The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914

Stephen Schloesser provides a propaedeutic of modern intellectual and cultural developments that crystallized in three "anxieties": the priority and understanding of "experience," the concern to safeguard epistemological "realism," and the threat to human freedom posed by "determinism." All the figures mentioned here were dealing with the immense impact of Kantianism and positivism, which they viewed as leading liberal Protestantism into agnosticism, historicism, and relativism.