Lecture 1 - Religion and Neuralogy

Question 1

Where did William James study at university in the US?

Answer 1

Harvard

Question 2

DEPRECATORY

Answer 2

1) (disparaging) despectivo

2) (attitude, gesture) de desaprobación; [smile] de disculpa

Question 3

What does William James announce as the main object of his psychological study?

Answer 3

To offer a descriptive survey of the religious propensities of man; of which religious impulses and religious feelings are its subject.

Question 4

To pursue his study, which type of documents does James endeavor to consult?

Answer 4

They will be those of the men who were most accomplished in their respective religious lives. Those able to give an inteligible account of their ideas and motives. They include both modern writers and religious classics.

Question 5

DELECTABLE

Answer 5

1) (delicious, appetizing) delicioso; exquisito

The seafood appetizers looked delectable.
Los aperitivos de mariscos se veían deliciosos

2) (appealing, delightful) atractivo;encantador; apetecible

The candy-colored shoes looked delectable to the shoppers.
Los zapatos de colores eran atractivos para los compradores.

3) figurative (person: sexually attractive) atractivo; (informal) sexi

My dear, you look absolutely delectable in that dress.
Querida, te ves muy atractiva con ese vestido.

Question 6

What are the two questions Williams urges the listener to not conflate (from the logical point of view)?

Answer 6

What are the religious propensities?

What is their philosophic significance?

Question 7

In books of Williams’s period on Logic, a distinction is made between two orders of inquiry. What are they?

(The questions are later combined in the mind.)

Answer 7

1) What is the nature of it? How did it come about? What is it’s constitution; origin and history?

The answer to this question results in an existential proposition or judgment. This basically refers to historical fact.

2) What is its importance, meaning or significance now that it is once here?

The answer to this question results in a “spiritual judgement”. Or, in other words, answers the question, “What use to us is the holy book or fact in question?” Or “What value does “religious revelation” generate?

Question 8

Given that William James plans to treat religious texts from an existential viewpoint and also discuss mankind’s religious propensities from a biological and psychological standpoint, what does James reassure his audience that he does not intend to do?

Answer 8

He proclaims he does not intend to discredit religion as an objective of his study. (And he proceeds to recognize that a “religious lifestyle” tends to make the person “exceptional and eccentric”. )

Question 9

What type of religious observer does he announce he’ll focus on and which type will he not focus o ?

Answer 9

We must study those who had the original experiences were were the “pattern setters” for all this mass of feeling and imitated conduct

He will not focus on the ordinary religious believer who follows the conventional religious observances of his country. “His religion has been made for him be others; communicated to him by tradition; determined to fixed forms of imitation; and retained by habit.”

Question 10

Name a few things that seem to distinguish religious leaders o religious “geniuses”?

Answer 10

Abnormal psychic visitations.

Exalted emotional sensibility.

Often subject to a discordant inner life, and tend to display “melancholy” in a part of their career.

Liable to obsessions and fixed ideas.

Claim to have heard voices or seen visions which would “be ordinarily classed as pathological”.

Question 11

What is the first example of such a religious leader cited by William James?

Answer 11

George Fox. The founder of the Quaker religion. Although nobody of his time in England would dare question his heightened spiritual “sagacity”, from the point of view of his nervous constitution, a psychologist would classify him as a psychopath.

Question 12

Briefly describe James’ narration of George Fox’s behavior?

Answer 12

He saw 3 steeple house spires. It was Litchfield. He claimed the voice of the Lord ordered him to go there. He took off his shoes (although it was winter) before the astonishment of some shepards. He claimed the Lord ordered him to walk around the town and its market crying “woe to Litchfield”. He later claimed to have discovered that in Diocletian’a time, a group of 1,000 Christians were martyred in Litchfield.

Question 13

If studied from a non religious perspective, what pathological aspects did George Fox display? What does scrutiny from “the intellect” reveal?

He affirms “we must describe and name them as if they had occurred in non religious men”.

Answer 13

First, the intellect attempts to classify the subject or object.

Second, discover the causes. James lists various possible causes for:

Belief in immortality: due to emotional temperament

Extraordinary conscientiousness: due to over instigated nerves.

Melancholy about the universe: due to bad digestion.

Delight while at church: due to hysterical constitution

Concern about one’s soul: due to a lack of exercise; maybe a “torpid” liver.

Question 14

TORPID

Answer 14

1) (sluggish, slow) aletargado; letárgico

The group of men were all torpid and exhausted after their long night of partying.

Question 15

William James references the fact that some writers see a connection between religious emotions and the sexual life.

In what sense?

Answer 15

CONVERSION would equate to:
a crisis of puberty and adolescence.

THE MACERATIONS OF SAINTS AND THE DEVOTION OF MISSIONARIES would equate to:
Instances of the parental instinct of self sacrifice “gone astray”

THE HYSTERICAL NUN STARVING FOE NATURAL LIFE would equate to:
An imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection.

Question 16

William James appears to lend credence to the sexual origin of religious emotion theory by giving what examples?

Answer 16

1) the REFORMATION might be better understood from the perspective of Luther’s desire to marry a nun.
2) in other religions we observe sex deities, “obscene rites” in polytheism

Question 17

William James observes that in addition to considering sexual impulses as the origin for religious propensities, we might also consider which factors?

Answer 17

1) Emotions related to eating and drinking.
2) Emotions as “a perversion if the respiratory function”. He then cites Eastern religions’ emphasis on “inspiration and expiration”.

Question 18

In the end, according to James, to interpret religion, what must one look at?

Answer 18

One must look at the immediate content of the religious conscienceness.

Question 19

William James offers a number of examples of taking “Medical Materialism” to its ultimate consequences. Recall some of them:

Answer 19

ST PAUL’S VISION ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS:
discharging lesion of the oxypital cortex, he being an epileptic.

ST THERESA:
hysteria

FRANCIS OF ASSISI:
hereditary degenerate

GEORGE FOX:
a symptom of a disordered colon

Etc

Question 20

What does Williams say about psychological conditions and and organic processes?

Answer 20

He affirms that “Modern psychology” postulates there is not one single state of mind that has not some organic process as its condition.

Question 21

What does William affirm is at the root of both religious and non religious states of mind?

Answer 21

Organic processes.

Question 22

In what sense does Williams urge his audience to be candid with themselves and with the facts?

Answer 22

?

Question 23

William James recognizes that often when someone attempts to reduce another’s “soul flight” or religious experience to “nothing but expressions of our organic disposition”, the person may feel outraged and hurt. Why?

Answer 23

Because whatever the cause may be, he recognizes that our mental states are have “substantive value as revelations of the living truth”

Question 24

Does William James consider medical materialism to be the be all and all of psychology?

Answer 24

No. He actually finds it much too simplistic.

Question 25

William James asks rhetorically whether or not we ever consider “organic antecedents” as causation when analyzing “superior mental states”? What does he then respond to this question.

Answer 25

No. He affirms we generally attribute such mental states to 1) the fact that “we find immediate delight in them” or 2) because we believe them to bring us “good consequential fruits”

Question 26

Give examples of how “inner happiness” and “serviceability” do not always agree. That is, demonstrate how what immediately feels most good is not always most true when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience.

Answer 26

If merely feeling good were the ultimate mental state, drunkenness could easily be the “supremely valid human experience”.

Question 27

William

James draws a parallel between “neuralogical states” and “religious states”. What do they have in common?

Answer 27

Opinions on such matters should always be tested by logic and by experiment, and not by other means.

Question 28

What is the main problem William James encounters with medical materialists?

Answer 28

Basically that the medical materialists substitute one type of dogma for another; that of religious dogma. The former use the notion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way.