Abstract

In this lucid and tightly crafted book, Brown battles fideistic and subjectivist interpretations of James’s pragmatism by cogently arguing that his robust empiricism’s careful attention to all features of experience imposes a number of constraints on belief formation, constraints metaphysical, noetic, evidential, factual, discursive, and theological. Brown persuasively argues that the issue that concerns James, particularly in his will to believe doctrine, is what would constitute intellectually responsible behavior toward certain existing beliefs, including religious ones that, while inconclusive evidentially, conform to those constraints. Brown thinks that the reasons have not been sufficiently understood why James’s belief in the difficulty of disentangling a proposition’s probability from its desirability does not force James into an endorsement of wishful thinking, so Brown carefully elucidates James’s three distinguishing characteristics of live options to rectify this deficiency. First, liveness involves a strong inclination to believe a proposition. There is distinct imbalance between religious options and alternatives: live theism involves a tenacious passional need, engages one’s sympathetic nature in ways not to be found in a purely abstract analysis of theism, and generates an invigorating disposition and intellectual openness.