William James's Radically Empirical Philosophy of Religion

“Edward Hackett’s book offers an exciting and fresh contribution to James-scholarship and to thinking religion as well. The author convincingly relates James’s works in light of his radical empiricism and tendency towards a relational metaphysics. Thinking how we relate to a higher power, or to God, Hackett, with James, may lead the reader to rethink religious truth as plural, respect for other religions as obvious, and the world as a relational web in motion, escaping all attempts at a unified conceptualization.”
— Angela Roothaan , Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

This book takes a stand against and critiques readings of William James that do not pay attention to the metaphysics of experience. Such interpretations overlook the first mentions of radical empiricism in James’s  Will to Believe  argument. By attending to James's metaphysics of experience, this book argues that James’s universe is a “quasi-chaos” of becoming in our relations with nature and other people, so that things independent of us relate, evolve, and change in space and time. James’s metaphysics of relations is what unifies his various psychological, poetic, mystical, and religious commitments. These metaphysical implications have consequences for how James understood what metaphysics can do in philosophy, how it relates to theology, what we can say about his  will-to-believe  argument, mysticism, free-will, God’s finitism, the problem of One and the Many, and panpsychism.

J. Edward Hackett  is an Assistant Professor at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Specializing in ethical theory, phenomenology, and American philosophy he is the co-editor of an anthology  Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century  (2016). He’s published a book on Scheler and James titled  Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration of Moral Metaphysics  (2018) and is co-editor alongside Eric Mohr of the forthcoming  Legacies of Max Scheler  with Marquette University Press .