 Hi there, and welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown, and today we're talking about William James, Anna Julia Cooper, and American Pragmatism. So what I want to do today is talk to you a little bit about these two figures. I give you an introduction, but also start to talk to you about the philosophical tradition known as American Pragmatism. American Pragmatism is the first philosophical tradition that originated in the United States that wasn't super dependent on ideas coming out of Europe. The Pragmatist tradition, like any philosophical tradition, is somewhat difficult to characterize. It concerns in some ways the connection of knowledge and agency. It concerns the analysis of philosophical problems through the lens of practice and of experience. So that word pragmatist or pragmatic is meant to tie into sort of agency and practice. It's a post-Darwinian philosophy. It attempts to grapple with the philosophical meaning of Darwinism and biology and the Darwinian conception of the human being. Pragmatism is now no longer just an American phenomenon, and it's seen as a major alternative in the philosophical world to both the analytic and the continental philosophy traditions, though in some sense it's both influential on and older than both of those traditions. Now, many figures that we think of as pragmatist, but some of the early figures were part of what was called the Metaphysical Club. The Metaphysical Club was the name of a discussion group about philosophy in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1870s that included among its members Charles Sanders Purse, who's often credited as the originator of some of the main ideas of pragmatism. William James, who we'll talk about today. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would eventually go on to become the Supreme Court Justice, and a number of other figures, including the lawyer Nicholas St. John Green and Chauncey Wright, who was a kind of scientist and philosophical thinker as well. Now, the Metaphysical Club was most active during the year of 1872, but it was active on and off throughout the early 1870s, the pragmatist version of the Metaphysical Club. One of the early ideas that was very popular in this Metaphysical Club was due to the psychologist and philosopher Alexander Bain, and it was a particular notion about the nature of belief. Charles Purse later credited Nicholas St. John Green for bringing this to the club's attention as well. Bain really emphasized the importance of a direct connection between belief and action. As Purse described it, although this is not exactly the way Bain himself described it, belief is what one believes is a matter of what one is willing or prepared to act on. So, Bain was a Scottish thinker, a Scottish philosopher and psychologist. Of course, although we say pragmatism is the first truly or uniquely, we say that pragmatism is the first philosophical tradition of American origin, the members of the Metaphysical Club entertained a variety of ideas from European thought that were interested in Bain. There was some interest in the British empiricists and utilitarians. There was interest in the work of Kant and the German idealists. William James was particularly interested in the French philosopher Charles Reneuvier. So, of course, it didn't happen in a vacuum. The New England transcendentalists were also an influence. So, one of the views that many think of as sort of characteristic of pragmatism is a kind of methodological view about the analysis of philosophical problems or concepts. And one way to describe this is captured in what Charles Purse called the pragmatic maxim. So, Purse says, consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. So, for Purse, this is a way of analyzing concepts, of analyzing ideas and making them clear. And was particularly applied by the members of the group to philosophical problems or philosophical concepts, not exclusively but primarily. Another thing that the pragmatists are well known for are various pragmatist theories of truth. Now, I say theories here, advisedly. Sometimes you hear talk of the pragmatist theory of truth, but different pragmatists have thought about truth in slightly or more significantly different ways. Here are two interesting statements about truth. Purse says the opinion which is faded to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. And the object represented in this opinion is the real. So, this is a kind of sort of analysis of the meaning of truth and real by Purse. Here's William James in a somewhat different vein. James says the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good too for definite assignable reasons. I hope it's clear to you that these are actually fairly different ideas. One concerns sort of the inquirers and what they will agree to in a kind of long run possible scenario. The other is more maybe less or less tied to the sort of the end of inquiry and more immediate perhaps. Okay, so those are some distinctive ideas from the American pragmatist tradition. You may have heard of them before in some other context. But now I want to back up and focus on our two philosophers, James and Cooper, and talk a little bit about their backgrounds and their philosophical thought. So, starting with William James. So, William James' father, Henry James Sr. was an independently wealthy theologian and a kind of member of the intellectual elite of the northeast, east coast. His brother, Henry Jr., was of course the famous novelist you probably have encountered in English class. You know, it's funny, it's sometimes said of the brothers William and Henry James, one of them was a great psychologist and the other was a great writer. But unfortunately, they both picked the wrong career. Or another version of that joke is William James was a psychologist who wrote like a novelist and Henry James was a novelist who wrote like a psychologist. Their sister Alice, by the way, was also a brilliant writer, though as her diaries were not published until after her death, this was only kind of known widely posthumously. Now, William James studied in both America and in various places in Europe. He received an MD degree, but he never practiced medicine. He was originally appointed at Harvard to teach physiology, human physiology or comparative physiology. And then he was later, he started teaching psychology. He was appointed as an assistant professor of philosophy, primarily to teach psychology, and then later began teaching more widely in philosophy, various areas of philosophy. In 1890, after he'd been doing psychology for a long time, he published the two volume work, The Principles of Psychology, then and for many years, the most important textbook in the field, the most important early textbook in psychology in English, for sure. The essay we read today was published a few years later, The Will to Believe was published in 1896. In 1898, he published a lecture called Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, where he was the first person to use the term pragmatism in print to refer to that particular philosophy. He credited Charles Purse there, of course. In 1902, he published the lectures on the varieties of religious experience, kind of the first attempt at a real psychology, sociology and philosophy of religion combined, empirical study of religion. And then in 1907, quite late in his career, he published the book Pragmatism, a new name for some old ways of thinking, kind of definitive statement of his pragmatist philosophy. Now, Anna-Julie Cooper was not a member of the intellectual elite, nor was she a member of the inner circles of pragmatism. And yet, in many ways, her philosophy fits with that tradition. In some ways, in fact, I think she outdid William James being more consistently pragmatist than he was. Now, Cooper's work has also been classified as a contribution to feminist philosophy, to standpoint theory, to critical philosophy of race, and to African American philosophy. Her thought is, I think, deep and interesting, and has well been well worth the recovery work that's gone into it in recent years. Cooper was born into slavery in 1858, and she received her PhD in history from the Serbonne in Paris, France in 1924. Much of her life, she worked as an educator, as well as an activist. She was a leading black liberation as well. She engaged directly or indirectly with figures like Frederick Douglass, Debbie E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells. Her first and best known book is The 1892, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, which the essay that we're reading for today, The Gain from a Belief, is included. It's included in that volume. So that's Cooper. Let's talk a little bit about the two essays that you had to read for today. So first, The Will to Believe by William James. So the kind of orienting question of The Will to Believe is, is it permissible to believe something on insufficient evidence? And here he's directly responding to a philosopher named Clifford, who argues that it is always impermissible to believe something on insufficient evidence. Now, James specifically focuses this question in on a particular type of question. So you might ask about any kind of question, could you believe on insufficient evidence? But James is particularly focused on what he calls genuine options, right? That is, where you have a question of belief that is living, right? That means that, that you sort of as a psych, just a psychological matter could, could entertain either believing or disbelieving a claim, right? It's forced, right? That means that there's no kind of way out of the question. There's no, there's no, it's a true dichotomy, you have to believe or not believe. And it's, and it's momentous, it actually matters now, whether you, whether you believe or don't believe. So James focuses the scope of his argument on genuine options, where there's a genuine choice, it feels like a real choice to you. It's not already decided by a matter of either evidence or prejudice, right? One way or the other. And in some sense, you have to make a choice. Sort of withholding judgment is in the case of a genuine option, sort of the same as not believing, right? So it's forced in that way. Now, one of the key sort of starting points of James argument or key elements of James argument is his claim that there actually are two epistemic commandments, right? Two, two laws governing the ethics of our belief, right? One is that we should believe the truth. And the other is that we should shun error. And I think one of James's great innovations in this essay is to argue that actually these are not the same thing. These laws pull in different directions. They can conflict with one another. If one has a really permissive notion of belief, right, then one is likely to capture more truths, but also to capture, to believe more errors, right? If one is very obstimous, really only believes things for which there is overwhelming evidence, the likelihood of error is much lower, but also the chance that you'll fail to believe a truth is also higher, right? So these things pull against each other. And so, you know, I think it's worth thinking about here, what is the real scope of James's argument, right? Does it only apply to religious belief? He spends a lot of time in the essay talking about religious belief. He has other examples that obviously aren't religious belief in focus, but I think we should ask ourselves, what is he really, what is really the scope of his argument in the final analysis? Is it really on religion or more practical matters as well? Now, Cooper's, the gain from a belief also, I think, has significant pragmatist element to it, although it's perhaps not stated in the same kind of way that James states it. So, for example, Cooper says, faith means treating the true as true, right? So what does it mean? Faith means treating the truth as true. It sounds kind of, you know, circular, right? But I think what, I think it's clear from context what Cooper means here is really acting on the belief, right? Not just entertaining it intellectually, but acting as if you believe it to be true, right? To connect with this, she also says life must be something more than dilettante speculation. I think those two notions are connected. Life must be more than dilettante speculation. It must be something that we act on, right? Our intellectual life has to have meaning by virtue of its connection with our practice. And I think Cooper really disdains a kind of intellectualism that doesn't touch on action. And obviously, she has in mind a kind of theoretical commitment to things like equality or human rights to civil rights without being willing to act on it. And that's the sort of thing that Cooper really has in mind, I think, in making these criticisms. So that's a taste of the two essays and sort of some of the background. I look forward to talking with you about these soon, either in class or on Discord or in the comments here in the videos on the videos. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.