Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James

In Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James Marchetti invites the reader to rethink James's seminal contribution to moral philosophy. Contrary to the standard interpretation of his work as a moral philosopher, Marchetti argues that James was not interested in defending a moral theory (telling us what morality consists in and how to best implement it) but rather aimed at problematizing the very methods and goals of a philosophical approach to, and investigation of, ethics. By giving prominence to this metaphilosophical feature of James's writings – grounded in his distinctive mode of pragmatic philosophizing aimed at the clarification, rather than at the foundation, of our human activities – Marchetti presents James's moral thought in a whole new light. In particular, the author reads James's work in ethics as an ambitious and imaginative attempt to set moral philosophy on different reflective rails, resisting with firm resolution the intellectualist temptation to advance disengaged meta-ethical explanations and prescriptive normative theories variously justifying or guiding our moral lives from either outside or above of their contingencies, and rather offer piecemeal critical elucidations of our ways of thinking and conducting ourselves in the midst of our ordinary practices for the sake of their amelioration.

Sarin Marchetti is Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Teaching and Research Fellow at University College Dublin. He has written on ethics, metaphilosophy, pragmatism, and the history of analytic philosophy. He is currently working on a book on pragmatist ethics and on three co-edited volumes on, respectively, twentieth century philosophy, meta-moral philosophy, and William James.