Philosophy of Religion in the Classical American Tradition

J. Caleb Clanton offers a tidy volume on how the philosophy of religion has been interpreted by American pragmatists and their philosophical descendants. He confers upon this tradition the normalizing title “classical” and seems to have chosen the relevant figures on the basis of their academic stature and connection to the seminal pragmatist William James. Clanton does not consider how such pragmatist intellectuals as W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams might embody this tradition, but he gives textual interpretations free of context for James, C. S. Peirce, and Josiah Royce—all in the Harvard University orbit around the turn of the twentieth century—and George Santayana, Edward Scribner Ames, and John Dewey, all slightly younger philosophers who continued to professionalize and institutionalize the discipline. The last chapter moves to the neo-pragmatists Richard Rorty and Cornel West to further consider the question of how religion and the public sphere relate. All of the figures Clanton examines are important historically, but his objective is to treat them as philosophers who stand outside of time rather than historical figures who belong within it. He presents fine faithful readings of the seminal works of the figures described but does not delve into reception or less public texts. It is impressive to see someone make such clear sense of Peirce, with whom Clanton engages as a contender for the truth, developing “a partial Peircean defense of the cosmological argument for God's reality” (p. 21). The objective of defending theism is introduced in this way and runs throughout the book

American philosophy · Argument (complex analysis · Contemporary philosophy · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Philosophy of religion · Pragmatism · Theism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Philosophy