Abstract

William James began his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh acutely conscious of his position as an American speaking to a European audience, a position that, as he observed in 1901, reversed the usual flow of academic scholarship. James would be pleased to note that the crosscurrents have continued, notably in Jeremy Carrette’s study of James’s relational metaphysics vis-à-vis religion. Carrette’s book attempts—successfully—“to read James through a pluralistic hermeneutic that seeks to include the fringes of our multidisciplinary consciousness and the excluded dimensions” . These “excluded dimensions” include anything obscured by the ways in which traditional disciplinary boundaries have been drawn. Part of the ..