William James in focus : willing to believe /

Gavin (Univ. of Southern Maine) presents a hermeneutic approach to William James's written corpus by focusing on the will to believe. In addition to an essay in which believing is presented as a force strong enough to have shaped James's career, Gavin draws the concept broadly to include its metaphysical presuppositions, as well as its extensions into both pragmatism and James's Varieties of Religious Experience. Gavin demonstrates that the will to believe is a "cardinal element in James' writing," primarily in relation to death. James contemplated suicide in 1868-70, and the will to believe is a response to this crisis. But grounding the will to believe becomes a later philosophical crisis for which Gavin uses Dostoevsky and Kafka as illuminating comparisons. Gavin is particularly helpful in relating James to religious experience as an exemplar of will to believe. James is "betting on" the ideal impulses that come from the subliminal region. The culminating image is that James presents a creator making us an offer to "add our fiat to the fiat of the creator"--a deliciously vague and potentially problematic idea, regardless of where a reader stands on James and theism. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers. R. Ward Georgetown College