ASEBL Journal – Volume 13 Issue 1 , January 2018
II . James
We now move from Königsberg at the close of the 18 th Century to Boston at the opening of the 20 th . The impact of Darwin on the social sciences was at its height while William James was constructing his version of pragmatism – indeed , Philip Wiener wrote a book length study of the role of evolution on the development of pragmatism itself ( Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism , 1949 ).
Henry Levenson ’ s introduction to the 1996 edition of A Pluralistic Universe similarly sees a philosophical reaction to evolutionary theory as one of James ’ main points . He quotes , “ the vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened and the rising tide of social democratic ideas , have changed the type of our imagination ” ( PU p . 30 ).
Yet despite the huge scientific gap between them , there are solid connections between Kant and James . Murray J . Murphey , who drew upon Wiener ’ s book in his influential article Kant ’ s Children , claimed “ Cambridge pragmatism was , and is , more indebted to Kant than to any other single philosopher .” Murphey ’ s argument is that the pragmatic conception of meaning as simply the end result of inquiry concerning an object that results in a habit of action , in Charles Pierce ’ s famous definition , while appearing to be aligned with empiricism and the scientific method which grew out of it , actually began with Pierce ’ s rejection of the empiricist claim of the origin of knowledge in sensation . Instead , Pierce relied on his interpretation of Kant ’ s transcendental unity of apperception – the ability to tie ‘ all appearances ’ together into ‘ one experience ’ – except that Pierce and the pragmatists emphasized the origin of transcendental apperception not in a divine mind , but in an actual human community of thinkers and actors . Pierce later totally revised his theory of inquiry , but by then James had picked up the ball and run with it . James ’ pragmatism , however , was more radically empirical than Pierce ’ s . ( cf . James ’ discussion of truth in Pragmatism p . 97-99 ). That being said , James was a far less systematic philosopher than Kant , and one must pick out passages among his works and connect disparate threads to arrive at anything like a coherent account . For the sake of brevity , I ’ ll restrict myself to connecting a few dots .
First , as discussed above , pragmatism ’ s epistemology is future oriented – truth is the end of inquiry that results in a habit of action – hence it is teleological in character : action deliberately directed towards a goal . Second , inquiry into truth is also a communal process that begins in the historical past , but extends into the indefinite future . The commonalities with Kant ’ s discussion of purposiveness in nature now appear in sharper relief .
Third , James developed his radical pragmatism in part in order to reconcile empiricism and its materialistic world view with what he called the “ religious demands of human beings .” The reason was not to preserve dogma , or to privilege theologically based forms of knowledge . Rather , it was in service to the pragmatic quest for truth as a means of improving human life .
In arguing against the materialism of Spencer and the social Darwinists , he pointed out that Spencer himself equated theistic notions of spirit with the then-modern conceptions of matter and energy : “[ b ] oth terms ... are but symbols , pointing to that one
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