By Trygve Throntveit

Pragmatist thinker William James has lengthy been deemed a doubtful advisor to moral reasoning. This e-book overturns such pondering, demonstrating the coherence of James's efforts to improve a versatile yet rigorous framework for people and societies looking freedom, which means, and justice in a global of interdependence, uncertainty, and change.

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Extra resources for William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic

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Associated divinity with the creative impulse, and the creative impulse with love. To create what could be truly loved, God gave human beings proprium or self-consciousness, a sense of separation from the creator. This self-consciousness was bound to entail spiritual evil, for only through the overcoming of such evil could the full love of completed creation be experienced by humankind. But if self-consciousness was the source of spiritual evil, it was also the means by which it was overcome. For just as self-consciousness inevitably resulted in humans’ freedom to ignore their total dependence on God for fully realized existence, it also entailed freedom to accept such dependence and reject their shadow existence as subjective selves; as Henry Sr.

First, he refined and expanded his argument that the central element of consciousness is interest or preference, 42 William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic explaining that thought is most active and creative in problematic situations provoking uncertainty about the future. These situations confound our understanding of the world and impede the habitual activity our interests dictate. ” It was also extremely effective, for among the “spontaneous powers” honed by cognitive evolution was that “essential function” of all thinking, “faith”—the will to act, in advance of evidence, as if some means of solving our problems and fulfilling our interests is really possible.

52 Peirce, just two years older than James, was less teacherly in bearing than Wright, but more influential. To James he appeared engaged in a quest to reconcile science and morality that complemented his own. ” In other words, “our sensations are merely contributory to our opinions about things. ”53 Hence James’s later identification of Peirce as the co-founder of pragmatism. For Peirce, a belief was merely a habit reinforced by its fruits for the believer, an idea justified but not given by our senses, a tool refined over time by a thinker using it to predict and navigate experience.

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