The story of the rise and fall of pragmatism is sometimes called the eclipse narrative. This paper addresses a specific version of this narrative that the logical empiricists arrived in North America in the 1930s and within 30 years had supplanted the pragmatists as the dominant philosophy there. Philosophers such as Alan Richardson and Cheryl Misak have challenged this view by emphasizing the similarities between these two movements. While both seem to admit that there is a distinction between the two (...) when it comes to values, I point out that the issue of values feeds into all aspects of pragmatist thinking, and so despite what seems on the surface to be agreements between the two movements, they were still quite different in all areas of their thinking. I challenge the degree of similarities by arguing that there were some sharp distinctions between the two movements, with the most important being the fact-value distinction and its impact on how each conceived of the term “practical.” I close by addressing how these distinctions should affect how we conceive of the eclipse narrative. (shrink)

Enactive theory seems to be reaching a critical juncture in its evolution, as it expands beyond cognitive science to include a project that Shaun Gallagher has called “new naturalism”: a “phenomenologized” reconstruction of nature, directed by a distinctive view of experience that is itself a product of “naturalized phenomenology.” This article aims to contribute to conversations about how to move forward with this project by highlighting important parallels between the trajectory of enactive theory and the early history of pragmatism. Pragmatism (...) was first developed by Peirce, James, and Dewey out of a distinctive view of experience that strongly resembles that of enactive theory. Then, during the first third of the twentieth century, pragmatism evolved into a philosophy of nature and played a leading role in a reconstructive project much like the “new naturalism” proposed by Gallagher and others. Around midcentury, however, this project was largely abandoned as philosophers turned to problems of more limited scope. This history raises crucial questions for proponents of enactive “new naturalism”: Why did the pragmatist version of this project fail to achieve its aims? And how will it be different this time? (shrink)