Year: 2000
Type: article
Abstract: EXAMPLES that are of very limited practical use.The illustration of the squirrel and the tree with which he begins chapter 2 of Pragmatism is an example.A friend of James's is on one side of a tree and a squirrel on the other.As the man moves to catch sight of the squirrel, the animal circles opposite him, and an argument rages among James's camping friends as to whether the man moves around the squirrel or not, an argument that James proposes to solve by employing the pragmatic method.Has anyone ever found it an especially helpful example?I doubt it.The same is true for many of James's distinctions, such as that between the tough minded and the tender hearted or between the healthy minded and the sick souled.The categories also are simply too large and too ill defined to be of much use, and if they were all that James had contributed, he would not be the focus of so much attention today.Yet we might spy a method in James's confusion in these and other cases, for by frustrating our desire for definitive clarity, he leads us where he would prefer we go-to an immersion in far richer theoretical and methodological realms such as pragmatism, the stream of consciousness, and radical empiricism.We might feel a similar frustration in reading David Baggett's "On a Reductionist Analysis of William James's Philosophy of Religion," as well as discerning in it an indication of a much more fruitful immersion.Baggett adds another to the list of concepts that are of limited use in relation to James, namely, morality.I wish I were more certain that Baggett knows how small and wooden "morality" is as he presents it in the first half of his article, where he examines the putative reduction of religion to morality in the work of James.There is certainly some evidence for such a reduction, but it is not very serious.One senses that Baggett's real target is Richard Rorty, who threatens to narrow James, especially when it comes to religion.If that is the case, a more focused and thorough examination of Rorty's misunderstandings would be helpful, for he is a more formidable adversary than the type of moral reductionist Baggett criticizes in the article.
Source: Journal of Religious Ethics
Author: Frederick J. Ruf
Institution: Georgetown University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2060979334