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The Religious Naturalism of William James: a New Interpretation Through the Lens of Liberal Naturalism Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Bunzl, Jacob Herbert (2019) The Religious Naturalism of William James: A New Interpretation Through the Lens of Liberal Naturalism. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Kent,. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/81750/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html 1 The Religious Naturalism of William James A New Interpretation Through the Lens of ‘Liberal Naturalism’ Jacob Herbert Bunzl Abstract: This thesis argues that recent developments in philosophical naturalism mandate a new naturalistic reading of James. To that end, it presents the first comprehensive reading of James through the lens of liberal rather than scientific naturalism. Chapter 1 offers an extensive survey of the varieties of philosophical naturalism that provides the conceptual tools required for the rest the thesis, and allows us to provisionally locate James within the field. Crucially, it establishes the coherence and validity of a radical form of liberal naturalism that rejects ‘the causal closure of the physical’, and endorses doctrines of strong emergentism and macro-causation. The thesis will argue that it was to this form of naturalism that James was ultimately committed. Chapter 2 provides a detailed chronological treatment of James’s key published works, seeking to understand the development of certain core naturalistic themes over the course of his career. It unearths a nascent doctrine of emergentism in The Principles, a critique of scientificism in The Will to Believe, a psycho-biological account of religious experience in The Varieties, a doctrine of panpsychist identism in Essays in Radical Empiricism, an evolutionary theory of cognition in Pragmatism, and a doctrine of finite theism in A Pluralistic Universe. The underlying aim of chapter 2 is to demonstrate the superficiality of James’s endorsement of piecemeal supernaturalism in The Varieties. It shows that he had originally planned to defend a doctrine of ‘theistic naturalism’ in his second course of Gifford Lectures, and that he only defined himself as a supernaturalist in contradistinction to a particularly austere doctrine of ‘mechanical naturalism’ that endorses ‘the causal closure of the physical’. James, whilst he rejected ‘the causal closure of the physical’, continued to endorse ‘the causal closure of nature’. Through the schema developed in chapter 1, the thesis demonstrates how James can be classified as a radical religious naturalist. Finally, in chapter 3, the thesis enters a more consciously constructive phase. Building on James’s suggestion that his philosophy was “too much like an arch built only on one side”, it embarks upon a detailed reconstruction of ‘the arch of James’s naturalism’. It argues that reconstructed versions of James’s doctrines of panpsychism and emergentism, in addition to being coherent and fertile in their own right, serve as the basis for a restoration of his theistic naturalism; the missing keystone of his mature philosophy. Ph.D. Thesis University of Kent December 2019 Pages: 305 Wordcount: 100000 1 2 Abstract: This thesis argues that recent developments in philosophical naturalism mandate a new naturalistic reading of James. To that end, it presents the first comprehensive reading of James through the lens of liberal rather than scientific naturalism. Chapter 1 offers an extensive survey of the varieties of philosophical naturalism that provides the conceptual tools required for the rest the thesis, and allows us to provisionally locate James within the field. Crucially, it establishes the coherence and validity of a radical form of liberal naturalism that rejects ‘the causal closure of the physical’, and endorses doctrines of strong emergentism and macro-causation. The thesis will argue that it was to this form of naturalism that James was ultimately committed. Chapter 2 provides a detailed chronological treatment of James’s key published works, seeking to understand the development of certain core naturalistic themes over the course of his career. It unearths a nascent doctrine of emergentism in The Principles, a critique of scientificism in The Will to Believe, a psycho-biological account of religious experience in The Varieties, a doctrine of panpsychist identism in Essays in Radical Empiricism, an evolutionary theory of cognition in Pragmatism, and a doctrine of finite theism in A Pluralistic Universe. The underlying aim of chapter 2 is to demonstrate the superficiality of James’s endorsement of piecemeal supernaturalism in The Varieties. It shows that he had originally planned to defend a doctrine of ‘theistic naturalism’ in his second course of Gifford Lectures, and that he only defined himself as a supernaturalist in contradistinction to a particularly austere doctrine of ‘mechanical naturalism’ that endorses ‘the causal closure of the physical’. James, whilst he rejected ‘the causal closure of the physical’, continued to endorse ‘the causal closure of nature’. Through the schema developed in chapter 1, the thesis demonstrates how James can be classified as a radical religious naturalist. Finally, in chapter 3, the thesis enters a more consciously constructive phase. Building on James’s suggestion that his philosophy was “too much like an arch built only on one side”, it embarks upon a detailed reconstruction of ‘the arch of James’s naturalism’. It argues that reconstructed versions of James’s doctrines of panpsychism and emergentism, in addition to being coherent and fertile in their own right, serve as the basis for a restoration of his theistic naturalism; the missing keystone of his mature philosophy. 2 3 Acknowledgement First of all, I would like to thank the University of Kent for its faultless provision of excellent resources at every stage of this project. In particular I wish to thank the department of religious studies – its students and its staff – for the pleasure of their acquaintance and for the intellectual stimulation that their conversation and research has brought me. First among them of course I must thank my supervisor Jeremy Carrette, for his tireless and diligent support (despite his daunting duties as Dean of Europe in this critical period). Without his ever-patient (but increasingly nervous) reminders that this thesis is supposed to have a word limit, the editing process might have been even more of a nightmare than it has been! I should also like to thank my examiners for their kind indulgence in reading the product, which, despite Jeremy’s best efforts, remains – as James said of The Principles upon its publication – something of a “bloated, dropsical mass”. I owe the University of Kent and its staff a great deal of gratitude; more, no doubt, than I can express in this paltry acknowledgement. But much of the work for this project, and the whole of my life beyond it, has occurred not on the Canterbury campus, but in London, where I live. To consider, therefore, things closer to home, I would like next to thank my beautiful wife Alice. She shares with James’s wife not only her name, but the thankless task of looking after a rudderless philosopher. Her patience, love, and understanding over the last two years have been more vital and indispensable than any academic resource. Last but by no means least I would like to thank William James. For one thing, it was with his sound advice in mind that I proposed to my own Alice late last year: It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else? So it was that I put James’s advice to the pragmatic test, and made my angel-possibility into an angel-reality. I am pleased to report that with each passing day that advice seems to approach fuller and fuller verification. Surely, the long-run consensus of the community of all inquirers will be that she is the most wonderful wife in the world! Besides his excellent advice in this regard I must also thank James for the broader intellectual and spiritual resource his philosophy has been to me personally. Speaking as someone who was raised outside of any religious tradition, and whose temperament, in any case, was probably too cynical to countenance many of them, I have found that James’s philosophy provided me with a means of coming to terms with certain important experiences in my own life which, without it, I might never have adequately assimilated. If the present project can serve – even if only through me – to make that resource available to more people, then it will have been a success. Jacob Bunzl, December 2019 3 4 Table of Contents List of Abbreviations p7 Introduction p11 Chapter 1: The Varieties of Naturalism; Locating James p17 1.1. The Birth of Philosophical Naturalism p18 1.1.1. Some Early Forms of Naturalism p19 1.1.2.
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