Download or read book William James on the Courage to Believe written by Robert J. O'Connell and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William James’ celebrated lecture on “The Will to Believe” has kindled spirited controversy since the day it was delivered. In this lively reappraisal of that controversy, Father O’Connell contributes some fresh contentions: that James’ argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Pascal and Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our “over-beliefs” ; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our “passional nature” as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief.
Download or read book The Will to Believe written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Will to Believe written by William James and published by Jovian Press. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of William James contributed greatly to the burgeoning fields of psychology, particularly in the areas of education, religion, mysticism and pragmatism. The brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James, William wrote several powerful essays expressing his ideas on the pragmatic theory of truth, sentience, and human beings' right to believe.
Download or read book The will to believe by william james written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book William James written by Robert D. Richardson and published by HMH. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature. A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man. In this biography that seeks to understand James’s life through his work—including Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism—Robert D. Richardson has crafted an exceptionally insightful work that explores the mind of a genius, resulting in “a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “A magnificent biography.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book James s Will To Believe Doctrine written by James C.S. Wernham and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1997-06-06 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1896 William James published an essay entitled The Will to Believe, in which he defended the legitimacy of religious faith against the attacks of such champions of scientific method as W.K. Clifford and Thomas Huxley. James's work quickly became one of the most important writings in the philosophy of religious belief. James Wernham analyses James's arguments, discusses his relation to Pascal and Renouvier, and considers the interpretations, and misinterpretations, of James's major critics. Wernham shows convincingly that James was unaware of many destructive ambiguitities in his own doctrines and arguments, although clear and consistent in his view that our obligation to believe in theism is not a moral but a prudential obligation -- a foolish-not-to-believe doctrine, rather than a not-immoral-to-believe one. Wernham also shows that the doctrine is best read as affirming the wisdom of gambling that God exists, a notion which James failed to distinguish from believing and which, among other things, he explicitly identified with faith. James's pragmatism, a theory concerning the meaning of truth, is shown to be quite distinct from the doctrine of The Will to Believe. In concentrating on a careful analysis of this doctrine of the will-to-believe, Wernham not only makes a major contribution to understanding James's philosophy, but also clarifies issues in the philosophy of religion and in the analysis of belief and faith.
Download or read book Is Life Worth Living written by William James and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Varieties of Religion Today written by Charles Taylor and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-30 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hundred years after William James delivered the celebrated lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, one of the foremost thinkers in the English-speaking world returns to the questions posed in James's masterpiece to clarify the circumstances and conditions of religion in our day. An elegant mix of the philosophy and sociology of religion, Charles Taylor's powerful book maintains a clear perspective on James's work in its historical and cultural contexts, while casting a new and revealing light upon the present. Lucid, readable, and dense with ideas that promise to transform current debates about religion and secularism, Varieties of Religion Today is much more than a revisiting of James's classic. Rather, it places James's analysis of religious experience and the dilemmas of doubt and belief in an unfamiliar but illuminating context, namely the social horizon in which questions of religion come to be presented to individuals in the first place. Taylor begins with questions about the way in which James conceives his subject, and shows how these questions arise out of different ways of understanding religion that confronted one another in James's time and continue to do so today. Evaluating James's treatment of the ethics of belief, he goes on to develop an innovative and provocative reading of the public and cultural conditions in which questions of belief or unbelief are perceived to be individual questions. What emerges is a remarkable and penetrating view of the relation between religion and social order and, ultimately, of what "religion" means.
Download or read book The Varieties of Religious Experience written by William James and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."
Download or read book The Will to Believe Illustrated written by William James and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2020-07-18 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, which defends, in certain cases, the adoption of a belief without prior evidence of its truth. In particular, James is concerned in this lecture about defending the rationality of religious faith even lacking sufficient evidence of religious truth. James states in his introduction: "I have brought with me tonight an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to Believe, ' accordingly, is the title of my paper."James' central argument in "The Will to Believe" hinges on the idea that access to the evidence for whether or not certain beliefs are true depends crucially upon first adopting those beliefs without evidence. As an example, James argues that it can be rational to have unsupported faith in one's own ability to accomplish tasks that require confidence. Importantly, James points out that this is the case even for pursuing scientific inquiry. James then argues that like belief in one's own ability to accomplish a difficult task, religious faith can also be rational even if one at the time lacks evidence for the truth of one's religious belief.
Download or read book William James on Religion written by H. Rydenfelt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of international experts present a collection of articles on William James's philosophy of religion and its current relevance. A new look at his philosophy of religion is crucially important for the development of this field of inquiry today.
Download or read book The Divided Self of William James written by Richard M. Gale and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-02-28 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the multiple directions of James's philosophy.
Download or read book William James on Ethics and Faith written by Michael R. Slater and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new interpretation of James's ethical and religious thought focusing on the prominent role these views played in his philosophy.
Download or read book The Courage Test written by James Preller and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will has no choice. His father drags him along on a wilderness adventure in the footsteps of legendary explorers Lewis and Clark--whether he likes it or not. All the while, Will senses that something about this trip isn't quite right. Along the journey, Will meets fascinating strangers and experiences new thrills, including mountain cliffs, whitewater rapids, and a heart-hammering bear encounter. It is a journey into the soul of America's past, and the meaning of family in the future. In the end, Will must face his own, life-changing test of courage. This title has Common Core connections.
Download or read book Evidentialism and the Will to Believe written by Scott Aikin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-22 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work on the norms of belief in epistemology regularly starts with two touchstone essays: W.K. Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief" and William James's "The Will to Believe." Discussing the central themes from these seminal essays, Evidentialism and the Will to Believe explores the history of the ideas governing evidentialism. As well as Clifford's argument from the examples of the shipowner, the consequences of credulity and his defence against skepticism, this book tackles James's conditions for a genuine option and the structure of the will to believe case as a counter-example to Clifford's evidentialism. Exploring the question of whether James's case successfully counters Clifford's evidentialist rule for belief, this study captures the debate between those who hold that one should proportion belief to evidence and those who hold that the evidentialist norm is too restrictive. More than a sustained explication of the essays, it also surveys recent epistemological arguments to evidentialism. But it is by bringing Clifford and James into fruitful conversation for the first time that this study presents a clearer history of the issues and provides an important reconstruction of the notion of evidence in contemporary epistemology.
Download or read book With the Grain of the Universe written by Stanley Hauerwas and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2013-06-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major work by one of the world's top theologians offers a provocative and closely argued perspective on natural theology. Stanley Hauerwas shows how natural theology, divorced from a confessional doctrine of God, inevitably distorts our understanding of God's character and the world in which we live. This critically acclaimed book, winner of a Christianity Today Book Award, is now in paper. It includes a new afterword that sets the book in contemporary context and responds to critics.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Other Writings written by William James and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The writings of William James represent one of America's most original contributions to the history of ideas. Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism. 'Pragmatism' grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with 'The Meaning of Truth', 'Psychology', 'The Will to Believe', and 'Talks to Teachers on Psychology'.
