The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914. Edited by David G. Schultenover S.J. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. xi + 247 pp. $69.95 cloth

摘要

David G. Schultenover’s edited volume, The Reception of Pragmatism in Francenand the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, illustrates with claritynand specificity the influence ofWilliam James’s pragmatism on Catholic thoughtnin France. The purpose of the book, as stated in the introduction by John Shooknand Schultenover, is “to show that Roman Catholic Modernism was not thencircumscribed, parochial affair it is often thought to be” (19). Instead, it wasnthe result of an intellectual tradition that drew upon the Enlightenment andnRomanticism in response to neo-Scholasticism, all with the help of WilliamnJames’s pragmatism. Not since Darrell Jodock’s Catholicism Contending withnModernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) have scholars sontransformed the study of the “Modernist Crisis” in the Catholic Church.nDespite the convoluted title—“Vivo ergo cogito: Modernism asnTemporalization and Its Discontents: A Propaedeutic to This Collection”—nStephen Schloesser’s opening chapter is a masterful analysis of how Americannpragmatists and Catholic Modernists responded to idealism and positivism at antime when secularization and scholasticism were on the rise. Schloessernidentifies experience, realism, and determinism as the three key concerns ofnWilliam James, John Dewey, and Charles Peirce. Moreover, CatholicnModernists were equally engaged in “catholic concerns—concerns sharednuniversally with the major intellectual currents of that era” (25). John Shook,nin a similar manner, describes American pragmatism and French CatholicnModernism as “reactions against both rationalism and conservatism” (59),nthough condemnation of “modernism” in Pascendi dominici gregis (1907)nproved considerably more influential for French Catholic philosophers