Pragmatism and Religion

Undergraduate / Graduate

C.I. Lewis famously described pragmatism as "the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be no ultimately valid distinction of theoretical and practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action." This course will examine key figures of post-WWII American pragmatism-including Richard Rorty, Cheryl Misak, Cornel West, and Eddie Glaude-in order to assess their implications for religion, politics and the possibility of objectivity.