The mission of the Pragmatism and Empiricism in Religious Thought Unit is to foster the advancement and understanding of the pragmatic and empiricist traditions in American religious thought, as well as the intersections of those traditions with other methodologies, intellectual figures, artistic movements, communities, and issues. This Unit is concerned with critically interrogating, evaluating, and developing the insights and relevance of the pragmatic and empiricist traditions of American thought, broadly construed, for the study of religion and theology, with attention both to the historical interpretation of ideas and contemporary developments within this critical sphere of philosophical and theological reflection. Recent areas of interest include pragmatism and democracy, the continued relevance of empiricism to the revival of pragmatism, multidisciplinary aspects of the tradition (intersections with other fields of inquiry), overlaps with cultural criticism and analyses of gender and race, and the application of pragmatic and empiricist analyses to contemporary problems.
Democratic participation requires the development of one’s own voice. In popular imagination, such development is a private activity, occurring within an individual and apart from shared criteria and public reception. Such a view is democratically harmful and philosophically false.
Against it, I argue that Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein and Thoreau offers a philosophically compelling and democratically wholesome account of how our voices develop. I conclude by inviting audience participants into an exercise in which they reflect on the development of their own voices, with particular attention to the texts, people, and questions who have aided this development. This activity shows the impact our understanding of voice development has on the way we prepare students to participate in democratic life.
West’s description of pragmatism in Prophesy! functions as an invitation to dialogue about the propriety of sources for revolution. Many readers of Prophesy! view pragmatism as an unnecessary source if it merely claims to provide one with an option to obtain freedom, self-referentially. What good is freedom if the government or the church cannot provide individual protections for black persons who profess to be free? Stipulating pragmatism as an ethical tradition was premature. West ends his genealogy in Evasion with an appreciation of “the black church”. Prophesy! would benefit from such a narration of non-religious sources. West’s genealogy in Evasion exhibits what it means to narrate an intellectual history of American philosophy as if the black church could conclude one such narrative. For the preceding reasons, this paper argues that the account of pragmatism in Propheshy! is to blame for constructive theorists missing the importance of class analysis in Prophesy!