You're listening to the partially examined life episode 349 part two we've been discussing Richard Rorte's pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism,

specifically the first two essays pragmatism and religion and pragmatism as romantic polytheism. We are going to stop talking about the

controversial things that he says about knowledge and get to the things that we probably mostly agree about where he is analyzing what the various

pragmatists, mostly Dewey and James had to say about religion and how which ones he likes the best.

Yeah, so we're looking at section 2 on classical pragmatism.

So he goes briefly into some of the commonalities between the pragmatists, including this

naturalistic Darwinian view of things and the desire to save moral and religious ideals from the trends of the time

in Pyrrhicism and positivism but they have different philosophical concerns.

So Pierce, for instance, Royd sees as a Kantian,

interested in improving on Kant and more focused on math and science than the others.

James is more, I think, the most interested in religion

and is not a fan of Kant or Hegel.

Dewey, influenced by Hegel, quite anti-Contian, and then he, that's sort of the initial summary,

he gives of the three, and then he'll go into the three in detail, and ultimately he's going to tell us why he thinks Dewey.

When it comes to religion is the most interesting of the three.

Dewey does the job.

Do he does it.

He also briefly refers to Nietzsche being described as a German pragmatist, but that interestingly, you know, when you get rid of for Nietzsche monotheism or you get rid of this focusing on transcendental truth, then you turn away from, right?

It becomes some sort of emphasis on what was good about religion according to some of this is that it points you at something lofty.

It points you at something, right, even for James, the fundamental religious belief is going to be something like the

eternal things are the best things.

So the other worldly things that shooting for the heights, this is why Roydy describes his own position and that he sees in some of these other folks as a romantic pragmatism because it is an optimistic pragmatism that goes with this enlightenment idea of democracy as being the full

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