2017 - Franco Angeli
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Can We Secularize the Will to Believe?
493-512 p.
- This paper reconsiders the case of William James's « will to believe », often taken to be only as a defense of the legitimacy of religious faith against such free-believers as William Clifford. It shows that the will to believe has no necessary relation with theism as it is only a very general method to solve philosophical dilemmas. This method is conceived to be applicable to every kind of topics where such dilemmas occur, such as the traditional antinomy between freedom and determinism. The main stake of this interpretation is to defend the general idea that pragmatism at large should primarily be understood not as a doctrine but as a method and even as an attitude.
- The virtue of such an understanding is to enable us to correct the doctrines of past pragmatists when they seem to contravene the pragmatist attitude. This paper ends up by presenting such a revision, as it claims pragmatist reasons for favoring an atheistic conclusion from the application of the will to believe-method. [Publisher's Text].
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Information
ISSN: 1972-5558
KEYWORDS
- William James, Will to Believe, Pragmatism, atheism, philosophical method, freedom
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In this issue
- Pragmatism : some new ways of thinking for an old name
- Pragmatism in the European Scene : the Heidelberg International Congress of Philosophy, 1908
- Scientific and not Scientistic : the Rich Realism of Pragmatism
- Peirce's Inversions of the Topological and the Logica! : forgotten Roads for our Contemporary World
- The Tones, Tints, and Textures of Temporality : toward a Reconstruction of Peirce's Philosophy of Time
- The Double Pace of Habits : Time and Timeless in Pragmatic Experience
- William James's Naturalism Within the Common Project of Pragmatist Philosophy
- Can We Secularize the Will to Believe?
- Aesthetic Naturalism and the «Ways of Art» : linking John Dewey and Samuel Alexander
- Theoretical Conclusions : Tradition and Truth
- Index