William James Revisted: “Pragmatic” Approaches to Religion

Abstract

This essay examines how William James conceptualized the philosophy of religion, including his view about the future of religion, for the purpose of aiding our own view on the future of this field in the present age. It focuses on three different aspects of his thought about religion against a backdrop of the centrality of our evolutionary, creaturely frame. First, I talk about selected pre-Varieties essays, in which James focuses on the relations of thought and action. In so doing, I will note where theism fits in for James then, and attend to his very straightforward conceptual generalizations about what religion implies. Second, I talk about James’s psychological findings about religion, glossing some of the details of Varieties with regard to the individual and social aspects of religion. And third, I turn briefly to the developed “pragmatic” and “radical-empiricist” period of James’s thought, where he delineates religion’s connection to his pluralistic meliorism. This culminates in a clear suggestion that the twenty-first century is not likely to see humankind evolving “beyond” religion, in any meaningful sense.