Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God

Preface

{ ix } B Preface This book addresses fundamental issues in the philosophy of religion from a pragmatist point of view and will be primarily of interest to professional philosophers specializing in pragmatism or the philosophy of religion. It is not merely a specialized scholarly volume, however, as it can also be used as supplementary reading material in courses intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Both pragmatism and the philosophy of religion have, obviously, been written on voluminously , but no previous book has applied pragmatism—or what I will call pragmatic pluralism—to issues in the philosophy of religion in the way this book will. Philosophers have tended to view pragmatism either as a somewhat informal version of logical empiricism (given the resemblance between the pragmatic method and the verificationist theory of meaning) or as a radical postmodern critique of any kind of systematic philosophy (as in Richard Rorty’s “antirepresentationalist” neopragmatism). Both ways of understanding pragmatism are misguided, as should become clear through the argument this book develops. On the other hand, scholarly studies on the classical pragmatists or their religious ideas rarely take neopragmatism seriously enough. A substantial look at both classical and recent currents in pragmatist thought is needed to evaluate the relevance of this extremely rich philosophical orientation to the philosophy of religion today and also to compare it to other traditions and perspectives. Moreover, the relation between ethics and metaphysics, a major theme in this book, is becoming increasingly relevant in contemporary philosophy . Indeed, one of the goals of the present investigation is to show the deep integration of ethical and metaphysical themes in a pragmatically pluralist approach to major issues in the philosophy of religion, includ- x Preface ing the theism versus atheism controversy. Thus, it is my sincere hope that this volume will make a genuinely novel contribution to the on-going discussion not only on pragmatism but on key topics in the philosophy of religion generally, including basic ones concerning theism and atheism, as well as the religion versus science controversy, and more practical problems concerning, say, the problem of evil. For this monograph, I’ve used some of my earlier articles as the basis for the chapters. The basic ideas for the introduction were presented at the “Brown Bag Seminar” of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in November 2009. An early version of chapter 1 appeared in The Pluralist 5 (2010); copyright by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois , used with permission of the University of Illinois Press; a brief version of the chapter was presented at the 22nd World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, Korea, in July–August 2008. Chapter 2 is based on my paper “Dewey and Pragmatic Religious Naturalism,” published in Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); copyright by Cambridge University Press, used with permission of the publisher. Parts of the chapter were presented in the Nordic Pragmatism Workshop “The Ethics of Belief” at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, in December 2008; and in the workshop “Science and Religion” at the Forum Scientiarum, University of Tübingen, Germany , in February 2012. Chapter 3 incorporates material from a paper on Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey’s views on religion, presented in a conference on Dewey and Rorty at the University of Szeged, Hungary, in November 2009. An early version appeared in the proceedings of the conference in the e-journal Pragmatism Today 1, no. 1 (2010), www.prag matismtoday.eu. Chapter 4 is based on a paper delivered at a conference on William James and the “Transatlantic Conversation,” organized at the Rothermere Institute of American Thought, University of Oxford in September 2010; there is also some overlap with my entry on James written for the Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming in 2013). Parts of the material were also presented as a guest lecture at New School University, New York City, in February 2011, and as the paper “Pluralism in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion,” presented in a symposium on religious pluralism and equality Preface xi at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in June 2011. Chapter 5 is based on papers presented at Columbia University, New York City, in February 2011; a meeting of the New York Pragmatist Forum at Fordham University, also in February 2011; and the international conference “Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion” at the Max-Weber-Kolleg, University...