Truth, Experience, and the World Re-Enchanted

Abstract

Detecting the presence of moral considerations in James’s writings on pragmatism (P and MT) is not an easy task, nor it is to understand the relevance of the views stated there for the discourse of the nature and stakes of moral reflection as approached in other texts. This has to do both with the inner complexity of James’s work on truth, and with an entrenched interpretation which has been mostly deaf to the ethical stakes of such texts. In P, James presents pragmatism as a method and as a genealogical conception of truth, which scholars have been inclined to read as a defense of a peculiar substantive theory of truth only, downplaying the methodological dimension of his pragmatism and missing as a consequence the ethical dimension of such characterization, as well as its strategic importance for the understanding of other parts of his moral thought. ¹ As in the past two chapters I shall thus take issue with some entrenched interpretive assumptions and resist a well-established narrative recounting of his work: this time I shall question on the one hand the reading of James’s position as a (subjectivist) theory of truth, while on the other the companion understanding of some moral essays informed by this alleged theory as articulating further details of his substantive ethical views.