The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~110,000 words · 505 passages
Cite this work
- APAWilliam James. (n.d.). The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-will-to-believe-and-other-essays-in-popular-philosophy
- MLAWilliam James. "The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-will-to-believe-and-other-essays-in-popular-philosophy.
- ChicagoWilliam James. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/william-james/the-will-to-believe-and-other-essays-in-popular-philosophy.
What it is about
The 1897 collection headed by his most disputed essay: when is it legitimate to believe something the evidence does not settle?
Context and history
James's argument is narrower than the title suggests, and it is worth knowing, because the opposite has been attributed to him. It applies, he says, only when the option is living (both possibilities mean something to you), forced (not deciding is already deciding) and momentous (something irreversible is at stake), and only when the evidence cannot settle it by itself. In such cases — his examples are religious faith and trust in another person — demanding proof before committing is not neutrality: it is a way of choosing. The rest of the volume contains 'Is Life Worth Living?' and 'The Dilemma of Determinism', and the whole is the most readable way into American pragmatism.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar to address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I have from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to me that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way. Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, {viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. _Primâ facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unity than the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absolute uni