Dr. Darren Staloff, James' Pragmatism

[Music] william james is one of the principal figures in modern anglo-american philosophy the philosophic movement that he was the leader of pragmatism is certainly one of the most important and indeed enduring philosophical projects of the last hundred years the contemporary philosopher richard rorty has argued that in fact if one looks at trends not only in anglo-american but in continental philosophy as well one will find that james is not so much the beginning of the road but the end of the road that when the dairy daws and foucaults as well as the davidsons and kwines take their next two steps forward in their movements they'll wind out wind up just where james began that's a rather bold claim i want to try and instantiate it in a couple cases throughout the text or the discussion rather of the text of pragmatism but i would say first that perhaps the best way of getting an angle on james is to see him as in many ways he is the american nietzsche or better yet james pragmatism is the american version of niche and perspectivalism this is i think a more apt comparison than most scholars have previously seen they for one they shared many of the same influences they had many common interests and they also shared a lot of views about philosophy truth and metaphysics both were profoundly influenced by the writings of ralph waldo emerson by the idealistic and romantic movements of the early 19th century and perhaps most importantly both were struck powerfully by the darwinian revolution and finally of course i think a very important similarity and influence neither of them has a technical philosophic training nietzsche you'll remember was a philologist trained in classical languages and james was a doctor trained at harvard medical school who became one of the founders of modern experimental psychology psychology of course is the principal interest they share in common as well we'll remember from nietzsche each conceived of himself as a philosophical psychologist which is to say nietzsche thought that what one did uh was to look at psychological states and see what sort of philosophical implications one could draw from them james in a way could then be said to be a psychological philosopher he did just the opposite of nietzsche what he did is said let us look at philosophical systems and see if we can read into them certain psychological attitudes propensities dispositions and of course he did this in two very famous texts uh the principles of psychology which is one of the standard texts for experimental psychology and of course his famous varieties of religious experience another common shared interest with nietzsche that of religious psychology now as to their views both were perspectivalists both share an external uh perspectivalism the view that reality is in some sense unfixed and internal perspectivalism that the self itself is a posit both shared a certain amount of anti-realism that the world does not necessarily correspond to our best descriptions of it both looked at truth and culture not as a copy not as an artifact but as a tool a tool for life and both of course perhaps most famously saw metaphysics as largely hanging on spiritual consolation and the projection of internal psychological needs and states well given all that similarity there is nonetheless a sharp difference james puts what i would call an american spin on perspectivalism he celebrates tolerance openness democratic egalitarianism in sharp contrast to nietzsche's morbid fascination with cruelty elitism and what he called what we must call i think a snobbish contempt for the herd and in fact i think you find this different sense this different spin as it were in the different idioms they use to describe the same sorts of phenomena what nietzsche calls perspectivalism james calls pragmatism pragmatism coming from the greek word for practice or action where nietzsche says that culture truth is all about the power principle right we we determine what to believe on the basis of how it empowers us james ever the american says that rather than a power principle that is in fact the ideas or beliefs cash value it's what you can purchase with it and indeed we might use the term purchase or hold on reality with respect to culture in the exact same place as nietzsche uses the expression domination and whereas nietzsche would argue that truth since there is no correspondence is a lie or useful error james says the truth rather than a lie or useful error is serviceable or helpful in short they will look at the same perspectival truth nietzsche the continental thinker brought up in a tradition of rationalism can't help in seeing the loss of absolute truth a certain amount of how should we say the glass being half empty james on the other hand seeing how serviceable even unabsolute truths are to human needs sees the glass as half full well from the american perspective right adopting our view james pragmatism is then i would urge a mature adult form of nietzsche's adolescent insight and it would run as follows unlike nature james is no longer scandalized by the loss of absolute truth by the inability to gain what we might call a god's eye view of things instead of nietzsche's implication from such a lack of god's eye view that we must therefore veer towards ruthlessness and recklessness james says just the opposite precisely because there is no absolute truth we have to be doubly careful doubly cautious and doubly calculative in our warrantable beliefs okay enough contrast denitro let me then turn to what i would call the democratic ethos of pragmatism and i think it's nowhere better exemplified in the rhetoric of the text itself pragmatism was a series of lectures first given in 1906 at the lowell institute in boston and then offered the following year at columbia university in new york the audience and i think this is important included a large number of laypersons amateurs as well as professional philosophers i mentioned this because contrary to most of the other texts we find in the history of philosophy pragmatism is not pitched to the professional james makes a self-conscious decision to pitch it to the amateurs in the audience and it is for that reason that the text of pragmatism is perhaps one of the most accessible and pleasant works in 20th century philosophy now this strategy the strategy of pitching to the average person certainly led to a large degree of what i would call derision and criticism from the academy but james believed that it was the average person who should ultimately be the philosophic authority i quote the finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal round of minds so it was a very self-conscious strategy james took and i'm going to take advantage of that in presenting the text by occasionally quoting passages from james to give you a sense of the very open and attractive prose and rhetoric that james employs james opened his discussion with a lecture quite scandalously entitled the present dilemma in philosophy james interprets the long-standing philosophical dispute between what we've been calling in the series the rationalist or german idealist tradition on the one hand and the empiricist or positivist tradition on the other as a clash between two different temperaments temperaments which he calls tender minded and tough-minded respectively right we know the temp the tender-minded sort of worldview they tend to be rationalistic they go by principles right principles first are priori truths they tend to be intellectualistic you judge a theory whether it appeals to the rational faculties of our cognitive uh makeup they're idealistic right they tend to think that ideas are abstract entities which have a reality above and beyond the physical world they're optimistic they consistently argue that this is in fact the best of all possible worlds if only we can attain the absolute perspective they're religious the absolute is in fact a sort of secularized version of god their free willist as james calls them believing that human dignity demands that we be autonomous from the sort of causal uh psychological events that occur in other animals they're monistic reality is one it's unified and of course as we've seen with hume they're intensely dogmatic on the other side we find the tough-minded philosophers people like hume locke barkley they're empiricists for them it's only the facts that count they're stationalistic they don't appeal to your rational faculties they appeal to your sense datum your experience they're materialistic right with the exception of barclay they tend to believe that the world is made up of matter or atoms in the void they're pessimistic they offer you no grounds for hope they're irreligious they're skeptical about the belief in a god they're fatalistic knowing fully well that if the material principle is correct the universe will eventually go out of being they're pluralistic failing to see how the world is unified instead noticing facts seeing the diversity of things and of course they're skeptical refusing to make strong statements now that's a very nice sort of tabular description of say the last 500 years of western philosophy but note what that implies to open a lecture with such a table it is in fact is it not demystifying debunking all of the philosophic tradition whereas nietzsche's perspectivalism was a sort of shock therapy as i argued a sort of tough love for the average person james pragmatism in this case at least is tough love for philosophers you must come to realize that your texts are nothing so much as the expression of your personalities as he states the books of all the great philosophers are like so many men our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them typical but indescribable is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education what the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of god what it is and oh so flagrantly is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is and that i would urge is an incredibly deflationary view of philosophy right what do most of you take away from any of these lectures but the sense of what an odd egg hegel was strange fellow that's the nose and that barkley and his point is that the layman who takes that view away should not be critiqued as being a philosophic lowbrow but is in fact making the natural intelligent response to the facts well james also points out that very few of us are likely to fall into one camp or the other only a philosopher makes consistency into such a virtue and that then constitutes our dilemma we have on the one hand the tender minded and they have their virtues they're inspiring they offer a cosmological promise hope of a better world but at the cost at the cost of what nietzsche would call one's intellectual conscience right they give you hope they give you aspiration but only by forcing yourself to become a scientific illiterate on the other hand you have the tough-minded right they preserve your intellectual conscience they don't say anything that would make you blush on the other hand they're intensely fatalistic they're irreligious they're pessimistic and of course for some people at least that leads to depression psychological only the rational person james says naturally wants the good things on both sides of the table right and i wish to quote james here most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line facts are good of course give us lots of facts principles are good give us plenty of principles the world's undoubtedly one if you look at it one way but as undoubtedly it is many if you look at it in another way everything of course is necessarily determined and yet of course our wills are free a sort of free will determinism is the true philosophy and james is making a good point here all of these things have value for our lives right optimism aspiration as well as a certain sense of fact a certain sense of the subtleties of particular existence well that's where pragmatism enters james offers promises in his first lecture that pragmatism is the philosophy which will allow you to have your cake and eat it too it is at this point that my own solution begins to appear i offer the oddly name thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand it can remain religious like the rationalisms but at the same time like the empiricisms can preserve the richest intimacy with facts okay for james pragmatism is both a method and a theory of truth the method grows out of charles saunders person's pragmatic account of meaning now person's account ran something as follows the meaning of an expression is determined by the experiences or consequences that would follow or wouldn't sue if under certain conditions if and only if that expression were the case or were true right in short pragmatism asks this question as a method what difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true if no practical difference whatever can be traced then the alternative means practically the same thing and all dispute is idle okay that's the pragmatic notion of meaning and we'll find that that is of course an important tenet in logical positivism in a.j air james generalized this doctrine into a larger method for settling metaphysical disputes and in addition interpreting philosophical doctrines such views and doctrines and by the way james like nietzsche refused to draw a sharp line between metaphysics and science so even scientific theories are instruments of action and not fixed and final answers to problems posed by the world as james says the whole functional philosophy ought to be to find out what difference what definite difference it will make to you and me a definite instance of our life if this world formula or that world formula be the true one what hangs on materialism or spiritualism or free will or determinism and we will return to that but first i want to talk about the pragmatic theory of truth at least briefly james points out that this theory was developed in large part with the collaboration of csf schiller and john dewey it is as james describes it a genetic theory of truth where truth is something that happens to an idea or a belief we invent new truths to cope with anomalous experiences and such invention is limited by the desire to change as few as of our old beliefs as follows or as possible rather as james puts it the individual has a stock of old opinions already but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain the result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous massive opinions at least some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently this new idea is then adopted as the true one and james offers an example in the lecture itself imagine as it were if i was to in the midst of my lecture start singing at the top of my lungs it's my party and i'll cry if i want to in the midst of loud shrieking and sobs and tears well that would be an anomalous experience right i haven't done that in any of the previous lectures so far i've been i hope admirably lucid so you might have to try and come up with a new truth to account for that you might say well whatever did he have for lunch did he have those pork chops that looked a little undercooked and green that might explain it but if you couldn't find something like that you might say well does he have a previous history of doing this and you would keep searching until you found an explanation that made you give up as little of your beliefs as possible what you want to do of course is find some way of accounting for my auditory ejaculation without concluding that i'm insane this is a view which in about 60 years after this text willard quine will describe as a web of belief or field of force and will be considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century again i'm trying to cash in as it were rory's point about james so true beliefs then are those that effectively marry the new experience to the old stock of truths or common sense and as james quite aptly puts it the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief and good too for definite assignable reasons okay let's return to the pragmatic method because james applies it to several long-standing metaphysical disputes and problems but first i want to begin with an illustration he offers from an experience he had while camping because i think it's very illustrative not only of his rhetoric but also of some of his views he was camping he says with some of his friends and he went off on the nature trail and came back and his friends were in the midst of a heated metaphysical struggle they said imagine a fellow traci chasing a squirrel around a tree the squirrel of course is faster than him so he can never actually catch the squirrel the squirrel always keeps the tree between himself and the person then the question becomes does the man go round the squirrel or does he not and the group had apparently broken into about even camps and since james was the deciding vote they both appealed to him and james offered them this answer he said well doesn't it really hang on what you mean by going around if you mean by going around that he's on each of the compass points north west south east respectively of the squirrel well then he certainly does go around the squirrel if however you mean by going around the squirrel that is first at the side of the squirrel and then the back of the squirrel then at the other side and then in front then he clearly doesn't go round and while a couple of his friends said well that's philosophical hogwash most of his companions accepted it the reason i bring it up is first it shows us what did that distinction what did that struggle hang on and hung on the way we choose to catch the expression go round into experience and look at the way james resolves it he resolves it pluralistically there is no right one answer if going around as circling the compass points works for you and gets you through your experiences with squirrels then that's fine and if the other one works just as well then that's just as fine i point this out because james thought that pluralism was perhaps more than any other philosophic view the best indice the sort of thinker you have a thinker who could accept pluralism that there is not one absolute truth that there might be more than one right way or best way to describe a problem for james's at the cutting edge of the pragmatic revolution okay now that you have a sense of the method let's watch as james applies it to particular cases the first case is the long-standing struggle between materialism and spiritualism is it just atoms in the void or are we souls and spirits with an oversoul james points something out if we look at this in a retro-addictive sense if we look back in time you can't tell any difference imagine the world ends at this moment and we look back at all of human history natural history cosmic history universal history what difference would it make can spiritualism can the providence of god account for everything that's happened certainly perhaps not to everyone's satisfaction but it certainly can logically incoherently similarly atoms in the void the argument that the universe is just matter and energy going through its changes and developments can account for everything that's happened to date so if we look from the past to the present there is no difference whatsoever between materialism and spiritualism however prospectively it's an entirely different kettle of fish as it were materialism teaches us right that one day the sun will supernova the planet will die the universe will collapse all of our aspirations our projects our goals our achievements will have meant nothing and they will be permanently obliterated without a trace without a memory all for not spiritualism on the other hand gives us ground to hope that something in some way may persist even if the universe goes out of being at least perhaps in the mind of god our achievements our aspirations may exist as examples or at least as exemplars and i quote james here then lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism not in the hair splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence or about the metaphysical attributes of god materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal in the cutting off of ultimate hopes spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope surely here is an issue genuine enough note something james has not settled the issue he simply said what it hangs on james is a pluralist if you need that sort of cosmological hope well then who could deny you your spiritualism as long as it doesn't do too much violence to your old stock of beliefs right conservatism always being the primary directive in keeping our web of beliefs solid similarly if you don't have those needs then you have no need for a spiritualism materialism will fulfill you well let's turn now to the dispute between free will and determinism james points out that many philosophers have tried to be pragmatic by trying to hang the issue on culpability and punishment right we've discovered if we're not really free if we're determined to act how can i be blamed for anything i do and of course the deterministic respond if you are free and your acts are spontaneous then there's no reason to think they'll recur one murder might not lead to another why would we punish you except out of vengeance james finds that whole argument somewhere between amusing and despicable it's absolutely absurd as he states instinct and utility are more than sufficient to dictate our moral actions of praise and blame and making a very good point here when you have a a moral or better yet criminal problem do you go to a philosophy department and find a philosopher or do you look for a policeman and take the guy to court philosophers don't settle such issues juries do lawyers do judges do policemen do right free will and determinism therefore do not at all hang on the issue of culpability nor do they have any difference with respect to human history in the past tense right everything that's happened in the human past can be accounted for on the basis of human freedom we saw hegel do that or it can be done on a materialist basis we've seen marx and vapor attempt to do that on a completely deterministic basis where then is the difference again it's with the future for some people determinism means that the future will resemble the past and james says there are certain people who are melancholic james himself was as he would say unhealthy souls souls which are as he would argue deeper and for them this notion that the future will resemble the past will be just like it it's the cause of despair most of the human past has been suffering has been silliness if not stupidity and cupidity and finality on the other hand what does free will teach us free will pragmatically means that we can expect novelties in the future right it means the right to expect it in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past it holds up improvement as at least possible whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance it's therefore possible if we believe in free will pragmatically that the world can be made better a doctrine james called ameliarism which he contrasted to both optimism the rationalistic view that this is the best of all possible worlds and it's going to work out in the wash and pessimism that we're destined to make the same stupid mistakes we've made before again james point is there is contingency there is at least the possibility if one accept free will as a pragmatic hypothesis rather than a metaphysical dogma that we could make the world better nothing stops us from doing so finally i turn to the doctrine of god or design and again it has no retrodictive force right the world could have occurred uh as a result of god and his providential design or it could have occurred by the action of atoms in the void but it does have a perspective difference doesn't it right if it is the case that there is no design then any moral improvement or physical improvement in the world will hang entirely on our efforts and that james says causes no small degree of anxiety and sensitive souls one is constantly as it were in a moral uproar trying to make things better and work towards a better future but look at what god and design offer they assure us that everything will work out in the wash right god is it up in this heaven and eventually it'll all be okay what then is the pragmatic cash value of god or design it'll it gives us the excuse to take the occasional moral holiday say okay i've done enough moral behavior for the day i can take the rest of the day off because god's going to make sure it works out in the end and he says and i think quite sensibly so to deny god is to say that why not never take a moral holiday that why not never check one's moral projects at the door and relax for a little while and yet that is an important part of life isn't it part of the pleasant part of life is occasionally relaxing from our moral struggles so all of these issues in religious metaphysics come down to what for james they come down or as he says arise in the fact that our empirical future feels to us unsafe and needs some higher guarantee and note the difference between him and nietzsche here nietzsche says the exact same thing and says that's despicable humans are acting weak when they uh grab for such a crutch whereas james is saying no look at the animal the animal has this need who is to say that that need is inauthentic if it helps it survive and it certainly has for the last several millennia then who could deny it then what makes that irrational it's biological so james concludes his discussion of metaphysical disputes the pragmatism represents a philosophical what he calls protestant reformation what i would call a rebellion against authority on behalf of the individual whereas nietzsche located that moment in the gay siberia the gay science of the uh chivalrous troubadour knights of provence james the protestant sees that same activity in the protestant reformation and this might well count as his manifesto the earth of things long thrown into shadows by the glories of the upper ether plato's heaven must resume its place to shift the emphasis in this way means that philosophic questions will fall to be treated by minds of a less abstractionist type minds more scientific and individualistic in their tone yet not irreligious either it will be an alteration in the seat of authority that reminds one almost of the protestant reformation and as the papal minds the protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of anarchy and confusion such no doubt will pragmatism seem to alter rationalistic minds in philosophy it will seem so much mere trash philosophically but life wags on all the same and compo passes its ends in protestant countries i venture to think that philosophic productism protestantism will compass a non-dissimilar prosperity well towards the end of a series james turned to a more complete account of the pragmatic or what we might call instrumental theory of truth like nietzsche james rejected out of hand the correspondence or what he called copy theory of truth right he gave a wonderful example he said well look at this watch right look at the watch now close your eyes and create your idea of it and it will be a mental picture of it which is more or less a copy of the appearance of the watch so far so good for copy theory he says now think in your mind the idea of the watch's inner workings right you all have an idea and i would venture to say most of you have something pretty close to the right idea but i would also venture to say not a one of you has anything even close to a copy of the watch's inner workings our ideas very rarely in fact our truths very rarely attempt to copy the world they're rather again instruments in again touching the world getting a purchase on it a cash value on it turning it so that it fulfills our needs james critiqued this copy theory of truth as static and inert true ideas uh according to this view are sort of eternal copies you get and when you get them you're done there's no more philosophic work to be done whereas james view is once you have a true idea that's just the beginning of your process you must now apply it to life you must use it to create new situations new contexts change the world they are everywhere instruments for actions in fact it is best not to think of sentences as being true so much as being made true by verification and as james says true ideas are those that we can assimilate validate corroborate and verify false ideas are those that we cannot truth happens to an idea it becomes true it's made true by events it's not an eternal fixed goal to which we move you know i should point out that such verification needn't always be direct right where i'd say to you it is snowing outside in washington dc right now you would verify that by leaving the uh this building and seeing if it is in fact snowing but there are other claims that you cannot directly verify if i was to say that it is snowing in tokyo right now i doubt many of you would get on the next jet but you might look in a newspaper you might turn on the weather channel no direct verification but indirect verification passes muster in fact most of our beliefs pass muster only through such indirect verification again this is a point aj error will make in his theory of meaning and it will be considered a great breakthrough in some 30 years so to recur to our major theme true beliefs are instruments of action not eternal copies of the world or thoughts in god's mind and this i would urge is an extremely darwinian view of culture the truth is simply the expedient in the way of belief just as the good is the expedient in the way of action both are expedient true or good for specific and definite reasons so if one wishes to respond to the pragmatist by saying well you keep saying that we should believe what's good but what's good you respond by saying that's not a meaningful question good for what what's a good belief in terms of your physical health well that would probably come down to medicine what's a good belief in terms of psychological health perhaps psychoanalysis perhaps religion it would depend not only on the context but on the person on the situation on the historical moment there is no absolute truth except perhaps conceived as a normative ideal that we might ultimately all believe in if we had free and open speech to last forever now that's a thought that jurgen habermas will spend about three or four books off in about 70 years and be considered a genius for well james then turned in one of his last lectures to something he called pragmatism and humanism and he opened it by recurring to this previous discussion of truth what hardens the heart of everyone i approach with the view of truth sketched in my last lecture the one i just expressed is that typical and here he alludes clearly to bacon idol of the tribe the notion of the truth which he spells with a capital t conceived as the one answer determinate and complete to the one fixed enigma which the world is believed to propound james in attacking that view and saying that the truth is in fact simply what's expedient for us to believe what's useful for us what gives us a purchase on life is in fact offering what he argues is a completely humanistic view of the cultural situation the world's not a fixed given that we must correspond to another idol of the tribe but in fact is made over in our image as we parse it as we work on it right has not that in fact our scientific theories changed the nature of the world maybe for the better maybe for the worst certainly ozone holes might not have existed had it not been for some of our scientific breakthroughs right the amount of forest or tree land we might have had in our topography has changed dramatically because of changes in human culture it is completely nonsensical for james to see when one looks at this evolutionary dynamic process to argue that the world is in some way fixed and final it's constantly changing and we're changing it also the notion that the world makes our beliefs true when they're true and we make them false when they're not that our beliefs must agree with the world somehow james argues is fixed on the metaphysical dogma that you can separate out the world's contributions to our beliefs from our contribution i see i think quite nicely puts it does the river make its banks or do the banks make the river does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially just as impossible may it be to separate the real right the world's contribution from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience nietzsche used to describe that phenomenon by saying our beliefs are human all too human james i think actually has the better phrase what he says is the trail of the human serpent is overall that's a point which in recent years has been made by donald davidson to quite a bit of a claim quite rightly so well the next point james makes really draws from his psychology we have no awareness he argues of a world prior to our interpretation of it at least under some of our descriptions or conceptual schemes the pre-schematic phenomenal world one gets from barkley is itself an abstraction from experience in and of itself as observed in say the perception of an infant the world is nothing but a booming buzzing confusion very much like nietzsche's chaos now so far that's not entirely dissimilar to what content said if you'll remember in his copernican revolution what james points out is that none of those parsings are fixed in the human mind so much as evolve through the process of cultural change by naming things and properties and attributes and relations we break up the flux of experience of sensation we parse it and most importantly of all we humanize it or make it serviceable for our human biological social and psychological needs that of course is a point that martin heidegger will make in about 30 years after the publication of this text and will cause quite a stir i wish to quote here we break the flux of sensible reality into things then at our will we recreate the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions we create the predicates also many of the predicates of our things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings such predicates of course are human editions caesar across the rubicon and was a menace to rome's freedom he's also an american schoolroom pest made into one by the reaction of our school boys on his writings the added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones he's just as much as a pest to school boys in the early 20th century as he was a danger to rome's freedom and the point that james is making is as i quote you see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle you can't weed out the human contribution well such a view of culture then is what i would argue dynamic darwinian and evolutionary culture changes or if you would like mutates according to evolutionary dictates beliefs are called true only when they have a survival value for our species or for our group for our society in a quite stirring passage he says we plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the belief our ancestors and we have already made these determine what we notice what we notice determines what we do what we do again determines what we experience so from one thing to another although the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation even our scientific truths are not written in god's pristine language their human language which gives us a purchase a hold a cash value and a lever as it were on the reality which surrounds us and no what do we call the vast bulk of those beliefs that we've inherited from ancestry common sense so common sense then is nothing more than the fund of such previously effective beliefs and posits for their opposites and this of course is a point that ludwig wittgenstein will make in his philosophical investigations and it will bring him great fame and rightly so finally i want to return or better yet turn to james defense of his version of perspectivalism and anti-realism against what he considered would be the imminent rationalistic criticism that in fact he did receive he was quite prophetic on that and see if this doesn't in fact correspond to what many of you may be feeling as an objection to this doctrine now the idea of this loose universe affects your typical rationalist and here i like to think of conto or hegel in much the same way as freedom of the press might affect a veteran official in the russian bureau of censorship it affects him as the swarm of protestant sects affects a papist onlooker in other spheres of life it's true that we've got used to living in a state of relative insecurity the authority of the state and that of an absolute moral law have resolved themselves into expediencies and holy church has resolved itself into meeting houses not so as yet within the philosophic classrooms right james is arguing for a revolution in the way we think about philosophic problems and it is a revolution which is both democratic egalitarian that there are as many solutions as there are tenable forms of life and i want to illustrate that by returning recurring to that dilemma in philosophy um and the dilemma was that we want to have our facts and our hopes with them as james says rationalism sticks to logic in the imperium empiricism sticks the external senses pragmatism is willing to take anything to follow either logic or the senses and to count the humblest and most personal experiences her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us if the notion of god in particular should prove to do it how could pragmatism possibly deny god's existence and this i think is a deep point if the positive god helps an animal work its way through its environment and best cope with the struggles of its psychological nature it would be insane to say that it doesn't exist rather what pragmatism offers is a way to believe in that posit without doing violence to your intellectual conscience without violating your sense of scientific realities and here he says is the most profound misunderstanding of pragmatism it's usually as he seen as he argues seen as positivistic tough-mindedness right uh as so much jabber and uh a love of intellectual anarchy he says most people think pragmatists prefer a sort of wolf world absolutely unpainted wild and without a master or a collar to any philosophic classroom product whatsoever but in fact james is saying that pragmatism is the mediator between your scientific rationality and your most profound psychological moral and spiritual needs and that there are as many pragmatic solutions to any given problem as there are pragmatic thinkers and finally i want to conclude with this thought that the pragmatic thinker that would be the ultimate pragmatic philosopher for james and for other pragmatists is not someone in a philosophy department but the average person going about is average business in a rational and self-conscious fashion it is as it were the philosophy of a democratic culture

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Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Comte, Origins, Sociology

Id: RiHq0bPHB44

Length: 45min 24sec (2724 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 29 2022