William James’s Personal ‘Religious Act’

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  • ウィリアム・ジェイムズの宗教的行為
  • ウィリアム・ジェイムズの宗教的行為--『宗教的経験の諸相』執筆そのものの宗教性
  • ウィリアム ジェイムズ ノ シュウキョウテキ コウイ シュウキョウテキ ケイケン ノ ショソウ シッピツ ソノモノ ノ シュウキョウセイ

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William James confesses, in a letter to his friend Frances R. Morse, when writing The Varieties of Religious Experience, that it is his own religious act to attempt to make it credible that （1） religious life is based on privately felt experience, not general views of philosophy; and that （2） religious life is mankind’s most important function. That is, his religious philosophy is, in some way, something to interpret his private endeavor as a public theory. <br> <br> We are here concerned with the question how his privately-motivated vision can be accepted as a general philosophy, and why he needs to make the former into the latter. <br> <br> The purpose of this article is to clarify the complex religiousness of James’s religious philosophy, focusing on these questions: how can the world be felt and said essentially religious? ; why should the privately-experienced intention be developed into an official philosophy? ; and why is this attempt to do so his personal religious act? <br> <br> Chapter 1 concerns with Jamesian philosophy of experience in general. Here we will see how general thought is made from personal feeling. Then Chapter 2 examines his view on religion, pointing out that religious feeling can reveal the deepest possibility of the universe, and doing so, that the personal experience must, in spite of its crucial lack of evidence, be established as public religion. Finally in Chapter 3 we will see how his religious philosophy is composed of his own religious intuition and why that is not only justified but essential.

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