William James’de Pragmatik Yaklaşım Bağlamında Dinin Temellendirilmesi

Abstract

Pragmatism is one of the important thought traditions in the history of philosophy. Approaching facts and propositions from a functional point of view, pragmatism is not concerned with whether the facts and propositions contain rational truth and consistency. Rather, it cares about their practical consequences. This approach is not only philosophically based but has become a widely used tool in social sciences over time. This approach, first introduced by the philosopher C. S. Peirce in the 1870s, gained momentum when William James wrote Pragmatism in 1907. In the context of this work, it is understood that he was one of the names who made important contributions to the development of pragmatism, even if he was not the person who presented pragmatism independently, with his writings in the atmosphere of American functional psychology. William James describes the pragmatic approach as a philosophy of life. In addition, this point of view is important in explaining religious and psychological phenomena. Some of the results determined in the context of this study are as follows: William James focused on the concept of religious experience in terms of the God-human relationship and the pragmatic value of this relationship. For him, individual religious experience is the direct source of religious knowledge. The origin of this knowledge is religious feeling, not religious beliefs. According to William James, the religious feeling is regarded as the first and deepest source of religion. While basing his views on religion from a pragmatic point of view, he focused on the resulting results rather than the rational truth of the belief. In other words, according to him, any belief is not absolutely true but subjectively true to the extent that it adds meaning to the individual's life and makes his life easier. The main subject of this study is how William James handled religion within the framework of pragmatism as a methodological approach. The aim of this study is to first examine William James's pragmatic approach and then to examine how he grounded religion in the context of pragmatism. In this context, the study is based on William James's; He is limited to examining his works called Pragmatism, The Diversity of Religious Experience, The Will to Believe. In this study, in which the qualitative research method was followed, the related works of William James, in which he discussed the phenomenon of religion and the grounding of pragmatism, were examined by document analysis technique.