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The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, [1] 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.
Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of, say, fevers or drunkenness, after a religious experience the ideas and insights usually still make sense to the person, and are often valued for the rest of the person's life. [14] James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or illegitimacy of religious experiences.
James, William: "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" – International Journal of Ethics, volume 1, number 3 (April 1891), pp. 330–354 The essay was also featured in: James, William: The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. First edition: Longmans, Green, 1897.
In William James's 1896 lecture titled "The Will to Believe", James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. This idea foresaw 20th century objections to evidentialism and sought to ground justified belief in an unwavering principle that would prove more beneficial.
This idea has two senses: (1) truth is mutable, (often attributed to William James and F.C.S. Schiller); and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme (more widely accepted in Pragmatism). (1) Mutability of truth "Truth" is not readily defined in Pragmatism. Can beliefs pass from being true to being untrue and back? For James, beliefs are ...
The notion of "religious experience" can be traced back to William James, who used the term "religious experience" in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. [15] It is considered to be the classic work in the field, and references to James' ideas are common at professional conferences.
Contemporary discussions of the ethics of belief stem largely from a famous nineteenth-century exchange between the British mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford and the American philosopher William James. In 1877 Clifford published an article titled "The Ethics of Belief" in the journal The Contemporary Review. There Clifford argued for ...
James put forth the doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism, inspired by the advances in physical science, has or had the tendency to emphasize 'whirling particles' at the expense of the bigger picture: connections, causality, meaning. Both elements, James claims, are equally present in experience and both need to be accounted for.