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  1. 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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  • William James's naturalistic account of concepts and his 'rejection of logic'.Henry Jackman - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe (ed.), Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 5. Routledge. pp. 133-146.
    William James was one of the most controversial philosophers of the early part of the 20 century, and his apparent skepticism about logic and any robust conception of truth was often simply attributed to his endorsing mysticism and irrationality out of an overwhelming desire to make room for religion in his world-view. However, it will be argued here that James’s pessimism about logic and even truth (or at least ‘absolute’ truth), while most prominent in his later views, stem from the (...)
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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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  • 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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  • William James and the ‘willfulness’ of belief.Alexis Dianda - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):647-662.
    This paper explicates and defends some of William James' more controversial claims in ‘The Will to Believe’. After showing some of the weaknesses in standard interpretations of James' position, I turn to James' Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience to spell out in more detail James' account of the nature of the attitudes of belief, doubt, and disbelief and link them to an account of the subject. In so doing, the moral force of the argument comes to (...)
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  • The Metaphysics and Logic of Psychology: Peirce's Reading of James's Principles.Mathias Girel - 2003 - Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 39 (2):163-203.
    The present paper deals thus with some fundamental agreements and disagreements between Peirce and James, on crucial issues such as perception and consciousness. When Peirce first read the Principles, he was sketching his theory of the categories, testing its applications in many fields of knowledge, and many investigations were launched, concerning indexicals, diagrams, growth and development. James's utterances led Peirce to make his own views clearer on a wide range of topics that go to the heart of the foundations of (...)
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