combined them into normative images of the man of science, or, ‘scientific personae’ as I use the term here. I argue that their competing formulations of the scientific ethos informed their psychological (...)
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  • Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe: Charles Renouvier and William James.Jeremy Dunham - 2015 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4):1-23.
    This article investigates the history of the relation between idealism and pragmatism by examining the importance of the French idealist Charles Renouvier for the development of William James's ‘Will to Believe’. By focusing on French idealism, we obtain a broader understanding of the kinds of idealism on offer in the nineteenth century. First, I show that Renouvier's unique methodological idealism led to distinctively pragmatist doctrines and that his theory of certitude and its connection to freedom is worthy of reconsideration. Second, (...)
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  • Reorienting Clifford’s evidentialism: returning to social trust.Ian MacDonald - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-22.
    Reading W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” in evidentialist terms is standard. However, evidentialist accounts face several longstanding interpretive issues over the Shipowner Story and Clifford’s Motto. This article defends an evidentialist reading. But what distinguishes it from others is that it interprets “The Ethics of Belief” according to Clifford’s “first principle of natural ethics”, a principle he articulates in prior writings, and which comes down to social trust. I reorient Clifford’s evidentialism by returning to his core moral principle and (...)
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