This article considers the relationship between moral philosophy and constitutional theory through a detailed examination of the work of Jeremy Waldron—an unavoidable voice in contemporary constitutionalist debate. Through a rigorous, original and holistic deconstruction of his work and its philosophical implications, I argue that Waldron’s engagement with core philosophy within his constitutional scholarship is wholly problematic, containing a number of ambiguities and apparent inconsistencies. These issues, I suggest, may stem from an at times rather casual treatment of the realist/anti-realist issue (...) of core philosophy, perhaps owing something to his view that it is in fact safely irrelevant to his constitutional pursuits. In any case, this view, I argue, is misguided, and the problems which result are real: they not only create issues of theoretical consistency and clarity; they put Waldron’s constitutional theory in danger. Like all good tales, I suggest there are lessons to be learned from this: one must think, and think carefully, about the philosophical background of one’s work, and take care in setting this out in a clear, thorough and coherent way—the stakes are too high not to. With this in mind, this article also lays some groundwork for a path into constitutional theory firmly grounded in my own anti-realist moral scepticism. (shrink)

Identity, difference, and the associated subject of cultural diversity pose challenges for nursing. As the demographics of the world change, demands are rising for nurses to provide sensitive, individualized care to people living in our ever‐changing global community. Issues concerning gender, sexuality, disability, age, language, economic and occupational status, multiculturalism, and ethnicity are made more complex because many of these topics strike a personal chord for individual nurses. In order for nursing to provide appropriate care to the world's people and (...) to meet future challenges, nursing must define itself in new ways. Kikuchi and Simmons have stated that the best way for nursing to approach this task is through the development of a ‘sound’ philosophy of nursing that will ‘accommodate diversity in nursing thought’. They contend that before we can establish a philosophy of nursing, nurses will have to agree upon the nature of reality, human beings, truth, and knowledge. This paper will suggest that neopragmatism, as described by Richard Rorty, is a way to assure diversity of thought in nursing. However, I will argue against the requirement for this philosophy to be ‘sound’ in the sense that Kikuchi and Simmons use this term. In place of their call for ‘truth and unity in nursing thought’. I will attempt to demonstrate how neopragmatic ideas relate to the construction of what Rorty called a unifying ‘plausible narrative of progress’. This change will allow nursing to abandon the dead end debate over epistemologies and instead focus on more important issues related to improving nursing practice. (shrink)

Argues that morals and politics require on a metaphysical backing and proposes a neoclassical metaphysics.

Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. The Critical Ihde (...) brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars. (shrink)

Is liberalism adaptable enough to the ecological agenda to deal satisfactorily with the challenges of anthropogenic climate change while leaving its normative foundations intact? Compatibilists answer yes; incompatibilists say no. Comparing such answers, this article argues that it is not discrete liberal principles which impede adapatability, so much as the constructivist model (exemplified in Rawls) of what counts as a valid normative principle. Constructivism has both normative and ontological variants, each with a realist counterpart. I argue that normative constructivism in (...) the Rawlsian mode, whatever its strengths elsewhere, is markedly ill‐equipped to deal with the particular normative challenges posed by climate change – and that that these doubts holds regardless of which stance is adopted as its ontological corollary. (shrink)

A cross-cultural work which reinvigorates the consideration of enlightenment.

Using Buddhist thought, explores and challenges the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two theses held by John McDowell, namely i) the claim that we are under a standing obligation to revise our beliefs if reflection demands it; and ii) the view that veridical experience is a mode of direct access to the world. Since puts no bounds on what would constitute reasonable doubt, it invites skeptical concerns which overthrow. Conversely, since says that there are some experiences which we are entitled to trust, it (...) undermines the prescriptive scope of. Drawing on C. S. Peirce's distinction between genuine and contrived doubt, I maintain that critical revisions of beliefs should be triggered only by unwanted disruptions of habits, thereby restoring unity between McDowell's two theses. (shrink)

The present paper aims at highlighting some of the main characteristics of a descriptive contextual approach to philosophy. Descriptive, in the sense that it centers not on the question of what philosophy should be, but on what philosophy is, has been, or may be. And contextual, in the sense that it treats philosophy as human praxis situated in and interacting with certain social and historical settings. In order to develop such an account, we engage closely with Kuhn’s paradigm-centered contextual approach (...) to science and examine, following Rorty, how it could be regarded in connection to philosophy. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of two concrete cases to which such an approach may be applied, the division between analytic and continental philosophy at the level of philosophical traditions, and the case of Wittgenstein’s life and thought at the level of individual philosophers. (shrink)

Abstract: One of the institutional highlights of the encounter between Austrian “wissen¬schaftliche Philosophie” and French “philosophie scientifique” in the first half of the 20th century was the “First International Congress for Unity of Science” that took place 1935 in Paris. In my contribution I deal with an episode of the philosophical mega-event whose protagonist was the American philosopher and semiotician Charles William Morris. At the Paris congress he presented his programme of a comprehensive, practice-oriented scientific philosophy and, in a more (...) elaborated version he published it two years later in Logical Positivism, Pragmatism and Scientific Empiricism (Morris 1937). Morris aimed at a synthesis of formalism, pragmatism, and traditional empiricism that combined the virtues of these accounts while avoided their shortocmings. The core of approach was a comprehensive theory of the concept of meaning. Through an analysis of the concept of meaning he sought to sort out the existing differences and the options for a possible future rapprochment between logical empiricism and pragmatism. Against the overly narrow logical empiricist understanding of philosophy as the syntax of the language of science Morris argued for a “scientific pragmatism” that comprised four levels: (1) Philosophy as Logic of Science, (2) Philosophy as Clarification of Meaning (Peirce), (3) Philosophy as Empirical Axiology (Dewey), and (4) Philosophy as Empirical Cosmology (Whitehead). (shrink)

Abstract‘Relativists' and ‘absolutists' about truth often see their own camp as promoting virtues, such as open-mindedness and intellectual humility, and see the opposing camp as fostering vices, like closed-mindedness and arrogance. Relativism is accused of fostering these vices because it entails that each person’s beliefs are automatically right for the person who holds them. How can we be humble or open-minded if we cannot concede that we might be wrong? Absolutism is accused of fostering these vices because the view is (...) seen as entailing certainty. This also seems to preclude us from conceding that we could be wrong. However, no relativist defends the Protagorean version of relativism that entails infallibilism. And no absolutist posits infallible certainty. Fallibilism really is a precondition of various virtues, but both camps take themselves to be defending fallibilist positions against opponents who they take to be committed to infallibilism. Philosophers may inadvertently end up promoting precisely the sort of infallibilism they oppose by creating a false dichotomy and caricaturing the opposing camp. This underscores the importance of interpretive charity in both academic and public debate. (shrink)

In Pragmatism, James promised his readers a theory of truth. However, many of his readers (even those sympathetic with other parts of James’s work) have concluded that James’s “theory” was little more than a tangle of mistakes. In this chapter, I offer an interpretation and defence of James’s theory of truth. I emphasize James’s truth pluralism.

At its centennial in 2001, the American Philosophical Association bravely proclaimed: “Philosophy Matters.” But does it? It won’t unless it reaches the concreteness of everyday life. To do so was Martin Heidegger’s ambition, and one can read Saul Kripke’s books as an attempt to get mainstream American philosophy beyond its abstractions. At length, Kripke’s efforts, on one reading, failed while Heidegger’s remained incomplete. A theory of commodification can get us closer to the things that matter to us in everyday life.

This essay argues a case for viewing Derrida's work in the context of recent French epistemology and philosophy of science; more specifically, the critical‐rationalist approach exemplified by thinkers such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. I trace this line of descent principally through Derrida's essay ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’. My conclusions are (1) that we get Derrida wrong if we read him as a fargone antirealist for whom there is nothing ‘outside the text'; (2) that he provides some (...) powerful counter‐arguments to this and other items of current postmodern wisdom; (3) that deconstruction is more aptly viewed as continuing the epistemo‐critical approach developed by thinkers like Bachelard; and (4) that it also holds important lessons for philosophy of science in the mainstream Anglo‐ American ‘analytic’ tradition. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as (...) if it exists prior to, and separate from, ethics and values. This logic, which was embraced in the Academy of Management from the 1960s, casts management researchers as ethical agents who ought to know about a reality conceptualized as naturally existing in the image of statistics and probability (replete with ‘constructs’), while overlooking that S&P logic and practices, which researchers made for themselves, have an appreciable role in making the world appear this way. We introduce a different way to conceptualize reality and ethics, wherein the process of scientific inquiry itself requires an examination of its own practices and commitments. Instead of resorting to decontextualized notions of ‘rigor’ and its ‘best practices,’ quantitative researchers can adopt more purposeful ways to reason about the ethics and relevance of their methods and their science. We end by considering implications for addressing ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ problems as collective concerns, wherein it is actually the pluralistic nature of description that makes defending a collectively valuable version of reality so important and urgent. (shrink)

Richard Rorty never cared much for religion, to say the least. Faithful to his own philosophical and political outlook, he did, however, abandon atheism in favor of anticlericalism—the view that religion should play no role in the public life of democratic societies.1 This shift sets him apart from advocates of New Atheism (and their opponents), who consider the arguments for atheism a crucial component in the overall case against religion,2 but also from the growing group of religious and nonreligious intellectuals (...) who argue that democratic societies need more, not less, religious contributions to public life.3Rorty also came to articulate—particularly in the last volume of his Collected Papers—his .. (shrink)

This study uses the theory of dyadic morality to analyze construction of cyberbullying as a contested social issue in U. S. newspaper opinion pieces. The theory of dyadic morality posits that when...

Often seen as a typical Chaoskampf, the cosmic struggle between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian epic of creation, Enuma Elish, looked at closely belies this reading that has been dominating scholarship since the nineteenth century. Through a close-reading of the epic’s narrative against its modern/colonial reception, the article argues that Enuma Elish provides a rich and complex narrative in which motherhood and monstrosity do not oppose each other, nor do they run together with each other. The textual, historical and (...) philological analyses, as well as reception-critiques, ultimately serve to theorize from within the ancient cosmology an immanent and decolonial logic that is beyond ‘either/or’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCurrently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)

Over the last several decades, Richard Rorty has developed a compelling metaphilosophical theory on the history of analytic philosophy. On this telling, analytic philosophy was atavistic from the outset, a forlorn attempt to reinstate scheme/content distinctions. Rather than asking whether our claims "correspond" to some nonhuman, eternal way the world is, we should ask about their pragmatic utility. On Rorty's account, analytic philosophy terminates in pragmatism. In this paper, I argue against this assessment of the fate of our tradition. More (...) specifically, I argue against Rorty's indictment of the notion of correspondence truth. My aim is to show that correspondence truth, in providing an indispensable background for the intelligibility of pragmatism, is not the needless dogma that Rorty takes it to be. Rorty's pragmatism, I thus argue, fails to be a freestanding doctrine. (shrink)

Norman Bowie wrote an article on the moral obligations of multinational corporations in 1987. This paper is a response to Bowie, but more importantly, it is designed to articulate the force and substance of the pragmatist philosophy developed by Richard Rorty. In his article, Bowie suggested that moral universalism (which he endorses) is the only credible method of doing business ethics across cultures and that cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are not. Bowie, in a manner surprisingly common among contemporary philosophers, lumps (...) Rorty into a bad guy category without careful analysis of his philosophy and ascribes to him views which clearly do not fit. I attempt to provide both a more careful articulation of Rorty's views, and to use his pragmatism to illustrate an approach to business ethics which is more fruitful than Bowie's. This brand of philosophy follows the Enlightenment spirit of toleration and attempts to set aside questions of Truth, whether religious or philosophical, and have ethics centered around what James called that which is good in the way of belief. Rather than looking for metaphysical foundations or some type of external justification, ethicists perform their craft from within the cultural traditions, narratives and practices of their society. (shrink)

Dans laScience de la logiqueet dans l’Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques,Hegel reconstruit la philosophie critique de Kant en développant i) une logique transcendantale dans laScience de la logiqueet dans laPhilosophie de la nature; ii) une conception pragmatique de l’a priori; et iii) une caractéristique-clé de l’usage du verbe «réaliser» en relation avec les concepts et les principes. Chacun de ces trois éléments constitue un aspect central de la sémantique spécifiquement cognitive de Hegel, que celui-ci développe, en partant de la thèse kantienne (...) de la référence cognitive singulière, en un réalisme pragmatique systématique. (shrink)

In this paper we present a reconstruction of Hegel's critique of Kant. We try to show the congruence of that critique in both theoretical and practical philosophy. We argue that this congruence is to be found in Hegel's criticism of Kant's hylemorphism in his theoretical and practical philosophy. Hegel is much more sympathetic to Kant's response to the distinction between matter and form in his theoretical philosophy and he credits Kant with ‘discovering’ here that thinking is an activity that always (...) takes place within a greater whole. He, however, argues that the consequences of this are much more significant than Kant suspects and that, most importantly, the model of cognition in which thought (form) confronts something non-thought (matter) is unsustainable. This leads to Hegel's appropriation of Kantian reflective judgements, arguing that the greater whole in which thinking takes place is a socially shared set of meanings, something resembling what Kant calls a sensus communis. From here, it is not far to Hegel's Geist, which eventually gains self-consciousness in Sittlichkeit, a whole of social practices of mutual recognition. In practical philosophy, Hegel argues for the importance of situating oneself within such a whole in order to attain the self-knowledge required for autonomous, or ethically required, action. For this to happen, he claims, it is necessary to recognise the status of Kantian Moralität as a form of Sittlichkeit or social practice. This would justify our practices without an appeal to a ‘fact of reason’ and also allow a wider range of actions that could count as autonomous. (shrink)

In this Special Issue of Journal of Critical Realism on Normativity, Elder-Vass has provided a paper that in part responds to one that Chris Winship and I wrote together, which was presented at the...

Despite Donald Davidson's influential criticism of the very notion of conceptual schemes, the notion continues enjoying its popularity in contemporary philosophy and, accordingly, conceptual relativism is still very much alive. There is one major reason responsible for Davidson's failure which has not been widely recognized: What Davidson attacks fiercely is not the very notion, but a notion of conceptual schemes, namely, the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes and its underlying Kantian scheme-content dualism. However, such a notion simply cannot carry the (...) weight of conceptual relativism for it does not catch the essences of conceptual relativism. Consequently, I argue that the very notion of conceptual schemes and conceptual relativism have survived Davidson's attack. Therefore, the failure of the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes and Kantian scheme-content dualism, even if Davidson can claim victory, does not mark the end of the very notion of conceptual schemes.[ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Philosophy of Education brings together a number of book chapters and articles in the philosophy of education. These cover a wide range of issues that engage and, in many cases, trouble contemporary philosophers of education, beginning with the perennial and fundamental one of the relationship between philosophy and education. The other sections, which include a rich selection of readings, concern the nature of education and its politics, policy-making and the moral dimensions of teaching. The whole is (...) preceded by a provocative introductory essay written by Wilfred Carr, the book’s editor. In it he suggests a different Aristotelian perspective on these issues, a different narrative from the usual contemporary post-analytic one we are used to and a means of responding to them, inspired mainly by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. This essay both takes up Carr’s provocations in this Introduction and comprehensively reviews the book and the chapters in it. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty, in their different ways, have represented the tension between acculturation and individuation, truth and freedom, as central to modern education systems, a tension which, both agree, they have failed to resolve. The paper argues that an additional complication is that in the contemporary postmodern landscape, which prioritises the notion of lifelong learning in its policy discourse, the very notion of education is threatened, and asks whether we should care. It considers MacIntyre’s suggestion that the notion (...) of the educated public can solve the former tension and concurrently re-launch the notion of education in the postmodern world—central to MacIntyre’s plan is the reform of the university. And against it Rorty’s suggestion that acculturation and individuation be regarded as different but connected processes, with individuation conceived as self-creation and located in the non-vocational university. (shrink)

In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's Rorty lacks a (...) sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post-truth” condition. (shrink)

The paper discusses the relation of philosophical pragmatism to empiricism as the backdrop to understanding human being. The crux of the problem is the relation between language and experience. The author argues that pragmatist empiricism is based on the concept that human practices are transactions, which includes both non-linguistic as well as linguistic practices. Within pragmatist anthropological philosophy, experience is a complex of transactions between humans and reality. Humans are both natural/physical and cultural/linguistic beings, whose living experience involves transactions with (...) both the natural and the sociocultural environment. The dualism between language and experience is false and should be abandoned. (shrink)

What do Social Networking Sites (SNS) ‘do to us’: are they a damning threat or an emancipating force? Recent publications on the impact of “Web 2.0” proclaim very opposite evaluative positions. With the aim of finding a middle ground, this paper develops a pragmatist approach to SNS based on the work of Richard Rorty. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze SNS as conversational practices. Second, we outline, in the form of an imaginary conversation between Rorty and Heidegger, (...) a positive and negative ‘conversational’ view on SNS. Third, we deploy a reflection, again using Rortian notions, on that evaluation, starting from the concept of ‘self-reflectivity.’ Finally, the relations between these three steps are more detailedly investigated. By way of the sketched technique, we can interrelate the two opposing sides of the recent debates—hope and threat—and judge SNS in all their ambiguity. (shrink)

El artículo se pregunta qué sentido tiene la práctica de conferir o reconocer derechos y sostiene que son sus consecuencias lo que nos interesa y lo que hace sensata la práctica relacionada con ellos. La virtud de esta tesis es que permite aterrizar el vocabulario aéreo de los derechos y que invita a determinar sus contenidos específicos con la mayor precisión posible. Se trata de una tesis realista y pragmatista respecto de los derechos. Realista, porque busca comprender en qué consiste (...) realmente ser titular de derechos; pragmatista, en la medida en que, para hacerlo, se interesa por las consecuencias de su titularidad. El artículo busca también mostrar el modo en que una tesis pragmatista sobre los derechos puede dar cuenta de los derechos fundamentales. (shrink)

Language is the tradition of nations; each generation describes what it sees, but it uses words transmitted from the past. When a great entity like the British Constitution has continued in connected outward sameness, but hidden inner change, for many ages, every generation inherits a series of inapt words — of maxims once true, but of which the truth is ceasing or has ceased. As a man’s family go on muttering in his maturity incorrect phrases derived from a just observation (...) of his early youth, so, in the full activity of an historical constitution, its subjects repeat phrases true in the time of their fathers, and inculcated by those fathers, but now true no longer. (shrink)

John Dewey's ideas on politics derive from his epistemology of inquiry as practical problem-solving. Dewey's philosophy is important for democratic theory because it emphasizes deliberation through questioning. However, Dewey's philosophy shares with positivism the same conception of answering as exclusively the dissolution of questions. While Dewey's ideas are distinct from positivism in important respects, he rejects a constitutive role for questioning by constructing knowledge as problem-solving via experience. The problem-solving ideal lends itself to a scientific conception of politics. Applying Michel (...) Meyer's philosophy of questioning, problematology, to Dewey's logic, reveals that Dewey's theory of inquiry is itself the product of an inquiry, confirming that questioning plays a constitutive role in knowledge. This suggests a problematological reconstruction of knowledge which extends Dewey's ideas by affirming an enhanced status for questioning. Grounding knowledge in the principle of questioning provides the basis for extending the rhetorical analysis of politics. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the revival of `virtue ethics'. If we regard human rights as a crucial development in the establishment of global institutions of justice and equality, then we need to explore the obligations that correspond to such rights. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue a respect for other cultures and an ironic stance towards one's own culture spells out this obligation side of the human rights movement. Cosmopolitanism of course can assume very different forms. The article (...) traces various cosmopolitan ethics from the Greeks, Roman Stoics and Christian philosophers. Contemporary cosmopolitanism needs to be ironic to function usefully in hybrid global cultures, but it is open to the charge of being culturally `flat' and elitist. These criticisms are examined through the confrontation between Maurizio Viroli and Martha Nussbaum. While American patriotism is not a promising foundation for ironic cosmopolitanism, the republican tradition of virtue does offer a viable method of developing cosmopolitanism. Ironic cosmopolitan care for other cultures is founded on the commonalities of social existence, of which there are two central components: ontological vulnerability and political precariousness. (shrink)