Peirce, James, and a Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion by John W. Woell (review)

Perhaps the best way to understand this book is to see it as the first installment on a larger project. Woell’s ultimate goal is to write a pragmatic philosophy of religion, but this work is not it. This preliminary project attempts to clear the way for the larger project by reclaiming pragmatism in such a way that it can provide an adequate framework for doing the philosophy of religion. In other words, this is a book about pragmatism that serves as a “prolegomena to a pragmatic philosophy of religion” (152). In this sense, the title is somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, it is meticulously argued and stands independently as an important contribution to our understanding of pragmatism.

Why a prolegomena? The problem, according to Woell, is that philosophers trying to rehabilitate pragmatism in the last half of the twentieth century have been either dismissive of or hostile toward religion. Unsurprisingly, Woell raises Richard Rorty with his strident atheism as a prime example, though others do not escape his critique. This neglect or rejection of religion stands in contrast to the significant role that religious concerns take in the work of the classical pragmatists, particularly Peirce and James. Woell sees this as evidence that something is amiss. While admitting that Peirce and James did not hold the same religious views, he argues that they shared a common understanding of religion in general and of the philosophy of religion in particular. Moreover, their treatment of religious concerns provides insights into their understanding of pragmatism. Thus, Woell argues not only that contemporary pragmatists have misinterpreted their classical counterparts but also that their neglect of religious concerns contributes to that misinterpretation. “Not only is a pragmatic philosophy of religion possible and desirable, it is central to a fuller rehabilitation of pragmatism and to a fuller understanding of early American pragmatism’s key insights” (6).

To address these problems, Woell develops two ambitious theses, one critical and the other constructive. The critical thesis is that reading Peirce and James through the lens of recent debates concerning metaphysical realism/antirealism and realism/nonrealism in regard to truth distorts their work and drives an unnecessary wedge between them. The constructive thesis is that paying attention to the notion of inquiry and its role in belief formation in their work is the key to understanding pragmatism and realizing its value in the philosophy of religion.

Woell develops the critical part of his thesis in the first three chapters. In the first chapter, he defines realism and antirealism, both metaphysical and in regard to truth, and looks at how contemporary philosophers have tried to position Peirce and James relative to these categories. According to Woell, however, these categories do not provide a clear lens for approaching the classical pragmatists. Their use obscures the fact that Peirce and James did not so much engage these debates as try to change the terms of engagement by rejecting the “bifurcation of the world into the mind-dependent and the mind-independent” (35) on which they depend.

In the next two chapters, Woell further develops this argument by tracing this bifurcation to Descartes, Hume, and Kant. In the second chapter, he takes up the issue of skepticism from Descartes to Hume, arguing that while Peirce and James took the issue seriously, both rejected the dualism of mind and world, knower and known upon which it is based. In the third chapter, he subjects Peirce’s and James’s responses to Kant’s inconceivable “thing-in-itself” to a similar analysis. In both cases, the failure to see that both Peirce and James were not so much attempting to solve as to dissolve these problems leads contemporary pragmatists to interpret the classical pragmatists in terms of the realism/antirealism debate and to attribute metaphysical positions to them that they themselves did not see as necessary conclusions of their pragmatism. The upshot is that while Peirce...