Dr Jeremy Dunham jeremy.w.dunham@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Was James Ward a Cambridge Pragmatist?
Dunham, J.
Authors
Abstract
Although the Cambridge Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic James Ward was once one of Britain's most highly regarded Psychologists and Philosophers, today his work is unjustly neglected. This is because his philosophy is frequently misrepresented as a reactionary anti-naturalistic idealist theism. In this article, I argue, first, that this reading is false, and that by viewing Ward through the lens of pragmatism we obtain a fresh interpretation of his work that highlights the scientific nature of his philosophy and his original and promising theory of ‘evolutionary Kantianism’, with its applications to the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. Second, I show that reading Ward as a pragmatist provides us with (1) a more complex history of the reception of pragmatism at Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century than the straightforwardly hostile one traditionally told; and (2) a more detailed understanding of the wide range of philosophical problems to which pragmatism was deemed at this time to have an appropriate application.
Citation
Dunham, J. (2014). Was James Ward a Cambridge Pragmatist?. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22(3), 557-581. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2014.928609
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | May 23, 2014 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 4, 2014 |
Publication Date | 2014 |
Deposit Date | Sep 27, 2017 |
Journal | British Journal for the History of Philosophy |
Print ISSN | 0960-8788 |
Electronic ISSN | 1469-3526 |
Publisher | Routledge |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 22 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 557-581 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2014.928609 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1348429 |
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