Hocking's place in American metaphysics
pp. 32-47
in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966Abstract
In 1912 William Ernest Hocking published his first major work, The Meaning of God in Human Experience. The work, which immediately established Hocking's reputation, was welcomed as the most effective statement of philosophical idealism to take account of experience in religion. Religious experience had been introduced to philosophy and theology on a large scale with the publication of William James's Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in the first and second years of the twentieth century. But the impact of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was to stimulate the rise of religious pragmatism and of modernism and to promote the wave of anti-intellectualism which Hocking has called "the retirement of the intellect." William James, whose Principles of Psychology (1890) had attracted the young Hocking to Harvard, died in 1910, but his presence was still felt. The year 1912, in fact, witnessed the posthumous publication of James' Essays in Radical Empiricism.
