Seven Podcast Lectures on William James' The Will To Believe

One of the works I teach fairly routinely in my Introduction to Philosophy classes - and also when I occasionally teach Philosophy of Religion - is William James' essay, The Will To Believe. 

It is quite an eye-opening text for my students, since it proposes something that they are surprised a philosopher would say, namely that there are some cases - having to do with matters that we believe or don't - where we not only can decide the matter on the basis of our feelings, our gut hunches, or even just our own capacity to choose.  Sometimes, we ought to decide matters that way.  that's what we ought to do, if we don't want to miss out on the possibility of learning, knowing, or enjoying the truth.

James will ultimately apply this to religious matters - so the will to believe is a will to believe in God and the teachings of religion, a pragmatic proof, if you like.  But it equally applies to all sorts of other matters of our practical lives, from the workplace to our romantic relationships, and even to North Pole expeditions.

I created the podcast episodes below from the seven core concept videos I shot for my students as resources for their studies.  Now you can listen to and download them at your leisure.  All seven of them together comprise a little under an hour and 45 minutes.  Here they are:

• Hypotheses and Options
• Willing Nature And Beliefs
• Criticism Of Pascal's Wager
• Risks, Truth, And Belief
• Empiricism And Absolutism
• Faith Facts And Verification
• Religious Faith And Options

I hope that you enjoy them and find them thought-provoking!  

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William James at the Book Club

Monday night saw a good crowd of the regulars at the Cumberland county book club.  Or selection this time was the last of the philosophers whose thoughts I'll get to watch the ordinary, educated, non-academic people of this book club engage with -- I'm leaving Fayetteville for the Hudson Valley at May's end, and our two next selections are more literary than philosophical.  Further blog entries in this "at the Book Club" series (which includes Arnold  and Kant) will have to wait until I find a suitable Great Books Club up north next Fall.

The selection included portions of a tried and true, oft-anthologized, piece, Pragmatism:  A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, commencing with the story of the squirrel and the conundrum over whether a man who circled the tree, the squirrel maintaining itself ever on the other side of he trunk from him, could rightly be said to have gone "around" the squirrel.  This, everyone agreed, was an entertaining tale, but not all actually saw it as significant -- a small irony.  And the discussion in fact added further ironies.

On the whole, the club members liked James' ideas.  One member, when asked:  "so do you think he's right," quipped: "more than I think he's wrong."  And that laconicism could well sum up the overall assessment, except that where there was some feeling that he was wrong, that he was off, that something had gone lacking, the objections became worrisome the more they were worked out.  But, that was not entirely unexpected for me, as a philosopher, who has read that essay countless times, and taught it already a few.  People tend to react in relatively few different ways to James' reduction or reworking of the notion of truth or meaning.  What I was much more startled by were their criticisms of James' style