An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century.

In her effort to recast moral realism in the style of the later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, Sabina Lovibond seeks to ground moral knowledge in a historical community and its rules of language. In Stanley Hauerwas’ writings, we find an account of Christian ethics that is similarly modeled on Wittgensteinian realism. The main problem with Wittgensteinian moral realism, as it is appropriated by both Lovibond’s and Hauerwas’ society-dependent accounts of morality, is that they are unable to resolve difficult issues created (...) by epistemic relativism. Both thinkers are vulnerable to epistemic relativism in two ways. First, with its contextualist approach to the justification of moral beliefs, their conception of moral realism makes any historical community the ultimate authority in all matters of morality. Second, their conception of moral realism also turns moral truth into a social property of a historical community, while denying the exclusive ownership of truth by one particular community. (shrink)

Responding to this issue’s invitation to bring new disciplinary insights to the field of improvement science, this article takes as its starting point one of the field’s guiding metaphors: the imperative to “mind the gap”. Drawing on insights from anthropology, history, and philosophy, the article reflects on the origins and implications of this metaphoric imperative, and suggests some ways in which it might be in tension with the means and ends of improvement. If the industrial origins of improvement science in (...) the twentieth century inform a metaphor of gaps, chasms, and spaces of misalignment as invariably imperfect and potentially dangerous, and therefore requiring bridging or closure, other currents that feed the discipline of improvement science suggest the potential value and uses of spaces of openness and ambiguity. These currents include the science of complex adaptive systems, and certain precepts of philosophical pragmatism acknowledged to inform improvement science. Going a step further, I reflect on whether or not these two contrasting approaches within improvement science should be treated as incommensurable paradigms, and what each approach tells us about the very possibility of accommodating seemingly irreconcilable or incommensurable approaches within improvement science. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism’s traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism (...) and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of new environmentalist themes is taking place. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce’s Monist articles—in particular “The Law of Mind” and “Man’s Glassy Essence,” both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce’s discussions should be understood in the context of contemporary evolutionary and physiological speculations, many of (...) which were featured in late- 1880s issues of Open Court, sister journal to the Monist. (shrink)

The essay compares Peirce's pragmatist approach to the problem of perceptual experience as a fallible foundation of knowledge to a sophisticated empiricist take on the issue. The comparison suggests that, while empiricism can accommodate the idea of perception as fallible, theoretically laden, and containing conjectural elements, the cardinal difference between pragmatism and empiricism consists in the pragmatist insistence on the intrinsic intelligibility of experience, which also serves as the ultimate source of all forms of intelligibility; whereas empiricism retains a penchant (...) for fitting experiences into abstract conceptual schemes. (shrink)

. A partial analogy exists between the lifespan neuropsychological development of individuals and the biological evolution of species: In both of these major categories of growth, progressive emergence of wholes transcends inherently limited part‐processes. The remarkably small purview of each moment of consciousness experienced by an individual may be a crucial aspect of maintaining organization in that individual's cognitive development, protecting it from combinatorial chaos. In this essay I summarize experimental psychology research showing that working memory capacity comprises the so‐called (...) magical number 7±2 items, not only for words and digits but for spatial items and other sorts of cognitive materials, and not only in humans but also in other species. This is so to such an extent that 7±2 may be a “constant of nature.” The small quantity range 7±2 independent items, which builds upon a more elementary, instantaneous working memory capacity of three or four items, is surprisingly independent of the time duration of a cognitive task. Moreover, it is largely independent of ontogeny. Explanations of these powerful facts about working memory are offered here within both a functionalistic framework and a framework of hypothetical neural processes. At the neural level, working memory dynamics may comprise certain brain wave harmonics or topological relationships in the sheetlike cortex. Within the functionalistic framework, I suggest an additional analogy, pertaining to cultural evolution, with Tom Gilbert's work on risk analysis and “the global problematic” that follows from unforeseen consequences of the expansiveness of human ambition. Several connections are drawn with ideas presented by participants in the Chicago Religion and Science Group about how theologies and sciences try to understand the possibility of adaptive exercises of human freedom in the face of the extreme finiteness of each human individual. (shrink)

This paper explores the issue of democracy and the role of the democratic classroom in the development of society in general, and the way in which educators understand and deal with diversity in particular. The first part of the paper explores different meanings of democracy and how they can be manifested in the classroom. We argue that the idea of a ‘democratic classroom’ is far too broad a category; democracy is defined in action and can have realist or pragmatic characteristics, (...) elitist or pluralist roots. The realist form of social education was championed by political scientist Charles Merriam, while a social educative process more dependent on pragmatic problem solving was pursued by educational philosopher John Dewey and those who followed in his theoretical wake. The history of democracy in the United States, and the battles of how to import different meanings of democracy into the classroom over the course of the 20th century is explored, suggesting that the educational establishment has a tendency to adopt more realist/elitist forms of civic education. We present five ‘democratic’ classrooms with different characteristics to illustrate the different characteristics social education can exhibit. In the second part of the paper we discuss the relationship between different types of democratic classrooms and issues of race/ethnicity/culture. (shrink)

William James’s interest in psychical phenomena spanned his entire career as a scholar, yet is has been largely neglected. Few if any have adequately incorporated this quirky side of James into their critical studies of his scholarly contributions, not only in religious studies but also in philosophy and psychology. Psychical research was nevertheless very much part of James’s intellectual endeavors and, as this article shall argue, sheds light on an evolving, complex, and contradictory Jamesian cosmological realism. I will contextual James’s (...) widely discussed Varieties of Religious Experience, relying on his voluminous correspondence, and will explore various articulations of pragmatism, vis-à-vis James, John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty, particularly as those articulations apply to scholarship in religious studies and as they shed light on a Jamesian cosmology. I will then conclude with a discussion of psychical research as it relates to epistemology and the (scientific) study of that cosmos. (shrink)

This paper proposes that engineers in public service are confronted with unavoidable complexity in their ethical considerations. The complexity begins with interactions among venues of ethical choices. Engineers must make ethical choices simultaneously at the individual, professional, organizational and societal levels. These ethical domains often conflict. The complexity also stems from situations in which physical properties may remain stable, but important social, economic, institutional and political conditions can change substantially. The paper proposes that the reflective learning approach of pragmatism can (...) help with these challenging situations. This approach depends upon employing Dewey’s five stage process of inquiry to engage the ethical complexity inherent in the practice of engineering in the public service. (shrink)

The ethical choices faced by engineers today are increasingly complex. Competing and conflicting ethical demands from clients, communities, employees, and personal objectives combine to suggest that engineers employ ethical approaches that are adaptive yet grounded in three concrete professional circumstances: first, that engineers apply unique professional skills in the service of a client, subject to protecting the public interest; second, that engineers advance the state of knowledge of their professional field through reflection, research, and sharing experience in journals and conferences, (...) and third, that they develop new professionals by active mentoring. This paper examines five features of American pragmatism and suggests that its emphasis on specific, context-based ethical decision making can assist engineers in a postmodern setting. In particular, it considers the venues of interpersonal ethical choices, institutional ethical conflicts, and social choices that have ethical components. Pragmatism suggests that in such a complex ethical climate, there is a need for the co-evolution of judgment and action, for individual reflective judgment in particular situations, and for ceasing to search for a single, immutable principle for ethical choice. (shrink)

This article investigates the history of the relation between idealism and pragmatism by examining the importance of the French idealist Charles Renouvier for the development of William James's ‘Will to Believe’. By focusing on French idealism, we obtain a broader understanding of the kinds of idealism on offer in the nineteenth century. First, I show that Renouvier's unique methodological idealism led to distinctively pragmatist doctrines and that his theory of certitude and its connection to freedom is worthy of reconsideration. Second, (...) I argue that the technical vocabulary and main structure of the argument from the ‘Will to Believe’ depend upon Renouvier's idealist theory of knowledge and psychology of belief, and that taking account of this line of influence is of crucial importance for establishing the correct interpretation of James's work. (shrink)

Recent scholarly comment on the relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James offers an either–or choice between conflating the two thinkers in a proto-postmodern, antifoundationalist cast or dividing them into mutually exclusive categories of idealist believer and relativist skeptic. Contending that neither of these positions captures the pragmatist adumbrations in Emerson or the transcendentalist retentions in James, this essay turns to James's annotations of Emerson's writings as a singularly revealing yet largely neglected source of information about the exact nature (...) of the Emerson–James connection. This evidence points to a pluralistic and distinctly literary formulation of intuitive insight as the key for opening up the Emerson–James relation and for framing it with a precision hitherto missing in discussions of these thinkers. The balance of the essay presents an analytic overview of the various aspects and implications of Emerson's and James's ideas of intuition. Combining doubt and belief, skepticism and faith, realism and idealism, a particular formulation of intuition is the answer that Emerson and James both offer to the problem of modernity—the problem of locating a source of value that is both of the self and beyond the self. (shrink)

Too often C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is used simply as a classificatory scheme rather than primarily as a heuristic framework (that is, a framework designed and modified primarily for the purpose of goading and guiding inquiry in any field in which signifying processes or practices are present). Such deployment of his semeiotic betrays the letter no less than the spirit of Peirce’s writings on signs. In this essay, the author accordingly presents Peirce’s sign theory as a heuristic framework, (...) attending to some of the most important ways that it might serve to facilitate a semeiotic investigation of our legal practices. He pays close attention to the ways the topics of history, formalism, reductionism, and generality become, from a Peircean perspective, salient features of legal studies. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes some of his own experiences of becoming an organizational systems theorist. The article also presents overviews of various systems theories that influenced the learning process from subject exploration to mastery. These include system dynamics, management systems, General Systems Theory, self-organizing systems, and autognomics. Additionally, discussions of system failures, philosophical pragmatism, and knowledge management all relate to their influence on systems theories. The article culminates with an examination of the possible causes of system failures and (...) proposes various new ideas for intervening in several large-scale issues, such as sustainability. Finally, there is a review of a new type of organizational performance measurement system known as the adaptive scorecard. (shrink)

The American experience of war is ironic. That is, there is often an intimate and unexamined relationship between seemingly contrary elements in war such as morality and politics. This article argues that without understanding such irony, we are unlikely to reflect in morally comprehensive ways on past, present, or future wars. Traditional schools of thought, however, such as moralism and political realism, reinforce these apparent contradictions. I propose, then, an alternative—"ethical realism" as informed by Reinhold Niebuhr—that better explains the irony (...) of war. Through an ethical realist examination of the U.S. Civil War, World War II, and the Iraq War, I consider how American political interests have been inextricably linked with deep moral concerns. Ethical realism charts a middle path that ennobles traditional realpolitik while eschewing certain perfectionist tendencies of moralism. Ethical realism provides a conceptual framework for evaluating these other frameworks—a distinct form of moral-political deliberation about war. (shrink)

Western philosophy has been greatly influenced by visual metaphors. Knowing something has commonly, yet implicitly, been conceptualized as seeing something clearly, learning has been framed as being visually exposed to something, and the mind has been understood as a ‘mirror of nature’. A whole ‘epistemology of the eye’ has been at work, which has had significant practical implications, not least in educational contexts. One way to characterize John Dewey’s pragmatism is to see it as an attempt to replace the epistemology (...) of the eye with an epistemology of the hand. This article develops the epistemology of the hand on three levels: A level of embodiment and metaphors, of craftsmanship and social practices, and of schooling and education. (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)

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln held very different views on the ‘social question’. This essay explores the way in which they converged in their estimation of slavery during the course of the Civil War; Marx was an ardent abolitionist, and Lincoln came to see this position as necessary. It is argued that the rôle of runaway slaves – called ‘contraband’ – and German-revolutionary ’48ers played a significant rôle in the radicalisation of Lincoln and the direction of the War.

The expression ‘cultural pluralism’ was popularized by Horace Kallen, a student of William James. I explore the meaning of pluralism in the context of the American pragmatic tradition with emphasis on the meaning of pluralism for William James. Kallen sought to characterize cultural pluralism in contrast with the idea of America as a ‘melting-pot’. I also examine the contributions of Randolph Bourne and the African-American philosopher Alain Locke to the discussion of cultural pluralism. I conclude by indicating that the idea (...) of a democratic society that respects and is enriched by differences is highly relevant to contemporary discussions of cultural pluralism in a global context. (shrink)

Certain discussions about “relativism” in the philosophy of Zhuangzi turn on the question of the morality of his dao 道. Some commentators, most notably Robert Eno, maintain that there is no ethical value whatsoever to Zhuangzi’s dao as presented in the Cook Ding episode and other “knack passages.” In this essay, it is argued that there is indeed a moral dimension to Cook Ding’s dao. One way to recognize it is to explore the similarity between that dao and John Dewey’s (...) notion of educational method. There are moral traits that Dewey can appeal to in recommending his method. It is argued here that these traits represent the moral features of Cook Ding’s dao as well. (shrink)

The university is promoted as 'a place from where to speak'. Academic freedom is examined as a crucial value in an increasingly uncertain age which resonates with Barnett's concern to encourage students to overcome their 'fear of freedom'. My concern is that the putative university space of freedom and autonomy may well become constricted by those who would limit not just our freedom to speak but also our freedoms to be and to do. Without academic freedom students and teachers, who (...) might be able to fly, will not be permitted to fly. I review issues of academic freedom and free speech raised especially by Berlin, Voltaire, von Humboldt, Mill, Milton and Rorty. I discuss problems raised when free speech is heard by others as harmful and offensive to their beliefs and values. I offer a set of suggestions to ensure that the university may envision itself as a space of freedom, pluralism and tolerance. Finally, I reflect that the university, of all democratic institutions, should be the one which best serves its society as 'a place from where to speak'. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

The rich and ongoing debate about constructivism in chemistry education includes questions about the relationship, for better or worse, between applications of the theory in pedagogy and in epistemology. This paper presents an examination of the potential to use connections of epistemological and pedagogical constructivism to one another. It examines connections linked to the content, processes, and premises of science with a goal of prompting further research in these areas.

Mainstream environmental ethics grew out of an approach to value that was rooted in a particular conception of rationality and rational choice. As weaknesses in this approach have become more evident, environmental philosophers have experimented with both virtue ethics and with pragmatism as alternative starting points for developing a more truly ecological orientation to environmental philosophy. However, it is possible to see both virtue ethics and pragmatism as emerging from older philosophical traditions that are here characterized as “agrarian.” Agrarian philosophy (...) stresses the role of nature, soil and climate in the formation of moral character as well as social and political institutions. As such, reaching back to the agrarian tradition may provide a way to move forward with both virtue oriented themes as well as pragmatist themes in developing ecological ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIncreasing attention is being directed at the impact of fake news on democratic societies across the globe. Scholars in a range of fields are attempting to determine who is behind fake news...

In this paper, I argue that Darwin's On the Origin of Species can be interpreted as the culmination of an extended exercise of what Kant called ‘the reflecting power of judgement’ that issued in a form of reasoning that Hegel associates with inference by analogy and that Peirce associates with hypothesis and later assimilates to abduction. After some exegetical and rationally reconstructive work, I support this reading by showing that Darwin's theory of natural selection gave us a way of understanding (...) the purposive character of organic generation and growth that does not rely on an analogy with intentional agency and outlining some of the uses to which this new understanding was put in reasoning about mind and society by American intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the process I hope to shed some light on the relationship between mechanistic and purposive explanation in judgements of nature. (shrink)

The theoretical tools bequeathed to us by classical and revival pragmatism offer the potential for informing robust empirical work in sociology. But this potential has yet to be adequately demonstrated. There are a number of strands of pragmatism; this article draws primarily upon Dewey’s theory of action to examine Hull-House in its early years. Of particular interest are the practices of Jane Addams and other Hull-House residents. What were they doing to help people and why? An attempt to answer these (...) questions in non-teleological terms forms the empirical basis of the article. This article should provide some support to those historical sociologists who might consider (or already are) taking a pragmatist turn in their work. And, it should strengthen the empirical foundations of pragmatism as an alternative (non-teleological) way to understand social action. (shrink)

The Darwinian economic theory that Thorstein Veblen proposed and refined while he served as a professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago from 1891 to 1906 should be assessed in the context of the community of Darwinian scientists and social scientists with whom Veblen worked and lived at Chicago. It is important to identify Veblen as a member of this broad community of Darwinian-inclined philosophers, physiologists, geologists, astronomers, and biologists at Chicago because Veblen’s involvement with this circle suggests (...) that the possible sources of his engagement with Darwinism extend beyond the pragmatists and Continental socialists to whom scholars have typically ascribed Veblen’s Darwinian roots. Additionally, that an extensive community continued to use Darwinian evolutionary theory to construct new models of scientific and social scientific analysis at the turn of the twentieth century, a period during which Darwinism was purportedly in decline, suggests that the “eclipse of Darwinism” narrative has been overstated in literature about Darwinism’s intellectual arc. (shrink)

Did the pragmatic turn encompass the linguistic turn in the history of philosophy? Or was the linguistic turn a turn away from pragmatism? Some commentators identify the so-called “eclipse” of pragmatism by analytic philosophy, especially during the Cold War era, as a turn away from pragmatist thinking. However, the historical evidence suggests that this narrative is little more than a myth. Pragmatism persisted, transforming into a more analytic variety under the influence of Quine and Putnam and, more recently, a continental (...) version in the hands of Richard Rorty and Cornel West. In this paper, I argue that proof of the linguistic turn’s presence as a moment in a broader pragmatic turn in philosophy can be garnered from close examination of a single article, W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and a single issue: whether the analytic-synthetic distinction is philosophically defensible. (shrink)

This paper urges contemporary Business Ethicists to reconsider the relationship between habit and virtue in the light of recent debates between contemporary philosophers and scientists. Synthesizing insights from current Neuroscience, from twentieth century American Pragmatism and from nineteenth century French Aristotelianism, this emergent intellectual tradition proposes a dynamic account of habit’s embodiment which we will first describe and then advocate. Two recurring suggestions within this habit renaissance are of particular relevance to Business Ethicists: firstly, that there is a ‘plastic’ structure (...) pertaining to habit and, secondly, that there is a processual ‘double-law of habituation’. Taken together, these accounts of habit and habituation provide virtue ethicists with a basis for claiming analytic and pragmatic authority within applied ethics debates in general and within Business Ethics debates in particular. We develop this argument in three steps. Firstly, we elaborate upon why habits are said to be plastic and why the process of habituation is said to be characterised by a double-law. Secondly, we distinguish this account of habit’s relationship to virtue from, and where necessary defend it against, the influential articulations of the habit: virtue relationship provided by situationism, by deontology and by communitarianism, respectively. Finally, we draw practical lessons from the initial elaborations made in the argument’s first step, and the subsequent clarifications provided in its second step, by announcing seven characteristics of highly effective virtue habituation projects. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the main lines of three hypotheses in the current literature concerning the evolutionary pace which characterized the natural history of human language: the “continuist” and gradualist perspective, the “discontinuist” and evolution-free perspective, and the “punctuationist” view. This current debate appears to have a long history, which starts at least from Darwin’s time. The article highlights the similarities between the old and the modern debates in terms of history of ideas, and it shows the current limits of each (...) of these perspectives. In the final part, we present an alternative approach which considers human language not as a single trait, but as the result of a mosaic of different elements, some of which recently evolved, and some others gradually evolved and phylogenetically ancient. When matched with a tree thinking and comparative perspective, this view suggests that expressions of symbolic and linguistic behaviors in other human species could have preceded the more complex and systematic behaviors showed by Homo sapiens. (shrink)

In the fall of 2001, the need for a vigorous and effective public health system became more apparent than it had been for many decades. With the advent of the first widescale bioterrorist attack on the United States, the government's obligation to respond and take steps to protect the public health became self-evident.Also obvious was the need for of an effective partnership between federal, state, and local officials. Local officials are almost always on the front lines of the struggle against (...) bioterrorism. They are the first to recognize a suspicious case and to provide testing and treatment for the affected population. At the same time, state officials are needed to support and coordinate local efforts, providing an expertise that may be lacking in many communities, especially smaller ones.But few would doubt that the federal government has a key role to play. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to lead the epidemiological investigation and provide expertise on how to cope with diseases that remain unfamiliar to most physicians. (shrink)

Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the (...) object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century Harvard faculty and students looked to philosophical ideas about the proper and effective study of nature as the model of rationality to which their religion must conform. As these ideas changed, notions of rationality changed and so did Harvard religion.

Moral values in healthcare range widely between interest groups and are principally subjective. Disagreements diminish dialogue and marginalize alternative viewpoints. Extremely premature births exemplify how discord becomes unproductive when conflicts of interest, cultural misunderstanding, constrained evidence review, and peculiar hierarchy compete without the balance of objective standards of reason. Accepting uncertainty, distributing risk fairly, and humbly acknowledging therapeutic limits are honorable traits, not relativism, and especially crucial in our world of constrained resources. We think dialogics engender a mutual understanding that: (...) i) transitions beliefs beyond bias, ii) moves conflict toward pragmatism (i.e., the truth of any position is verified by subsequent experience), and iii) recognizes value pluralism (i.e., human values are irreducibly diverse, conflicting, and ultimately incommensurable). This article provides a clear and useful Point-Counterpoint of extreme prematurity controversies, an objective neurodevelopmental outcomes table, and a dialogics exemplar to cultivate shared empathetic comprehension, not to create sides from which to choose. It is our goal to bridge the understanding gap within and between physicians and bioethicists. Dialogics accept competing relational interests as human nature, recognizing that ultimate solutions satisfactory to all are illusory, because every choice has downside. Nurturing a collective consciousness via dialogics and pragmatism is congenial to integrating objective evidence review and subjective moral-cultural sentiments, and is that rarest of ethical constructs, a means and an end. (shrink)

Tenure debates and disputes are often irresolvable because of the complex and multivariate nature of contractual relationships between faculty and administration, and the nuanced and varying beliefs about tenure held by the professoriate. The Ceci et al. study leads this commentator to suggest a simple solution – allow individual institutions to define the parameters of tenure according to their unique core values. (Published Online February 8 2007).

This paper develops a pragmatist approach to ethical business decision-making. It draws primarily on the work of John Dewey and applies his deliberative approach to ethics to the challenges of business practitioners. In particular the paper proposes the value of Dewey’s concept of dramatic rehearsal in emphasizing the task of “constructing the good” in ethical decision-making. The contribution of the paper is, first, to build on recent foundational work to bring American pragmatism into the mainstream business ethics literature; second, to (...) offer a perspective that is accessible to practitioners and integrates ethics into their daily tasks; and third, to identify a number of related research imperatives – in particular the importance of focusing efforts on gaining a deeper understanding of the deliberative process itself. (shrink)

Experiential Foundationalism, Linguistic Practice, and Historicity.

In ‘What Has Philosophy to Learn from Tort Law?’, Bernard Williams reaffirms J. L. Austin’s suggestion that philosophy might learn from tort law ‘the difference between practical reality and philosophical frivolity’. Yet while Austin regarded tort law as just another repository of time-tested concepts, on a par with common sense as represented by a dictionary, Williams argues that ‘the use of certain ideas in the law does more to show that those ideas have strength than is done by the mere (...) fact that they are part of the currency of common sense’. But what does it mean to show that ideas or concepts ‘have strength’? How does conceptual strength relate to the distinction between practical reality and philosophical frivolity? And what special features of the law are supposed to make it a better test of conceptual strength than common sense? In this chapter, I reconstruct and develop Williams’s answers to these questions. I show why Williams believes that we need to test the concepts forming the currency of common sense against practical reality as embodied by legal practice; I identify seven features of tort law that make it particularly suitable to act as such a test; I distinguish three respects in which concepts can show strength, and unpack Williams’s metaphor of microwave-resistant concepts: concepts capable of holding and presenting material for intense critical scrutiny without succumbing to it themselves; lastly, I show how philosophy can learn to identify systematically weak concepts, and the limits of otherwise valuable concepts, by considering which concepts fail the test. (shrink)