William James's Radically Empirical Philosophy of Religion

This book takes a stand against and critiques readings of William James that do not pay attention to the metaphysics of experience. Such interpretations overlook the first mentions of radical empiricism in James’s Will to Believe argument. By attending to James's metaphysics of experience, this book argues that James’s universe is a “quasi-chaos” of becoming in our relations with nature and other people, so that things independent of us relate, evolve, and change in space and time. James’s metaphysics of relations is what unifies his various psychological, poetic, mystical, and religious commitments. These metaphysical implications have consequences for how James understood what metaphysics can do in philosophy, how it relates to theology, what we can say about his will-to-believe argument, mysticism, free-will, God’s finitism, the problem of One and the Many, and panpsychism.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Metaphysics in James, Its Limits, and the Implication for Religion.- Chapter 3: Truth, Relations and Religion.- Chapter 4: Radical Empiricism and the Affective Ground of Religion.- Chapter 5: Relational Becoming and Radical Empiricism.- Chapter 6: Panpsychism and the Problem of One and the Many.

J. Edward Hackett is an Assistant Professor at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Specializing in ethical theory, phenomenology, and American philosophy he is the co-editor of an anthology Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century (2016). He’s published a book on Scheler and James titled Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration of Moral Metaphysics (2018) and is co-editor alongside Eric Mohr of the forthcoming Legacies of Max Scheler with Marquette University Press.