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The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, [1] which defends, in certain cases, the adoption of a belief without prior evidence of its truth. In particular, James is concerned in this lecture about defending the rationality of religious faith even lacking sufficient evidence of religious truth.
James, William: "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" – International Journal of Ethics, volume 1, number 3 (April 1891), pp. 330–354 The essay was also featured in: James, William: The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. First edition: Longmans, Green, 1897.
At the extreme, the "healthy-minded" see sickness and evil as an illusion. James considered belief in the "mind cure" to be reasonable when compared to medicine as practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century. [12] James devotes two lectures to mysticism, and in the lectures, he outlines four markers common to mystical experiences. These ...
William James in Brazil, 1865. William James was born at the Astor House in New York City on January 11, 1842. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day.
In 1896, American philosopher William James had written about the will to believe, and Russell uses this as a foil to express his own opposite position. James claimed that even without (or with conflicting) evidence, one might still simply choose to believe in a thing—he cites Christianity—simply because one thinks the belief has beneficial ...
James would, indeed, have done better to say that phrases like "the good in the way of belief" and "what it is better for us to believe" are interchangeable with "justified" rather than with "true." (Rorty 1998, p. 2) (2) Conceptual relativity. With James and Schiller we make things true by verifying them—a view rejected by most pragmatists.
William James in his 'Will to Believe' states that "We feel that a faith in masses and holy water adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the ...
William James tried to show the meaningfulness of (some kinds of) spirituality but, like other pragmatists, did not see religion as the basis of meaning or morality. William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it ...