The last decade has seen the publication of five or more collections on William James, including The Cambridge Companion to William James (2006) and centenary editions of both Varieties of Religious Experience (2005) and Pragmatism (2010). No fewer than ten volumes of William James Studies have followed its inception in 2006, which was also the year Robert D. Richardson published his magisterial William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Into this crowded field comes yet more new work on James, this time a collection originating from the 2010 centenary conference at Oxford.

Does James really matter this much today? Of the three affirmatives this volume's title implicitly promises, some are more compelling than others. The first, James's transatlanticism, is the weakest, at least to this reader. Even if we marvel (as several contributors insist we must) at James's “zig-zag” life, is this so distinctive? Western intellectuals have been outgrowing nationality since the Enlightenment, and the editors’ introductory contrast of Jamesian cosmopolitanism with “Emersonian exceptionalism” (7) will fail to persuade anyone familiar with the robustly global imaginary of Romanticism, including American Transcendentalism. Indeed, more interesting on this score are the exceptions, when the otherwise urbane James plays the yokel – for example, in his boyish resistance to John Stuart Mill's feminism (as described by Leslie Butler), his Protestant blindness to facets of Bergson (as argued by Barbara Loerzer), and his long-lived Oedipal obsessions (as portrayed by Peter Kuryla).

The volume's second answer is more compelling. As the editors Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S. Rasmussen put it, this volume shows – pace Richard Rorty – that James's “conversation … is not just about … redescription,” because James “was deeply interested in religious experience that lies beyond words.” Rorty may think conversation is “the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood,” but James wondered if “human experience of reality might well exceed conceptual knowledge of it” (quoted at 9, Halliwell and Rasmussen's emphasis). James, in other words, was a metaphysician, and thus Rorty's enlisting James as a fellow “aesthetical ironist” – as Rasmussen recalls Rorty phrased it (151) – was a real injustice to James's project. Unfortunately, such contestations of contemporary pragmatism's misreading of James are rarely so blunt in this book. Another earnest moment comes when Michael R. Slater concedes that James's A Pluralistic Universe (2009) is “the most dated” (168) because while it engages four philosophical options – materialism, theism, pluralism, and monism (as summarized by James at the start of that book's second lecture) – only the first two of these have mattered to the West ever since, comprising as they do the culture war. On one side of this tedious struggle are arrayed contemporary pragmatism and other postmoderns in alliance with a strictly materialist science: science provides the percepts, postmoderns “make” the concepts through conversation. On the other side stand the traditional theists who “find” truth through revelation.

James, though, weirdly believed that the future belonged to neither theism nor materialism, but pluralism, and a number of the essays struggle with how to characterize this apparent miscalculation. Several contributors, committed or perhaps just resigned to the secularization thesis, argue that James's pluralism was but a way station on the road from theism to materialism. David A. Hollinger portrays James as a semi-secularizer of ecumenical Protestantism while Richard H. King similarly situates James “midway” (62) between the Victorian faithful and Nietzsche's “modernist sublime” (51). Rasmussen contends, too, that James pursued a “middle way” (164) between Hegelian metaphysics and Rortian irony, while Sami Pihlström determines James “a middle-ground thinker” (193), standing somewhere between the belief that “there really [is] a God” and just “act[ing] as if there were one” (192).

In at least a couple of cases, though, this volume offers a more compelling, post-secular narrative, one being when Slater gently hints that the secularist conviction that materialism will triumph over theism might be the “certain blindness” that must be overcome. More explicitly, David C. Lambeth admires James's honesty – in contrast not only to John Dewey back then but also to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris right now – in recognizing that religion is by no means moribund (144–45). Lambeth nods toward an important distinction. Yes, chronologically, James obviously falls somewhere between Emerson and Rorty, but normatively A Pluralistic Universe is arguably more germane today than Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). As James concludes A Pluralistic Universe, when “science … pretend[s] to give us literally accurate instead of approximate … pictures,” it is pluralism (not dogmatic materialism or theism) that will keep us honest about what we know, and what we don't. Why, finally, does James matter today? The book's third answer is the most compelling: because he published A Pluralistic Universe.