This is the great turning point in Emerson’s life. The chapter starts with a comparison to William Ellery Channing’s heroic arc of antislavery activism. Despite dying before the annexation of territories from Mexico that galvanized abolitionism, Channing, starting as a moderate like Emerson, progressed dramatically in his commitment. Where was Emerson in all this? (See Chapter 2.) Suddenly, in 1856 Emerson pivots and from then on rises spectacularly in the abolitionist world. Not because of violence done to Black bodies, but because of violence done to his White friend Charles Sumner and to White settlers in Kansas. The chapter analyzes why Emerson had contempt for most abolitionists and how he became one himself without the characteristics of those whom he disdained. William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience is an important text here. He used him as an example of someone undergoing a “soft” conversion.

Before we can understand the present state of the psychology of religion – with its frequent emphasis on empirical data – it can be helpful to understand the field’s history. The prominent theoreticians that we explore in this chapter – James, Freud, Jung, Maslow, Fromm, Allport, Becker, Frankl, and others – remain influential in the twenty-first century, but they are also controversial. William James’ biography and writings show that debates about religion were never purely intellectual matters for the great scientist and philosopher. Freud’s theorizing on religion is discussed in detail, including his ideas on the origin and meaning of mystical religious experiences, the roots of theistic belief in wish-fulfillment, the notion of religion as a universal obsessional neurosis, and the assessment of the historical importance of religion for civilization. This discussion of Freud is followed by consideration of Carl Jung’s more sympathetic outlook on aspects of religion. The chapter concludes with a comprehensive discussion of the many ways humanistic and existential thinkers have studied religion and spirituality.

Leaning against the affordances of narratological clarity that the rhetoric of afterness sometimes seems to promise—a spatiotemporal legibility complicated in the queer poetics of John Ashbery and Harryette Mullen—this chapter returns to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading as it first appears in her introduction to Novel-Gazing (rather than its later form in Touching Feeling) for its illumination of a mode of relational attention, inseparable from the latter’s quality of effort, that Sedgwick figures in terms of the experimental spirit of the palpable. Both echoing William James’s characterization of the “strain and squeeze” of tendency and echoed in Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s articulation of a horizon of the palpable as sidelong “tendency dilating,” the haptic absorptions of Sedgwick’s vision of reading invite us to shift our attention to a textual substance whose complex responsiveness interrupts the perceptual ease of object relations. Brian Teare’s Pleasure and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts offer instances of such textual ecologies turned in on and against themselves, giving productive pause to the hand of the eye.

To demonstrate the flexibility of moral positioning and the associated transference of energies, the concept of dominance reversal is introduced, illustrated by James’s description of “falling out of love” and Bakhtin’s exposé of carnival. The carnival ritual provides a basis for the conceptualization of a moral middle ground or grey area beween moral good and bad. The main practical implication of this chapter is the significance of recognizing that, via this middle ground, sharp distinctions between good and bad can be transcended as a buffer to toxic polarization.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter highlights the newly significant role of embodiment in the discourses of realist aesthetics and theory of mind across the 1860s. Developing conterminously (though not in lockstep), the discourses of aesthetic realism and psychology at this time endowed material reality – including the mind – with new relevance, insisting on the interdependence of body and mind and on the fundamental sameness of scientific and psychological inquiry, whose shared pursuit was advancing the “science of human nature.” More particularly, this chapter moves beyond a familiar emphasis on the role of visual aesthetics to feature other emergent or developing discourses important to realism, including theories of sound, psychology and perception, and motion, and even ital atomic theory and what E.S. Dallas, in The Gay Science (1866), described as “the science of the laws of pleasure.”

This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits are not available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or “wager on,” God. This chapter distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, it turns to the epistemic–pragmatic distinction and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, it covers outstanding objections and responses.

This chapter examines the important cultural role played by early modern sermons in refining and developing the meaning of sympathy. The chapter begins by exploring how metaphors and concepts involving the human and social body were appropriated by religious writers in the 1580s, including Edwin Sandys, John Udall, and Christopher Hooke. It then explores a particular sermon by William James from 1589 that uses the term sympathy to describe a mutual suffering, in which James seeks to unite his listeners whilst excluding those of a different religious or political persuasion. The chapter goes on to argue that, by the mid-1590s, preachers such as Henry Holland were using the term to describe an active and imaginative engagement with the other, in ways that recall several contemporaneous dramatic works – including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595). Finally, it examines Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and proposes that these questions about the performance and representation of sympathy recur across Protestant and Catholic cultures.

This essay explores pragmatic aspects of Carnaps and Quines philosophy. It begins with a (schematic) characterization of pragmatism, pointing to recurring themes in the writings of leading American pragmatists, such as fallibilism, the social dimension of language and knowledge, the relation between belief and action, and the critique of skepticism, essentialism, foundationalism, and the fact/value dichotomy. It then examines aspects of Carnaps and Quines thinking that appear to be related (conceptually rather than historically) to pragmatism. Carnaps Principle of Tolerance and Quines critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction are primary examples, but there are others, such as their positions on scientific method, truth, and realism. Despite the similarities between Carnap and Quine emerging from this examination, the paper also identifies significant differences between their ways of understanding pragmatism. These differences, I suggest, are related to the difference between the European and American traditions regarding the meaning and use of the term pragmatism

Wallace “dabbled in religion,” as Matthew Gilbert put it in a 1997 interview with the author, but while he was openly intrigued by it, Wallace eschewed organized religion. Much of his work is characterized by a search for meaning that in other circumstances or periods would have constituted religious questing, and the absence of belief is generally portrayed in his work as part of the malaise of contemporary life. Religious language permeates the corpus, and religious iconography plays a significant role in several texts. Belief as a good in itself appears to be promoted in his work on politics, on aesthetics, and on culture, with the idea of faith central to his project of working against solipsism, but religion as a practice is often viewed with suspicion. This essay traces that pattern in Wallace’s writing, beginning with Broom’s connection of evangelical religion with capitalism by way of the G.O.D and the figure of John, the wasted prophet son of immense wealth, positioning a particularly American form of religious practice as pernicious and profit-driven. Don’s particular ambivalence about religion in Infinite Jest highlights a complex relationship between faith as a personal attribute and religion as a collective one. The essay argues that Wallace’s approach to religious thought bears the same ambivalent inflections as his work on art and entertainment, which can both inspire thought and suppress it. Nevertheless, the essay argues that while Wallace appeared to view organized religion with some wariness, the metanarratives of religion – belief, faith, transcendence and a sense of the sacred – constitute vital and consistent themes of his craft.

The relation between Kantian transcendental philosophy and Jamesian pragmatism is both historically and systematically crucial for the conception of pragmatism and truth developed in the book. Chapter 3 first introduces the basic idea of "transcendental pragmatism" - the integration of pragmatist, or pragmatically naturalized, and Kantian-inspired transcendental arguments identifying conditions for the possibility of things we take to be actual in our practices - and then offers a critical comparison between some of Kant's and James's key ideas, especially elaborating on their pessimistic conception of the human being and suggesting that Jamesian empirical meliorism (as distinguished from both optimism and pessimism) needs to be built upon Kantian transcendental pessimism about the limits of the human condition. Based on this development of transcendental pragmatism, the relation between ethics and religion - analogous in Kant and James - is critically considered: if religion can only be based on ethics, we will have to ask whether (ethically) legitimate religious faith inevitably remains insincere.

The introduction summarizes overall argument unfolding through the six main chapters of the book and provides basic motivation for pursuing the pragmatist considerations of the volume. It emphasizes that the concept of truth may seem to have become seriously threatened in our culture - especially due to familiar political events and the active use of the social media today. As pragmatism, particularly Jamesian pragmatism, might be considered partly responsible for these developments, a novel critical exploration of pragmatist resources for dealing with the issues concerning the responsible pursuit of truth across a wide range of human practices is needed. The introduction also offers preliminary reasons why the argument of the book moves through a rather complex discussion of Kantian transcendental philosophy (and transcendental pragmatism) instead of merely "directly" utilizing the classical pragmatists' views on truth as such.

This chapter continues the discussion of pragmatism and truth from the first chapter by further investigating pluralism about truth in the context of the philosophy of religion, particularly focusing on the debates on religious diversity. Arguing that pragmatism should firmly side with religious inclusivism instead of exclusivism, the chapter compares Jamesian pragmatic pluralism and individualism to Hannah Arendt's more politically framed conception of natality, i.e., human beings' capacity of spontaneously creating novelties into the world, of beginning something anew. This Jamesian-Arendtian entanglement of individuality and novelty can, the chapter proposes, be illuminated by means of holistic pragmatism (indebted to Morton White). The chapter also contains a critical discussion of Naoko Saito's views on what she calls "philosophy as translation" offering a distinctive perspective on pragmatist views on acknowledging diversity, pluralism, and otherness. A defense of Jamesian meliorism, as distinguished from Saito's Cavell-inspired "perfectionism", is also included.

The first chapter asks whether there is a threatening slippery slope from William James's pragmatist conception of truth (as presented in his 1907 work, Pragmatism), via Richard Rorty's radical neopragmatism, to Donald Trump's and other populists' fragmentation of the concept of truth, or even ultimately to the destruction of truth depicted in George Orwell's dystopic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), whose character O'Brien was interestingly analyzed by Rorty in a 1989 essay on Orwell, arguing for the primacy of freedom over truth. The chapter criticizes Rortyan pragmatism by arguing that the concept of freedom also presupposes the concept of truth (and not just the other way round), also suggesting that, despite the unclarity of some of James's original ideas about truth, there is a sound core to the Jamesian conception of the pursuit of truth. It is, furthermore, suggested that the concept of truth may itself receive a plurality of interpretations within a (meta-level) pragmatist understanding of truth, one of them being the realistic correspondence account, which remains highly relevant, e.g., in the context of combatting post-truth politics.

The "will to believe", introduced by James in his 1897 essay with the same title, is presumably one of the most famous - or, according to some, notorious - ideas in pragmatist philosophy of religion. This Jamesian strategy of argumentation can be extended from the philosophy of religion to other "existential" matters, including the question concerning the freedom of the will. By considering the will to believe argument and interpreting it in the context of holistic pragmatism, this chapter continues the discussion of pragmatist philosophical anthropology and individualism (started in the previous chapters) and thus provides novel perspectives on the notion of pragmatist truthfulness and truth-seeking in worldview-related (including ethical and religious) matters. The will to believe is, furthermore, explored (holistically) in terms of vice- and virtue-epistemology, drawing attention to the role it may play in a self-critical development of an individual's doxastic character. The concept of sincerity thus again turns out to be crucial to a proper understanding of not just the pursuit of truth generally but of the will to believe as well.