In CoPhi today it's a bunch of churchmen invoking supernatural nonhuman authority. Pragmatic humanists don't share their enthusiasm for Divine incursion and spiritual/apologetic coercion, but pragmatic pluralists (who turn out to be the same pragmatists, tilting their hats just a bit aslant) are bound to "respect" whatever value for life the likes of Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, and Aquinas and their devotees credibly attest from that remote and august quarter. "Value for life" is deliberately vague, but it definitely excludes any over-narrow construction cast in strictly self-serving short-sighted terms. Value must be for life as a whole and in the long run. The question for a good pragmatist is never What's in it (just) for me?
That's the view we're examining in A&P, as we skip ahead in Pragmatism to the final pair of lectures. The penultimate Pragmatism and Humanism defends WJ's friend FCSS's (Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller of Oxford) "butt-end foremost statement of the humanist position," his avowal that the world possesses enough plasticity to actually accommodate some and other of our various moral and existential desires... (continues)
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