The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

One criticism of pragmatism, forcefully articulated by Stanley Cavell, is that pragmatism fails to deal with mourning, understood in the psychoanalytic sense as grief-work (Trauerarbeit). Such work would seemingly be as pertinent to philosophical investigations (especially ones conducted by pragmatists) as to psychoanalytic explorations. Finding such themes as mourning and loss in R. W. Emerson's writings, Cavell warns against assimilating Emerson's voice to that of American pragmatism, especially Dewey's instrumentalism, for such assimilation risks the loss or repression of Emerson's voice (...) in not only professional philosophy but also American culture. While granting Emerson's distinctive voice, this essay argues that the way Cavell insists on differences problematically represses recognition of the Emersonian strains in Dewey's own philosophical voice. In doing so, Cavell falsely flattens the resounding depth of Dewey's philosophical voice and narrows the expansive range of pragmatic intelligence. But Dewey all too often lends himself to such a misreading, for his writings at once repress and embody the strains of a distinctively Emersonian voice. (shrink)

In the literature investigating the long history of appeals to ‘nature’, in its multiple meanings, for rules of conduct or justification of social order, little attention has been paid to a long-standing tradition in which medical and physiological arguments merged into moral and social ones. A host of medical authors, biologists, social writers and philosophers assumed that nature spoke its moral language not only in its general economy, but also within and through the body. This is why, for instance, many (...) critics of Malthus argued that physiological self-regulating mechanisms ensured a spontaneous adaptation of fertility to the circumstances. Beliefs in a beneficent economy of nature persisted when Providence was replaced by evolution. To some, they provided reasons for hope even when others worried about ‘unfit’ members of society increasing at a quicker rate than ‘fit’ ones. The nerves gradually replaced food and blood as moral mediators between society and the body. When faith in bio-social progress was shaken by degeneration theories, and fin de siècle anxiety concerned underpopulation rather than overpopulation, not an insignificant proportion of those who emphasised the bad effects of modern civilisation resorted to ideas and arguments based on a view of the body in which physiology and morality worked together. A common language and common assumptions linked the Kulturpessimisten to their optimistic eighteenth-century colleagues, in spite of their different forecasts. The present paper traces continuities and discontinuities in the operation of a persistent set of interrelated ideas and assumptions on the coalescence of the physiological and the moral across disciplines and contexts. (shrink)

In the literature investigating the long history of appeals to ‘nature’, in its multiple meanings, for rules of conduct or justification of social order, little attention has been paid to a long-standing tradition in which medical and physiological arguments merged into moral and social ones. A host of medical authors, biologists, social writers and philosophers assumed that nature spoke its moral language not only in its general economy, but also within and through the body. This is why, for instance, many (...) critics of Malthus argued that physiological self-regulating mechanisms ensured a spontaneous adaptation of fertility to the circumstances. Beliefs in a beneficent economy of nature persisted when Providence was replaced by evolution. To some, they provided reasons for hope even when others worried about ‘unfit’ members of society increasing at a quicker rate than ‘fit’ ones. The nerves gradually replaced food and blood as moral mediators between society and the body. When faith in bio-social progress was shaken by degeneration theories, and fin de siècle anxiety concerned underpopulation rather than overpopulation, not an insignificant proportion of those who emphasised the bad effects of modern civilisation resorted to ideas and arguments based on a view of the body in which physiology and morality worked together. A common language and common assumptions linked the Kulturpessimisten to their optimistic eighteenth-century colleagues, in spite of their different forecasts. The present paper traces continuities and discontinuities in the operation of a persistent set of interrelated ideas and assumptions on the coalescence of the physiological and the moral across disciplines and contexts. (shrink)

Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific beliefs can both be justified by a unitary (...) set of evidentiary rules. I argue that James did build a unitary epistemology but not by loosening cognitive standards. In his psychological research, he had adopted the Comtian view that hypotheses and regulative assumptions play a crucial role in the context of discovery even though they must be provisionally adopted before they can be supported by evidence. “The Will to Believe” relies on this methodological point to achieve a therapeutic goal—to convince despairing Victorians that religious faith can be reconciled with a scientific epistemology. James argues that the prospective theist is in the same epistemic situation with respect to the “religious hypothesis” as the scientist working in the context of discovery. (shrink)

William James has traditionally been seen as a critic of evidentialism, with his claim that “Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds” being understood as saying that in certain cases we have the right to believe beyond what is certified by the evidence. However, there is an alternate, “expansive”, reading of James (defended most recently by Cheryl Misak, (...) Robert Talisse, and Scott Aikin) that portrays him not as criticizing evidentialism itself, but only as trying to expand our conception what we should count as evidence. There are two main strategies for defending this ‘expansive’ reading. The first approach relies on showing that the logic of James’s argument itself relies on highlighting a new type of evidence rather than rather than undermining the need for our beliefs to be grounded in evidence, while the second approach appeals to aspects of James’s biography to show that he always intended something closer to the expansive reading. It is argued here that neither approach is persuasive, and that the anti-evidentialist reading of James remains the most probable. (shrink)

One way to understand philosophy as a form of therapy is this: it involves a philosopher who is trying to cure himself. He has been drawn into a certain philosophical frame of mind—the ‘disease’—and has thus infected himself with this illness. Now he is sick and trying to employ philosophy to cure himself. So philosophy is both: the ailment and the cure. And the philosopher is all three: pathogenic agent, patient, and therapist.

The concept of empiricism evokes both a historical tradition and a set of philosophical theses. The theses are usually understood to have been developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. But these figures did not use the term “empiricism,” and they did not see themselves as united by a shared epistemology into one school of thought. My dissertation analyzes the debate that elevated the concept of empiricism (and of an empiricist tradition) to prominence in English-language philosophy. -/- In the 1870s and (...) ’80s a lively debate about psychology emerged. Neo-Kantian idealists criticized the very idea that the mind can be studied scientifically. A group of philosopher-psychologists responded, often in Mind. They were among the first to call themselves “empiricists,” arguing that psychology could provide a scientific basis for philosophical progress. Idealists held that empirical psychology depended on premises developed by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. These premises were allegedly absurd because they rendered ideas of extension, as well as other ideas crucial to natural science, unreal. Those who wanted to advance psychology towards becoming a legitimate science were forced to engage these philosophical attacks, while at the same time to develop empirical theories that could successfully explain some characteristics of experience. I show how James’s theory of space perception accomplished both tasks. -/- In developing this theory, James found he had to reject the Lockean notion that reality is associated with passively-registered sensations. James also abandoned Berkeley and Hume’s claim that ideas are ultimately derived from atomic sensations. Instead, James presented experimental evidence that sensation is a continuous stream. The mind must actively parse this stream if it is to gain a coherent representation of its environment. I argue that James’s stream-of-thought thesis served as a presupposition of his entire psychology. The thesis showed how the labor of investigating the mind could be divided between philosophers and scientists, and in a manner sensitive to the concerns of both. The stream thesis also provided a scientific basis for a new philosophical empiricism that, I argue, has a hidden legacy in the history of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)