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Recent Books 121
Reflecting the wide reach of James’s work, this twelve-essay volume includes
a variety of approaches to James from authors with diverse disciplinary
backgrounds. It is divided into two parts, the first of which treats James’s
intellectual contexts and the second of which is dedicated to the
philosophy of pluralism.
Both parts are likely to interest readers of The Way, albeit for different
reasons. Although all twelve chapters offer reflections on the ways James
engaged (personally and philosophically) with European intellectuals
during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the first part of the book is
more historical in character, with chapters on the reception of James’s
work in Europe, his relationship to ecumenical Protestantism, and ‘the
woman question’. Several of these chapters offer family portraits of the
Jameses—a transatlantic family with a dominant and tormented paternal
figure in Henry James, Sr, and two offspring of genius in William and
Henry Jr (the novelist who wrote Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians,
among other works). Henry Sr is portrayed as a ‘theological eccentric’
(p.81), whose focus on death cast lasting shadows over his children’s lives.
The second part, on the philosophy of pluralism, gives more focus to
James’s ideas themselves, and their applicability to debates today, than to
setting them in biographical or historical context. As someone who teaches
James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience to undergraduates, this part was
especially interesting and useful to me for, as the editors state in the
introduction, James ‘did not just speak to the late nineteenth century’ (p.11).
That his insights are still worthy of study is attested by the range and
quality of approaches taken in this latter part. David C. Lamberth’s chapter
‘A Pluralistic Universe a Century Later: Rationalism, Pluralism, and
Religion’ discusses James’s objections to ‘vicious intellectualism’—a
‘philosophic sin’, as Lamberth calls it, that preferred concepts (as products
of the intellect) to percepts (products of sensation or experience).
Thinking of this kind prioritises ‘knowledge about’ over ‘direct
acquaintance’. For James, as Lamberth writes,
Thinking is not generally best understood along the traditional lines of
contemplation or theoria. Rather, thinking is a form of adaptive behaviour
oriented most basically to action in and on a relatively stable but also
continuously evolving environment. (p.135)
The implications of James’ rejection of ‘vicious intellectualism’ for the
philosophy of religion—especially for current debates about atheism and
theism—are developed in Sami Pihlström’s excellent essay ‘Jamesian
Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God’. Pihlström argues that ‘we