British empiricism and American pragmatism

About this book

Among the few Catholics to write favorably - even if critically - about American pragmatism, Father Roth presents here a creative piece of comparative philosophy in which he attempts a reconciliation between pragmatism and a classical spiritual and religious perspective. The title, Radical Pragmatism, is an adaptation of William James's "radical empiricism." James had argued that the classical empiricists, Locke and Hume, did not go far enough in their account of experience. They missed some of its most important aspects, namely, connections and relations. In a similar vein, Roth maintains that the pragmatists themselves have not been radical enough in developing the full implications of their own tradition. Examining the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, Roth makes the first full-scale attempt to show that the pragmatic notion of experience can be extended to include a classical spiritual and religious perspective in a theory of knowledge, morality, God, religion, and person. Radical Pragmatism also discusses the thought of the Jesuit priest and anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, showing how Teilhard, from an evolutionary standpoint, addressed the problem, long considered by the pragmatists, of bringing religion and science into harmony.