Next Event:
Works in Progress Series: Wai Hung Wong: “William James’s ‘Epistemic’ Principles of Rationality”
Friday, December 1st
12:00 PM, Humanities Center, PAC 113
Wai-hung Wong is a professor in the Department of Philosophy specializing in epistemology and metaphysics.William James’s celebrated essay “The Will to Believe” is widely regarded as an important contribution to the topics of evidentialism, reasons for belief, and the ethics of belief. Although most commentators interpret James as offering a pragmatic justification of faith, there are two principles of rationality James employs which appear to be epistemic in nature. If these principles are genuinely epistemic, James’s argument may have general implications for epistemology, and hence may have been unfairly neglected by epistemologists. The main purpose of this paper is to explain how the two principles in question look epistemic, but actually are not. James’s argument is, in the end, just a convoluted version of Pascal’s wager, albeit a cleverly disguised one.
