William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He
is the author of Biblical Religion and Family Values: A Problem in the
Philosophy of Culture and Competition in Religious Life, Religion vs.
Television: Competitors in Cultural Contex

The writings of American philosopher and psychologist William James
(1842-1910) have interested people for sundry reasons, one being the
remarkable balance in this author’s thought between practical
reasonableness and an interest in spirituality. In this academic
monograph on James’s approach to religion, Hunter Brown of the
University of Western Ontario defends James from critics who have
characterized the celebrated pragmatist as a fuzzy-minded fideist and
subjectivist in his treatment of religious belief. Reflecting that
James’s talk about “the will to believe” has often been
misunderstood, Brown stresses James’s concern with defending actually
existing religious convictions; and Brown endeavors to illuminate
James’s views on religious experience and religious belief by
considering them in the context of James’s general epistemology, the
centrepiece of which is the complex unity of immediate experience.
Particularly notable in Brown’s exposition is a detailed examination
of the importance James attaches to “the strenuous mood.” Brown
draws attention to noteworthy passages in James’s writings but perhaps
underestimates some equally important ones.

Unlike James himself, a thinker of enormous intellectual and spiritual
breadth and receptiveness, Brown is rigidly committed to a rather narrow
form of professional analytical philosophy and usually seems to be
writing strictly for an audience of professional analytical
philosophers. He almost seems to make a point of excluding from the
references, even in the bibliography, virtually all of the sophisticated
expositors and defenders of James’s work on religion who are open to
other philosophical methods, such as those of phenomenology and
personalism. It may be no coincidence, then, that Brown underestimates
the influence on James of the ideas of Charles Renouvier (along with
those of Chauncey Wright and Josiah Royce); and it is probably not
coincidental either that Brown is conspicuously weak in an area where
James is exceptionally strong: in not allowing formal and theoretical
abstractions to obscure the importance of concrete experiences.

This book should be included in library collections at universities
that offer graduate programs in philosophy.