William James

Background

William James (1842–1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher at Harvard, a founder of both experimental psychology in America and philosophical pragmatism. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, assembled first-person testimony from Christian, Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular sources into the classic empirical study of religion as lived. James writes as a sympathetic outsider — "my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand" (James 1902, Lectures XVI–XVII) — which is precisely what makes him this wiki's key witness for cross-traditional experiential parity.

Positions held in this wiki

• Religious Pluralism — "personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness," and mystical states are demarcated by four marks found wherever they occur: ineffability ("it defies expression"), noetic quality ("states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect"), transiency, and passivity ("the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance... as if he were grasped and held by a superior power") (James 1902, Lectures XVI–XVII).
• His verdict on their evidential force is famously double-edged: "(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come. (2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically. (3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness... They open out the possibility of other orders of truth" (James 1902, Lectures XVI–XVII).
• The doctrinal systems of the traditions he classes as "over-beliefs" — intellectually indispensable and to be treated "with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves," for "the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs" (James 1902, Conclusions).

Key works in our corpus

• The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — in corpus in full. Key sections: Lectures XVI–XVII (Mysticism: the four marks; the three-part answer on authority), Lecture XVIII (Philosophy), Conclusions (over-beliefs).
• Corpus gap: The Will to Believe (1897) and Pragmatism (1907) are public-domain and eligible for ingestion; see meta/ingestion-queue.md.

Principal critics

• William P. Alston — accepts James's experiential data but argues doxastic-practice epistemology licenses tradition-specific belief rather than agnostic parity.
• Alvin Plantinga — warrant-based particularism against the parity reading; see Religious Pluralism.
• James's own point (2) is the seed of the diversity defeater later critics press against all experiential apologetics.

See also

• John Hick — systematized James's cross-cultural data into the pluralist hypothesis.
• David Hume — the skeptical-parity ancestor; James's pragmatism is in part an answer to Humean evidentialism.
• J. L. Schellenberg — the contemporary skeptical development of the parity datum.