The relation between Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, and Perfectionism is both obvious and difficult, and this is what prompted us to edit the present issue of the Journal. The relation is obvious, because the history of American Philosophy is deeply textured by this relation, and the transition from Transcendentalism to Pragmatism has been historically attested. Difficult, because these traditions seem to deny one another. Pragmatist philosophers have often presented themselves as the founder...

Genealogies in philosophy can be tricky and even a little dangerous. Lines of influence and inheritance run much more linearly on paper than in reality. I am often reminded of Robert Frost's "Mending Walls" and the attention that must be paid to what is being walled in and what is being walled out. In other words, William James and Emmanuel Levinas are not natural conversation partners. I have always read James as a fellow traveler of Edmund Husserl, and placed both (...) in a line of thought that might share Franz Brentano and Wilhelm Dilthey as forebears. In this genealogy, Levinas appears with an asterisk, or after one. Maurice Natanson described Husserlian phenomenology as an elderly grandparent who comes down to dinner just a little bit too early, making everyone uncomfortable. Seating Levinas next to James brings to mind some similar scene. What basic premises or positions do James and Levinas share? Is Levinas a Jamesian pragmatist? Is he a radical empiricist? Does James offer an ethics that parallels or even complements Levinas's rigorous ethical phenomenology? (shrink)

To practice compassion, the recognition, understanding, and alleviation of patient suffering are of utmost importance. Nursing literature provides ample guidance about the nature and meaning and patients’ views about compassion and physical and psychological suffering. However, missing is the discussion about how nurses can achieve a deeper awareness of patients’ suffering to practice compassion. This paper aims to describe the relational inquiry nursing approach and illustrate how this approach can enable nurses to develop a deeper awareness of patient suffering. The (...) relational inquiry approach encompasses two components: a relational consciousness and inquiry as a form of action. Relational consciousness requires the nurses to focus on the concrete situations and relationships as well as recognize the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and contextual factors affecting the situations. The interpersonal factors are among and between the individuals, intrapersonal factors are within the individuals, and contextual factors are the hidden factors influencing the individuals and situations. Inquiry as an action requires a critical analysis of the experiences of individuals, situational contexts, and knowledge to inform the nursing care modalities and actions. This approach encourages nurses to use the philosophies of hermeneutic phenomenology, critical theory, and pragmatism. The phenomenological worldview allows nurses to interpret their own and patients’ experiences, the critical theory worldview allows nurses to examine the influence of social and cultural factors, and pragmatism allows nurses to question their prior knowledge and develop new knowledge in each situation. The relational inquiry approach allows nurses to develop a deeper understanding of patient suffering through building a therapeutic and trustworthy relationship, active listening, focusing on the details, and engaging in broad and situations specific inquiries to understand the patient narrative of suffering. Two case exemplars are shared to demonstrate how relational inquiry allowed nurses to move beyond recognizing physical suffering and understand patients’ emotional and psychological suffering. (shrink)

Philosophical inquiries in nursing are useful for analysing and critiquing existing practices, exploring contextual factors affecting practice, adapting to and sustaining ongoing changes in knowledge development, and facilitating the linkages between theory, research and practice. Nurse scholars used several philosophical schools of thought to guide knowledge development and practice. Pragmatism has been described as essential for bridging the theory–practice gap, for engaging in the inquiry‐based practice and for translating knowledge into practice. The existing descriptions of pragmatism rely on rudimentary descriptions (...) of “what works” and “inquiry‐based action" aspects. However, the operationalist and inferentialist aspects of pragmatism and their worth for nursing knowledge development and practice are yet to be discussed. This paper explores the operationalist and inferentialist pragmatism and highlights the implications of these aspects for nursing knowledge development and practice. It has been argued that the dual aspect of pragmatism offers an approach to develop practical lines of action, evaluate actions in terms of their usefulness and assimilate already learned actions with the new actions. I suggested that moving beyond the rudimentary understanding of pragmatism and embracing and utilizing the dual aspect of pragmatism can bring more significant benefits for nursing. Embracing the dual aspect of pragmatism can enable nurses in developing philosophical reflexivity, emphasizing the experiential context of nursing, generating actionable and ready to use knowledge, and utilizing nursing theories to their fullest potential. (shrink)

The role and ethics of professionals in business and economics have been questioned, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. Some suggest a reorientation using concepts such as craftsmanship. In this article, I will explore professional practices within the context of behavioural theory and business ethics. I suggest that scholars of behavioural theory need a strategy to deal with normative questions to meet their ambition of practical relevance. Evidence-based management, a recent behavioural approach, may assist business ethics scholars in understanding (...) how professionals infer ‘evidence’ to make decisions. For a professional, ethical issues are an integral part of decision-making at critical moments. As reflective practitioners, they develop insights related to ethical concerns when collecting and assessing evidence within decision-making processes. (shrink)

This article seeks to defend and develop a stakeholder pragmatism advanced in some of the work by Edward Freeman and colleagues. By positioning stakeholder pragmatism more in line with the democratic and ethical base in American pragmatism (as developed by William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty), the article sets forth a fallibilistic stakeholder pragmatism that seeks to be more useful to companies by expanding the ways in which value is and can be created in a contingent world. A dialogue (...) between a defence company and peace and arbitration society is used to illustrate the main plot of this article. (shrink)

Introduction to the symposia on Pragmatism and Perfectionism appered on the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2 issue 2, 2010.

This paper examines the relationship between pragmatism and critical realism, first as alternative philosophies for the social sciences in general, and second, as an illustration, in the social stu...

Chris Voparil’s Reconstructing Pragmatism builds the best case to date that the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty decisively and productively reshaped the lineage of pragmatist philosophy. In developing new directions for pragmatism, the book seeks to press past a number of recent debates. One such debate concerns the relative priority of experience and language as methodological starting points for pragmatist philosophy. While Voparil seeks to abandon this debate as outworn, this review argues that the issue of pragmatism’s methodological apparatus cannot be (...) easily set aside. Only by addressing head-on the disadvantages of experience-first pragmatism and language-first pragmatism can a next iteration of pragmatist philosophy properly develop a third methodological option, tantalizingly noted by Voparil, of a practice-first pragmatism. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to philosophy were very different, reflecting their distinct personalities, with James exhibiting a pluralistic and humanistic style as opposed to Peirce the analyst and (...) formalist. James was a popular philosopher and Peirce a philosopher for philosophers. But they followed each other’s work, corresponded about philosophical problems, and deeply influenced each other. Peirce never completely renounced James’s broader pragmatism and tried hard to find common ground, even to some extent reshaping his own views to accommodate James’s. (shrink)

The reformist philosophy of the classical pragmatist tradition has gradually evolved into the now-fashionable revolutionary styles of pragmatism, some scientistic, some literary. This evolution is traced from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, through Schiller, Lewis, Hook,and Quine, to Rorty’s literary-political neo-pragmatism. Rather than get hung up on the question of which variants qualify as authentic pragmatism, it is better — more fruitful, and appropriately forward looking— to ask what we can learn from the older tradition, and what we can salvage (...) from the new. (shrink)

growing up in new mexico, I was passionate about geology, specifically paleontology. It led, in one adventure, to me being arrested by monks. While on a picnic with my parents at Jemez Springs, I had followed a beautiful Permian stratum, rich with crinoids and brachiopod shells, onto private land owned by The Servants of the Paraclete, a retreat for "whiskey priests."1 I was detained while one brother admonished me, kindly, and let me go, and even let me keep my specimens. (...) But the passion for the history of the earth and natural history in general remained. I was one of those kids who came late to the idea that what was taught at school and what I found of interest had any points of intersection, but I did come to... (shrink)

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results (...) from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice. (shrink)

Engineering is a practice that must function in an environment of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. This environment has become even more difficult in an increasingly complex world. Engineering ethics has to be framed and taught in a way that addresses these realities. This paper proposes a combination of the philosophy of pragmatism and the ethic of care as a possible framework for the practice of engineering ethics that can provide flexibility and openness to address engineering ethics problems more realistically within (...) the ethos and culture of engineering. Embedding values into practice, pragmatism and care provide a broad, reflective, and corrective framework for engineering ethics that can accommodate the realities in which engineering operates. It is shown that these two approaches are more consonant with design methodologies and have a natural fit with design thinking, so they mesh well with what engineers do and with the complexities of their work today. As humans more and more try to alter the socio-techno-natural world, e.g., the earth’s climate, the combination of pragmatism and care will allow enhanced ethical behavior. Alterations to complex adaptive systems will produce highly uncertain results that require engineers to have a mindset that allows them to act with humility in the face of significant uncertainty and potential catastrophic failures. (shrink)

This comment explains why the claims of Callicott et al. in their paper 'Was Aldo Leopold a Pragmatist?' (Environmental Values 18 (2009): 453—486) are incorrect. The arguments they make are shown to be based upon several misunderstandings. In addition, important contributions by Aldo Leopold to the philosophy of conservation are missed.

We consider the prospect of a trans-Atlantic alliance for a social theory of critical pragmatism, seeking the specific value that French critical pragmatism can offer American pragmatists, and vice versa. We proceed through a discussion of the ontological and metho- dological keys to French critical pragmatism: the architecture of justification, the treatment of conflict in public disputes, the dynamics of argumentation, and the play of acts defined analytically as ‘test’ and ‘compromise’. At each level, we compare this approach to Deweyan (...) pragmatism. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with moral experimentalism, which I describe as the stance according to which moral inquiry is grounded not in objective foundations nor in our subjective inclinations but in our active encounter with things and events and in our communicative interactions with others. The notion of moral inquiry as grounded in objective foundations and that as based on subjective inclinations have traditionally been conceived of not as two independent possibilities but as the two poles of a dramatic Either/Or (...) that has profoundly conditioned, and still does, our perception of and approach to disagreements and conflicts. When the pragmatists, particularly Dewey, advanced the idea of an experimental approach to moral issues, they put it forward as an alternative to these extreme positions and, therefore, as a way out of what they perceived, I think correctly, as a false and pernicious dichotomy. The paper is divided into three parts: In the first section, I set the theoretical foundation of experimentalism as conceived of by the American pragmatists, in particular Peirce and Dewey. In the second part, and drawing mainly on Dewey’s Logic, I explore the procedural implications derived from the application of experimentalism to practice. In the third section, I consider the particularities of the application of experimentalism to the realm of ethics. As I argue, experimentalism is not only a promising approach to moral problems but perhaps the only effective remedy for the increasingly irrational attitudes with which they are today addressed. (shrink)

Eric T. Morton ABSTRACT: Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin have argued that substantive versions of value pluralism are incompatible with pragmatism, and that all such versions of pluralism must necessarily collapse into versions of strong metaphysical pluralism. They also argue that any strong version of value pluralism is incompatible with pragmatism’s meliorist commitment and will...

We have long lived in a world made by global connections. Our products, our travels, our ideas--all of these have their origins in places and peoples both near and far. But when scholars narrate the history of the modern self, they ignore these connections and focus on changes in European science and philosophy. In this provocative new book, Avram Alpert argues that we need to rethink the story of the modern self as a global history. He first shows how canonical (...) European thinkers like Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant explicitly formed their ideas of selfhood in relation to the travel accounts flooding into Europe from colonial missionaries. He then pushes this history beyond Europe, showing how a diverse series of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and D.T. Suzuki, critiqued these ideas of global selfhood with their own creative responses. Spanning four continents and four centuries, the book argues that all of these writers partake of a shared global history forged in the violence of colonial rule. The resulting narrative shows that the modern self is not a European invention, but a global, evolving, and fraught attempt to make ourselves the kinds of beings who can live with the complexity of a world that is at once connected and never fully knowable. (shrink)

Critically engages the work of American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.