William Henry Chamberlin: First LDS Philosopher

Posted on March 21, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy |

Discourses in Mormon TheologyI know I’ve mentioned the recent book Discourses in Mormon Theology: Philosophical and Theological Possibilities before. It’s nothing like a systematic theology text but rather a collection of diverse essays from the first SMPT Conference. One of my favorite essays in the book was on William Chamberlin who was arguably the first real LDS philosopher.

He was a big part of the significant changes in the Church from 1894 through the 1920’s. His life also reflected some of the unfortunate tensions at that time. Most of you are probably familiar with his career at BYU and the controversies there. He arrived at BYU in 1910 but resigned in 1916 when the philosophy department was dissolved. This was, unfortunately, due to leaders at the time being worried about Higher Criticism, evolution and other such things. Despite the efforts of scientist leaders in the Church like Talmage, Eyring, or Widstoe along with science sympathizers like Roberts there was a fairly anti-scientific backlash around this time. It can be seen in anti-evolutionary books like Man: His Origin and Destiny. This backlash tended to adopt a lot of the reasoning of the then rising fundamentalist movement in Protestantism.

As an aside, it’s arguable that before this backlash that the many Church thinkers had moved to adopt a position almost close to what we’d today call scientism. That’s not to say Talmage or Widstoe were proto-Dawkins. Rather they perhaps privileged scientific methadology higher than was really justified. Clearly much of this backlash was primarily due to social changes in America and which crossed religious boundaries. However I often wonder how much was really a backlash at this perceived methodology and its problems. Someone should write a paper on that some day.

Anyway most of my LDS readers are probably familiar with the history of Chamberlin at BYU during this era through the prism of debates about academic freedom or evolution. (Often unfortunately de-contextualized and applied naively to contemporary debates) How many of you are familiar with Chamberlain as a philosopher though?

I certainly wasn’t and thus found James McLachlan’s paper amazingly fascinating.

Chamberlin studied under Royce and Howison at Harvard during the peak of the debate over realism and idealism and the continued rise and domination of pragmatism by figures like James and Dewey. (Peirce, although the originator of the movement, was arguably very under appreciated and even less understood. It’s probable that much of his mature thought didn’t see significant light of day until decades later.)

Royce’s philosophy was basically a modification of Hegelism although he was deeply influenced by Peirce and James. However I’ll fully admit that Royce is one of those figures I keep meaning to study and yet never have. Peirce actually discusses him quite a bit and gave some fairly scathing reviews of Royce’s significant works. Still there was a common theme of idealism put through various guises - especially as they thought through the problem of God - that was common to the thinking of that era.

Chamberlin developed an unique philosophy in this context that attempted to make use of uniquely LDS conceptions of theology. He called his position spiritual realism.

According to McLachlan, part of Chamberlin’s motivation was as a kind of critique of what was termed modernism. As with pragmatism as a whole, it could be seen as a kind of precursor to the kinds of critiques launched under the rubric of postmodernism. One should be careful not to read too much into this though. At the time Chamberlin wrote Spencer’s social darwinism was still taken very seriously in academic circles. Eugenetics had not yet been given its negative ethical taint by the horrors of Nazism. And a naive positivism was the name of the game in many if not most epistemologies.

The irony, as McLachlan notes, is that Chamberlin was basically doing philosophy as a kind of defense of Mormon thinking and was thus opposed to a naive modernism. Yet he was caught up in Church crackdowns on what they perceived to be the excesses of modernism and its pedagogy.

Hopefully in future posts I can address some of Chamberlin’s views. However thus far I only have McLachlan’s paper - although he has an excellent bibliography at the end.

Comments

6 Responses to “William Henry Chamberlin: First LDS Philosopher”

BTW - if you are like me you’ve never heard of Howison except in passing. He, like so many of the American philosophers of the time (including Peirce, James and Dewey) was attempting to grapple with evolution as it affected philosophy and religion. McLachlan actually has a paper on him in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20:3. “George Holmes Howison: ‘The City of God’ and Personal Idealism.” Quoting from the abstract (I’ve not read the paper yet)

American Personalism is sometimes referred to as having East and West Coast varieties: Boston Personalism, founded by Bordan Parker Bowne and carried on by Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Peter Bertocci, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others, and California Personalism, founded by George Holmes Howison and carried on by Ralph Tyler Flewelling. But like so many shorthand notions it doesn’t quite work. No one really carried on Howison’s “multi-personalitarianism.” Howison created a radically democratic notion of personal idealism that extended all the way to God, who was no more the ultimate monarch, no longer the only ruler and creator of the universe, but the ultimate democrat in eternal relation to other eternal persons. It is no wonder Howison found no disciples among the religious, for whom his thought was heretical, or the non-religious, who thought his proposals too religious; only McTaggart’s idealist atheism or Thomas Davidson’s Apeirionism seem to resemble Howisons personal idealism. By all accounts George Holmes Howison was one of the great philosophical teachers of his age.

Clark, I see you have a copy of the book. Would you please provide a table of contents since one is lacking on Amazon (and all the other sites I searched)? Feel free to delete this post (or any part thereof) and email me personally if you wish.

3 Jim McLachlan on August 2nd, 2008 5:13 pm

Clark,

Chamberlin is actually a really interesting philosopher. He fits into the personalist movment that is actually still around. They have a journal called The Pluralist that is published at U of Illinois Press. Sterling McMurrin was one of Ralph Tyler Flewelling’s students at Southern California. Though McMurrin mentions people like Brightman in Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion he was not a personalist himeself. Flewelling was a kind of disciple of Howison and an important thinker in his own right. He edited the journal the Personalist at USC which ran from 1919-1980 and was one of the most important philosophical journals of its time.

I’m working on an edition of Chamberlin’s work. He published a couple hundred pages of material for his classes and wrote a couple of articles. He also wrote an unfinished disertation on Berkeley for Harvard. The disertation in available at the university of Utah Special Collections. I’m almost finished or rather have been almost finished for a couple of years but other projects keep preventing me from getting it done. I should have it to Kofford in couple of months though this time. I’m committed to finishing it and will just leave things like his letters and what not for some other time so it will be the publisher soon.

4 Jim McLachlan on August 2nd, 2008 5:24 pm

Here is the webpage for The Pluralist which used to be the Personalist Forum http://www.siu.edu/~tpf/. By the way Southern Illinois University is the best place to study American Personalism these days. There are also European varieties of Personalism running from Schelling to Buber and Levinas and of course John Paul II though the latter looses all the wonderful heterodox elements of personalism that makes it interesting to Mormons.

5 Christopher Bradford (Grasshopper) on August 2nd, 2008 9:16 pm

Jim, I was disappointed to see that your planned Sunstone presentation on Chamberlin was cancelled. Are you planning to present it in any other forum?

Jim, I look forward to it when it comes out. Didn’t McMurrin turn into much more of a positivist? That’s what I’ve always read and certainly that’s always the impression I’ve had of him. If he’s not I’m going to have to make sure I stop telling people he was. (grin)

Be sure to get Kofford to put it up on Amazon. They aren’t very good about that and not having it on Amazon really limits it’s reach. I suspect there are people who’d not find it through normal routes. Kofford was pretty bad about Blake’s 3rd volume. It never made it up on Amazon. I finally tracked it down on my one (although it hasn’t arrive yet for some reason)

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