Possibility and Permission? Intellectual Character, Inquiry, and the Ethics of Belief
In Pihlstrom S. & Rydenfelt H. (eds.), William James on Religion. (Palgrave McMillan “Philosophers in Depth” Series (forthcoming)
| Abstract | This chapter examines the modifications William James made to his account of the ethics of belief from his early ‘subjective method’ to his later heightened concerns with personal doxastic responsibility and with an empirically-driven comparative research program he termed a ‘science of religions’. There are clearly tensions in James’ writings on the ethics of belief both across his career and even within Varieties itself, tensions which some critics think spoil his defense of what he calls religious ‘faith ventures’ or ‘overbeliefs’. But our study of James in the first half of the chapter reveals a significant degree of unnoticed unity: The two distinct defenses of faith ventures he develops post-1900 are actually both versions of the Dialogue Model of the relationship between individual religiosity and scientific reasoning. One shared theme in the diverging approaches to doxastic responsibility suggested by the two versions is what some interpreters have called ‘the character issue’ in James’ writings. The second half of the chapter develops these connections and argues that a neo-Jamesian approach tying the ethics of belief with Rawlsian reasonable pluralism and with contemporary character epistemology results in a stronger yet more clearly delimited defense of responsible faith ventures. | |||||||||
| Keywords | William James ethics of belief Religious pluralism and exclusivism science and religion responsibility | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
  |
| External links | This entry has no external links. Add one. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJennifer Welchman (2006). William James's "the Will to Believe" and the Ethics of Self-Experimentation. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (2):229-241.
Amir Dastmalchian (2009). Religious Diversity in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The ‘Ambiguity’ Objection to Epistemic Exclusivism. Dissertation, King's College London
Michael R. Slater (2009). William James on Ethics and Faith. Cambridge University Press.
Andrew Davis (2010). Defending Religious Pluralism for Religious Education. Ethics and Education 5 (3):189 - 202.
Rik Peels (2013). Belief-Policies Cannot Ground Doxastic Responsibility. Erkenntnis 78 (3):561-569.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski & Timothy Miller (eds.) (2009). Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary. Wiley-Blackwell.
Brian Zamulinski (2002). A Re-Evaluation of Clifford and His Critics. Southern Journal of Philosophy 40 (3):437-457.
Richard Amesbury (2008). The Virtues of Belief: Toward a Non-Evidentialist Ethics of Belief-Formation. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 63 (1/3):25 - 37.
Celal Türer (2006). The Challenge of William James's Philosophy of Religion. The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy 8:25-30.
Rik Peels (2010). The Ethics of Belief and Christian Faith as Commitment to Assumptions. Religious Studies 46 (1):97-107.
Michael Lopresto (2011). The Ethics of Belief. Emergent Australasian Philosophers (4):9.
David Baggett (2000). On a Reductionist Analysis of William James's Philosophy of Religion. Journal of Religious Ethics 28 (3):423 - 448.
Guy Axtell (1999). Courage, Caution and Heaven's Gate. The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 1999:77-89.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2012-04-18Total downloads23 ( #53,790 of 549,013 )Recent downloads (6 months)23 ( #2,219 of 549,013 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
