This paper examines the relationship between Arthur Fine’s “Natural Ontological Attitude” and the work of neo-pragmatists, particularly Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. I argue that many of the problems that face Fine’s account can be seen as a direct result of his failure to employ certain key pragmatist insights concerning the nature and status of the realism-antirealism issue. Consequently, I suggest that we should cease to think of Fine as representative of mainstream attempts to dispense with the realism-antirealism issue and (...) instead view NOA as an unfortunate mixture of opposed philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Pragmatism can be understood as a position that conceives of epistemic and moral claims in the terms of a realization within the framework of our collective forms of activity. In this respect, it on the one hand proves to be compatible with current discussions in anthropology, which take Aristotle and German Idealism as their starting point. At the same time however, the two seem to be in tension with regard to the concept of form presupposed in the neo-Aristotelian debates which (...) seems to block a practice-theoretical reading. This article argues for a reconciliation of the two concepts: The human form of life is realized in collective practices that further define the concept of this form of life. For such a reconcilement, both pragmatist as well as neo-Aristotelian accounts however must partially be re-engineered. (shrink)

Thomas Piketty’s capitalism in the twenty-first century is arguably the most significant book in empirical economics since Simon Kuznets’s Modern Economic Growth (.

While historians of pragmatism often present William James as the founder of the “subjectivist” wing of pragmatism that came back into prominence with the writings of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam has argued that James’s views are actually much closer to Peirce’s (and Putnam’s own). Putnam does so by noting that James distinguishes two sorts of truth: “temporary truth,” which is closer to a subjective notion of warranted assertibility, and “absolute truth,” which is closer to Peirce’s own comparatively objective notion of (...) truth as what would be believed at some idealized end of inquiry. Putnam then argues that the temptation to read James as a precursor to Rorty requires privileging his talk of temporary truth, when, in fact, it was always absolute truth that was the primary sense of the term for James. This paper will argue that James’s views on truth are, in fact, much less tied to the absolute notion than Putnam suggests, and, indeed, that James’s account of the relations between our concepts and reality leave open the possibility that no claim of ours could ever be “absolutely” true, and thus that “temporary” truth would be all we could ever expect to have. (shrink)

Hasok Chang is developing a new form of pragmatic scientific realism that aims to reorient the debate away from truth and towards practice. Central to his project is replacing truth as correspondence with his new notion of ‘operational coherence’, which is introduced as: 1) A success term with probative value to judge and guide epistemic activities. 2) A more useful alternative than truth as correspondence in guiding scientific practice. I argue that, given its current construal as neither necessary nor sufficient (...) for success, operational coherence is too weak and fails to satisfy both 1) and 2). I offer a stronger construal of operational coherence which aims to improve on Chang’s account by tying it to systematic success. This makes operational coherence necessary and sufficient for success. This new account, if successful, rescues 1) but not 2). I then take a step back and try to locate Chang’s pragmatic realism within the broader pragmatist tradition by comparing his views to the founding fathers Peirce, James and Dewey. I also assess to what extent we should consider Chang’s position ‘realist’, arguing that despite the many relativists threads running through it, Chang’s pragmatic realism is deserving of the realist label because its aims to maximize our learning from reality, even if it falls short of what many traditional realist are happy to accept as realism. I finish with comments on the epistemology of science pointing out that there is nothing intrinsic about a practice-based philosophy of science that precludes having both operational coherence and correspondence and highlighting that given a proper understanding these two notions could, in fact, be understood as complementary. I suggest one way this could be done. (shrink)

Ce premier symposium en langue française inaugure une nouvelle série de symposiums qui viendront enrichir la section multilingue de l’European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. Cette série vise à contribuer à la discussion des publications récentes qui traitent du pragmatisme ou proposent des confrontations avec ce courant de pensée. Elle s’insère dans la section multilingue, dont l’ambition est de permettre aux nombreuses voix internationales qui composent la scène pragmatiste c...

There is a famous puzzle in Rorty scholarship: Did or did Rorty not subscribe to a form of realism and truth when he made concessions regarding objectivity to Bjørn Ramberg in 2000? Relatedly, why did Rorty agree with Ramberg but nevertheless insist upon disagreeing with Brandom, though large parts of the research community hold their two respective requests for shifts in Rorty’s stance to be congruous? The present article takes up the discussion and tries, for the first time, to make (...) sense of Rorty’s insistence that there is a difference between Brandom’s notion of “made true by facts” and Ramberg’s notion of “getting things right” by showing that Ramberg’s appropriateness-conditions are fully compatible with Rorty’s revised interpretation of Davidson’s concept of “triangulation,” whereas Brandom’s inferential “made-true-by-facts”-language game is not. The reason why Rorty agrees with Ramberg but not with Brandom, I argue, is that Brandom’s contemporary concept of objectivity, as developed in his contribution to the debate and in his Making It Explicit, works with a scheme-content distinction, whereas Ramberg’s Davidson-based version does not. As many of his critics suppose, Rorty’s concession to Ramberg entails a substantive revision of Rorty’s position, not just a clarification. However, this new position is not in conflict with Rorty’s most important commitment, namely his anti-authoritarianism. The revised account still does not bind him to the forms of realism and truth that his critics favor. The article explains to which forms of realism and truth Rorty’s concessions to Ramberg commit him instead. (shrink)

There have been few attempts thus far to read Rorty through a humanistic lens. This paper is an attempt at making explicit some of the key features of his conception. My main objective is to show that humanism is integral to his philosophy and to explain what it consists in. I focus on Rorty’s secular humanism, which I believe lies at the center of his thought. In sections 2 and 3, I provide an account of key humanist sources, both pragmatist (...) and non-pragmatist. Section 4 examines recent interpretations of Rorty as a humanist. In section 5, I focus on the distinction between the human and nonhuman as the central feature of his humanism. Section 6 outlines Rorty’s project to humanize humanity. In the concluding section, I summarize the key features of his humanism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore Rorty’s recommendation to shift from a philosophical to a literary culture by addressing this theme through a philosophical-educational lens and in reference to the question of what kind of education we need in order to foster democratic ethos. In this perspective, I will establish a comparison/contrast between Rorty’s idea of sentimental education and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children understood as two (alternative?) ways of recontextualizing Dewey’s heritage. After discussing Rorty’s understanding of a need for (...) an end (instead of a “Deweyan” recovery) of philosophy starting from his dialogue with Castoriadis and by reconstructing his appeal to a poeticized culture, I will present Lipman’s case for education for philosophical inquiry in order to cultivate a democratic ethos in primary and secondary schools. I will contrast it with Rorty’s education as socialization and, contextually, I will illustrate their different stances towards Hirsch’s cultural literacy and his core curriculum approach to civic education. Finally, after problematizing Rorty’s views on the use of literature for a democratic culture, I will indicate the need to combine the Rortyan and Lipmanian thrusts and will claim that an aspect of the novel-driven education advocated by Rorty maintains a constitutive Socratic-inquiring dimension. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of inter-normative engagement, of constructing dialogical interaction across substantive normative difference. Focusing on how this affects democratic and pluralistic contexts, it argues that a social-practice-based approach to normativity and reasoning offers unique resources to understand and frame such encounters. It specifically draws on pragmatism and the work of Richard Rorty to reframe normativity, authority, identity, and reason, linking these understandings to recent trends to deliberative political inclusivism in democratic theory. The upshot is that framing inter-normative (...) engagement as calls to responsive engagement between diverse systems of normative authority offers real insights for constructing and maintaining ongoing democratic engagements in a non-hierarchical manner. This, the article argues, extends emerging methodological trends in the broader literature while overcoming the morass between conflict- and consensus-oriented approaches in democratic th... (shrink)

There are significant differences between the neopragmatism as formulated by Rorty, based on James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism, and what Peirce, in order to distinguish his own approach from the last two thinkers, called pragmaticism. I take in this paper the concept of solidarity as a focus, from which those differences will be implied, albeit many other points could be chosen. I highlight that the usual Rorty’s sentence beginning with ‘we pragmatists…’ shall necessarily exclude Peirce. Exemplarily, I could mention the concepts (...) of representation, which for Peirce has nothing to do with mirror, and of truth that, for him, also has no relation at all with fixed essences. Those differences will not only mark a very clear border between the two concepts of pragmatism, but also will question how the idea of community can be supported only by dialogical agreements, without the anchor of common open human experience. Pragmaticism and neopragmatism differ not only regarding their specific range of philosophical problems but, moreover, on what kind of problems they really consider as genuinely philosophical. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim once refrained from excluding distinct mental causes of effects that depend upon the sufficient physical cause of the effect. At that time, Kim also refrained from excluding distinct mental explanations of effects that depend upon complete physical explanations of the effect. More recently, he has excluded distinct mental causes of effects that depend upon the sufficient cause of the effect, since the physical cause is individually sufficient for the effect. But there has been, to this point, no parallel (...) shift in the explanatory realm, such that distinct mental explanations of effects that depend upon complete physical explanations of the effect are excluded since the physical explanation is objectively complete. In this paper I consider, defend, and apply this update to the principle of explanatory exclusion—an update, which, in the final analysis, demonstrates a significant advantage that non-reductive physicalism has over reductive physicalism. (shrink)

I. Introduction In 1966 two sociologists, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, published a small yet influential book, titled The Social Construction of Reality, in which they argue that reality is socially constructed and that it is the task of the sociology of knowledge to analyze the process in which this occurs (1966: 1). They acknowledge in their Introduction that “reality” and “knowledge” are two terms with a long philosophical history, and they are careful to claim they are not using (...) t... (shrink)

William James (1842-1910) influenced the American intellectual history of the second half of the xix century and the beginning of the xx in various fields, due to his activity as a writer, a teacher and experimentalist. William James was a participant in the germinal, legendary meetings of the “Metaphysical Club,” in 1872, together with C. S. Peirce, Chauncey Wright, O. W. Holmes Jr., and others, in conversations that would lead to the first formulas, close to the future “pragmatism,” regardi...

Guido Baggio & Marta Caravà: As a leading enactivist philosopher, on several occasions you have emphasized that pragmatism and neo-pragmatism can offer a fruitful contribution to situated approaches to cognitive science/the philosophy of mind. These contributions include – among others – the theoretical support that the pragmatist approach can give to both the enactive and the extended approach to cognition thanks to its integrative and dynamical view of cognition. This conversation will focu...

This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored in three (...) sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan, as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remapping geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker, each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west. (shrink)

This study focuses on the important epistemological question of the objectivity of scientific knowledge by comparing the analyses and theories developed in the two different schools of hermeneutics and pragmatism. To justify the feasibility of the comparison, we proceed from the observation that, albeit in different ways, authors such as Gadamer and Peirce revolutionize the idea of experience and its theoretical scientific relevance issuing in a new conception of cognitive truth bearing fruits to the problem of objectivity. This comparison is (...) intertwined with the critical resumption of Betti’s theoretical scientific research, which is useful for illustrating the articulation of this problem and the scope of the operations implemented in the context of contemporary hermeneutics and for probing the problem of scientific objectivity beyond the fields of the historical and social sciences. This possibility can be glimpsed by absorbing Betti’s approach to the problem of humanities into a theory of knowledge where a position of critical realism is associated with an interpretative component in hermeneutic and pragmatic keys. (shrink)

Starting from an emblematic episode described by Rorty in Trotsky and the Wild Orchids, which is an effective narrative example of making public a private experience, the article provides an inquiry into Rorty’s thinking around education, with a particular focus on his notions of contingency and luck.In particular, the article offers an analysis of Rorty’s frequent use of the term “luck,” in accordance with a literary (non-philosophical) method, which informs his understanding of the role and function of education and his (...) view of the educational process. The use of a literary method is useful to give shape and meaning to the contingency of human experience, creating a narrative thread to connect the past and present and make meaning of the present through the images of the past. Within this framework, Rorty understands “luck” as a specific and crucial condition that highlights the presence of an undetermined space within which education can make a difference in individual life. (shrink)

The emergence of linguistic pragmatism has given rise to a lively debate over whether philosophy should focus on language or experience. But the experience vs. language dichotomy is just another type of dualism of the sort that pragmatists ought to be wary of. We need to appreciate that, insofar as pragmatism aspires to elucidate and transform our meaningful experience, it must recognize that meaning goes deeper than language. What linguistic pragmatists hope to do with language cannot be done without meaning (...) resources that are not themselves linguistic. Meaning, understanding, thinking, and valuing all have to be enacted as embodied processes. Moreover, no use or analysis of language is possible without an experience of meaning, and so we can never avoid experience in our philosophical undertakings, even granting that there is no perspective-free take on what some thing or event means. (shrink)

In this article, cognitivism is understood as the view that the engine of human action is the intentional, dispositional, or other mental capacities of the brain or the mind. Cognitivism has been criticized for considering the essence of human action to reside in its alleged source in mental processes at the expense of the social surroundings of the action, criticism that has often been inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This article explores the logical extent of the critique of cognitivism, (...) arguing that by positing collectively shared knowledge of criteria as the engine of human action many such critiques themselves display latent cognitivism. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatist-inspired perspective on the social sciences. It explores the relevance of neo-pragmatism for the philosophy of the social sciences, showing how it can lead to innovative and groundbreaking social research. The paper attempts to drive home these insights by elaborating on the affinities of neo-pragmatism with some Continental philosophers who have engaged with Husserl’s phenomenology, notably Gadamer, Levinas and Sartre. This neo-pragmatist proposal for the social sciences develops a non-representational view of knowledge and puts the (...) ongoing engagement with difference at the centre of social research. From this perspective, the process of knowledge formation is dialogical in nature whereby the researcher learns as much from those who are being researched as vice versa. The concluding section aims to show the implications of this perspective for current research in the social sciences, throwing new light on contemporary meta-discussions about social research. (shrink)

In this article, cognitivism is understood as the view that the engine of human (individual and collective) action is the intentional, dispositional, or other mental capacities of the brain or the mind. Cognitivism has been criticized for considering the essence of human action to reside in its alleged source in mental processes at the expense of the social surroundings of the action, criticism that has often been inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This article explores the logical extent of the (...) critique of cognitivism, arguing that by positing collectively shared knowledge of criteria as the engine of human action many such critiques themselves display latent cognitivism. (shrink)

. Against modernist illusions: why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories. Journal for Cultural Research: Vol. 25, What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth., pp. 104-122.

In this text, the relationship between fallibilism and cognitive vulnerability is examined using Richard Rorty’s thinking as an example. First, some of Rorty’s central ideas are collected and commented on, especially the substitution of objectivity for solidarity, since it affects relevant issues of epistemology and of reflection on rationality. Next, the notions of fallibilism and cognitive vulnerability are examined, which will be connected to an existential dimension of vulnerability. Examples of all those things are also given from Rorty’s thinking and (...) it is highlighted that the author operates with both a negative and a positive sense of existential vulnerability. It is then stated that Rorty’s proposal implies pessimistic fallibilism and an excess of cognitive vulnerability. First, it is argued that the cause of this lies in the fact that his approach is imprisoned in what Richard Bernstein called Cartesian anxiety and secondly, this generates unwanted consequences for the Rortyan goals themselves to raise his ethnocentric proposal as a non-relativistic alternative to realism and authoritarianism. In this respect, it is maintained that the priority that Rorty attributes to solidarity is accompanied by the rejection of any notion of evidence. This produces a conceptual lacuna in the structure of his thought that makes it impossible to reflect philosophically on an epistemic activity (the activity of adducing or requesting evidence) that is a normal part of day-to-day conversational exchanges as important as controversies to determine the best option in each case. In response, we will argue that one can better work towards the achievement of Rortyan goals if we bear in mind that reasons based on solidarity do not replace and do not deactivate the value of epistemic reasons, although they do combine and reinforce each other. (shrink)

Dewey’s concept of “experience” has baffled many a reader. It is, however, assuredly the key to Dewey’s distinctive philosophical contribution. Notoriously, Rorty urges that Dewey would have been well-advised to abandon “experience: in favor of “discourse” (that is, the “linguistic method of philosophy”), which he draws largely from Davidson and Sellars. For various reasons, Rorty betrays his deep misunderstanding of Dewey’s pragmatism, the lack of any close relationship between Sellars’s notion of the “given” (as a philosophical target) and Dewey’s notion (...) of the saving discovery of what is “denoted” (in inquiry) as the “given”; and the extremely problematic (possibly even incoherent) treatment of linguistic meaning in Davidson’s most pertinent papers (which Rorty seems to regard as pragmatist in an important sense and is guided by). In any event, neither Davidson nor Rorty can be rightly supposed to extend or improve Deweyan pragmatism: Rorty, in fact, explicitly and unconditionally repudiates the “linguistic turn”; and Davidson finally subverts the very theory of language on which any reading of Rorty’s “pragmatist” account of Davidson’s theory of meaning would be at all feasible. The exposé of these disorders may contributes to a more careful formulation of the pragmatist undertaking, which lies elsewhere and depends on a measure of convergence between Dewey and Peirce. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy of language has often criticized classical pragmatism for holding to an unwarranted notion of experience which lapses into epistemological foundationalism; defenders of the classics have denied such a consequence. The paper tries to move this debate forward by pointing out that the criticism of the empiricist “given” is not wedded to a specific philosophical method, be it linguistic or pragmatist. From a broader historical perspective drawing in particular on Kant, antifoundationalism turns out to be deeply rooted in modern (...) western philosophy and its ambivalent attitude towards the success of the empirical sciences. This diagnosis allows to reassess classical pragmatism beyond the perceived alternative “language vs. experience”, and to concentrate on antifoundationalism as the real challenge to any modern, epistemologically oriented philosophy. In that perspective, classical pragmatism’s genuine contribution is to do justice to antifoundationalism by focusing on the experimental dynamic of scientific practice, which is most commonly ignored by the analytic tradition. Pragmatism identifies rationality with the practical operation of reflexively determining and articulating what is being experienced. With this approach, it is argued, experiential pragmatism serves modern antifoundationalism ends better than its analytic siblings. (shrink)

This paper outlines a pragmatist aesthetic theory on the basis of themes relating to naturalism, metaphor, and solidarity found in Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism. A central part of this attempt is to show that some previous readings of Rorty’s work in aesthetics are misguided. I begin by raising aspects of Rorty’s work that have been previously largely overlooked in aesthetics and philosophy of art, and which I believe undermine particularly Richard Shusterman’s critical reading of Rorty. I shall then move on to (...) discuss the social role Rorty assigns to metaphors in his postmetaphysical liberalist culture and argue that the social and cultural view of art and the aesthetic Rorty’s philosophy of literature contains overlaps in some significant respects with some central points of John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics. I close by outlining some new set of issues for pragmatist aesthetics that emerge from the discussion of Rorty’s work presented in the paper. (shrink)

This paper makes the case that environmental education needs to be taken up as a moral education to the extent that we see the connection between harm and destruction in the environment and harm and destruction within human individuals and their relationship, and proceeds to show this connection by introducing the key notion of human alienation and its psychological factors of wounding, dissociation or split, self and other oppression and exploitation, all of which result in compromised moral agency. To this (...) end, the paper further makes the case that we need to replace the culture of alienation with a culture of healing and reclamation of fundamental humanity manifest as compassion and wisdom, and presents an ideal of moral agency that would emerge when all parts and dimensions of one’s being—body–mind–heart–energetics—are aligned, attuned and integrated, having healed from the body–mind split, mind–heart split, body–spirit split and mind–matter split. Concepts and imagery borrowed from Asian philosophies, such as Buddhism and Daoism, are offered as illustrative resources for the project of reclaiming uncompromised moral agency and its manifestation through compassion and wisdom. These concepts include hungry ghosts, bodhicitta, sunyata and wu-wei. (shrink)

1. This issue of EJPAP represents a new step forward in the comparison between two great philosophical traditions, Pragmatism and Hermeneutics. It recalls and mirrors the lines highlighted in the international conference held in Cagliari, Italy, in May 2019. On that occasion, scholars from different disciplinary fields pertaining to the two different traditions discussed the key themes of subjectivity, historicity and representation. They were understood as key thematic-problematic terms for...

Seit nunmehr vier Jahrzehnten beschäftigt die Renaissance des Pragmatismus Philosophen und Theoretikerinnen. In verschiedenen Fächern, von der Philosophie und den Literaturwissenschaften bis zur Soziologie und Jurisprudenz, haben die sich um den Pragmatismus zentrierenden Diskussionen zu interessanten neuen Einsichten geführt. Allerdings ist es bisher nicht gelungen zu erhellen, auf welch komplexe Art und Weise Pragmatismus, Humanismus, Antiautoritarismus und die Idee einer genuin post-metaphysischen Kultur zusammenhängen. Seine Version des Pragmatismus als Antiautoritarismus verstehend, sucht Richard Rorty den antiautoritären Gestus aus den praktischen Bereichen (...) der Ethik und Politik auf die Epistemologie zu übertragen. Sein Antiautoritarismus besagt, dass es keine nicht-menschliche Autorität gibt, deren Befehlen Menschen zu gehorchen hätten; weder die Wahrheit oder der Wille Gottes noch die Vorstellung einer objektiven Realität oder die Idee des wirklich Realen können als Autoritäten wirken. Die Vorstellung, es gäbe so etwas wie menschliche Verantwortlichkeit gegenüber etwas Nicht-Menschlichem, gilt es zu verabschieden. Dieser Aufsatz gliedert sich in drei Teile. Der erste sucht dazulegen, inwiefern der Pragmatismus als Antiautoritarismus zu verstehen ist. Der zweite Teil diskutiert die folgende Frage: Wie lässt sich innerhalb eines antiautoritären Rahmens, der bestimmt ist von Kontingenz, Antiessentialismus und der Praxis einer radikalen Historisierung, die Idee der Solidarität denken? Es wird argumentiert, dass die Literatur, und insbesondere der Roman, eine wichtige Rolle bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage spielt. Dieser Teil konzentriert sich auf Rortys Position. Ein kurzer abschließender Teil beschäftigt sich mit der Frage von Antiautoritarismus und ästhetischer Form. (shrink)

In this essay, I term the dominant educational paradigm of our time as scientific education and subject it to historical analysis in order to bring its tacit racial, colonial and Eurocentric biases into view. I subsume this cluster of problems under the general heading of “the problem of scientific education”, a problem simultaneously submerged deeply in the invisible background of current education and across its foreground inasmuch as it conditions daily educational practices beyond educators’ awareness. The delicate question to be (...) answered is: enclosed as we are within a scientific framing of our educational system, how can we find an alternative way of looking at this educational system that will help us resolve the problem of colonial, racial and cultural subordinations inherent in its scientific framing? (shrink)

In the division between analytic and continental thought, pragmatism has often been cast as a middle way. Fundamentally critical of each, it also shares resonances with both of these traditions. However, while this observation is common, remarkably little has been done to examine its truth in contemporary political thought. Drawing on recent trends in political theory, including ‘New Realism’, critical genealogical methods and a surge in pragmatic approaches, this article identifies an emerging situated turn in political thought. Emerging from several (...) major traditions in contemporary political thinking, this trend has pragmatic themes at its centre. Having identified this as a fertile opportunity for inter-methodological work across the analytic/continental divide, it then turns to the late work of Richard Rorty in order to expose his productive framework for such cross-border exchanges. Arguing for its fundamentally democratic and pluralistic nature, this analysis also exposes this framework’s weaknesses before illustrating how recent methodological exchanges between genealogy and pragmatism rectify these deficiencies while providing a viable model for future work across traditional philosophical boundaries. (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)

There is an overt tension between Rorty’s pragmatist critique of philosophy and his apparent epistemological and metaphysical commitments, which it is instructive to examine in order to assess not only Rorty’s overall position, but also renewed contemporary interest in pragmatism and its metaphilosophical implications. After showing why Rorty’s attempts to limit the scope of his critique failed to resolve this tension, I try reading him as a constructive metaphysician who was attempting to balance a causal account of the language / (...) world relation with panrelationism. However, Rorty intended these commitments to be interpreted in light of his pragmatism about vocabularies, and relied upon a ‘social standpoint strategy’ to render his overall position consistent. I conclude that to the extent that this strategy succeeds, it removes almost all of the argumentative force from Rorty’s pragmatism. (shrink)

This paper explores metaphilosophy’s role in pragmatism. It does so particularly in relation to pragmatism’s multiplying and competing forms (e.g. classical pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, analytic pragmatism, third-wave pragmatism, new pragmatism, etc.). Focusing on the most comprehensive treatment of metaphilosophy in pragmatism, that of Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse, I argue their attempt to turn pragmatism into a metaphilosophy is problematic. Using a “metaphilosophical minimalism” to address pragmatism’s tendency toward what they label an inward looking and dogmatic “insularity” and “triumphalism” – a (...) tendency that feeds competition among pragmatists – I charge displays that very tendency (it also leads to a regress). I then pivot to outline what I dub “eclectic pragmatism.” This pragmatism embraces the contemporary zeitgeist of the inclusionary, decentered “more.” It does so by abandoning competition over the singular, right form of pragmatism (and indeed philosophy). It embraces the “more,” but not because it is right (which would be an obvious contradiction). Rather, it embraces the “more” because it is “’satisfying.” Simply put, there is a metaphilosophy at work with eclectic pragmatism. It is a “naturalized metaphilosophy” where the “choice” for pragmatism, especially eclectic pragmatism, is seen to stem from psychological and sociological propensities not the necessity of long exalted “reason.”. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the primacy that, following Sellars, Robert Brandom ascribes to the intersubjective and discursive space of reasons over all other processes in which the human mind is involved. I will compare Brandom’s perspective with that of the situated approach to the study of mind. At first, my aim is to show that the origin of intentionality has to be found in the sphere of sentience and the living body. Second, by comparing the enactivist account of language (...) that derives from the naturalization of Husserl’s phenomenology with the neo-pragmatist approach to the linguistic turn, I argue for a heuristic primacy owing to the linguistic practice of giving and asking for reasons. This allows me to reflect with a meta-philosophical approach on to what extent two families of views such as pragmatism and phenomenology, with their different variants, interact in the attempt to blend things together, i.e., nature and culture; mind and world; and what happens inside the human body and what happens outside it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s philosophy of mind aimed at showing both its systematic structure and the originality of some outcomes, not adequately underlined by critics. My starting point is an early paper, titled Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental, in which Rorty takes sides on the venerable question of the mark of the mental. I will show that Rorty defends a weak view on the above question and that his idea, (...) according to which a particular concept of incorrigibility provides the most promising way of distinguishing the mental from the physical, has a deep influence on Philosophy and the Mirror of the Nature. In the last part of the paper, I will underline the consequences of Rorty’s peculiar idea of the mental on the specific problem of fictional entities, showing how his position could be seen as a form of deflationism which in some ways seems compatible with the positions recently engaged by Crane. (shrink)

En ces temps d’avenir perdu, les sociétés sont des sociétés spéculatives, qu’elles le veuillent ou non. Alors que la crise financière de 2007–2008 s’est transformée en une myriade de crises politiques dans les années qui ont suivies. En effet, l’esprit d’un âge néo-biedermeierien et les programmes politiques axés sur la stabilité sont devenus le modus operandi de l’Occident dans les contextes économiques et bien au-delà. Le désenchantement du néolibéralisme et son eschatologie politique dans un large éventail de domaines socioculturels perdurent (...) des deux côtés de l’Atlantique, tout autant que l’aporie des sociétés qui tentent de sauver le statu quo même si celui-ci avait perdu son chemin. En conséquence, les sociétés actuelles seraient, même sans le désirer, des sociétés spéculatives. Des éclaircissements sur la notion même de spéculation apparaissent alors nécessaires. Cet article vise à offrir ces éclaircissements. Pour cela, cet article s’appuie sur le cadre réglementaire d’après-crise de Bâle III. Cette analyse philosophique est d’autant plus éclairante si le « désarmement de la politique » (Habermas 2018, ma traduction) au nom de politiques prétendument inévitables, à vocation sécuritaire et stable, peut constituer l’objet de critique. Cet article est, par conséquent, une esquisse philosophique. Ce qui suit est une série de réflexions sur le concept de spéculation au-delà des frontières de la compréhension financière ou économique actuelle et, enfin, de minuscules manifestes sur la façon dont les études philosophiques et autres pourraient mobiliser et affiner ce concept. Tout d’abord cet article offre une histoire conceptuelle de la notion de spéculation (section deux). Dans un deuxième temps, les effets instables de l’aporie de stabilité concernant des régularisations financières sont analysés (section trois). Enfin, les bases pour un renouveau du concept de spéculation, utile pour la philosophie et qui maîtrise les apories des sociétés spéculatives, sont développées (section quatre). Si la philosophie ne peut prévenir la pensée d’être parfois large et incertaine, la philosophie peut sans doute être appréhendée comme un « hybride onto-épistémique-éthique », en recourant à la notion de spéculation. C’est ce que cet article suggère : offrir un langage qui pourrait permettre de penser la « spécularisation » des mondes sociaux en ce début du xxi e siècle. C’est à dire, le passage de la politique des classes à la politique identitaire (représentant les cultures plutôt que les classes), du capitalisme industriel à la politique culturelle (vendre des valeurs au détriment des fonctions) et des acteurs rationalisés au conservateur (choisir entre des identités à la place des préférences). (shrink)

I am very grateful to Michela Bella, William Curtis, and Emil Višňovský for their thorough and generous interventions on my latest work. I would also like to thank EJPAP’s executive editors, Roberta Dreon and Sarin Marchetti, for hosting a symposium on this book and Michela Bella for her editorial work. Each of the three contributions to the symposium grasps some key features of my work, indeed the spirit that animated it, even if, at times, my statements are not entirely explicit. (...) Since the... (shrink)

Richard Rorty has long been perceived and interpreted as a provocative and groundbreaking philosopher. However, an approach that he calls ‘eirenic’ emerges in his writings. This eirenism should not be confused with a form of sophisticated relativism, but rather it should be understood as a consequence of the profound anti-foundational conviction and anti-authoritarian sentiment that feeds his thought, as well as his reading of the relations of science and ethics. In this article, I focus on Rorty’s recovery of pragmatism and (...) “pragmatist hermeneutics” by considering his understanding of science and ethics as deeply interlaced. Rorty’s perspective on this issue is inspired by Dewey’s and James’s conception of a holistic-syncretic pragmatism. His project takes into account not only the main cultural trends of logical empiricism and continental philosophy, but also the existential needs they conveyed – that is, the search for objectivity and the meaning of life, respectively. The Rortyan proposal of an anti-ideological, historicist or post-positivist reformulation of the conception of scientific rationality as not opposed to ethics aligns with Jamesian efforts to confront scientific dogmatism by questioning the key notion of truth. Within a naturalistic hermeneutical framework, Rorty contests the ontological need for necessary connections or disconnections between moral and scientific discourse. In this sense, the conception of ethics as having to do with what is personal, historical and “irrational” contrasts with the notion of scientific rationality elaborated in modernity as something that, unlike morality, is able to escape human finitude and contingency. Appreciating the Jamesian (and Deweyan) element in Rorty’s pragmatist hermeneutics may contribute to renovating the current lines of debate around Rorty and pragmatism, especially by reevaluating Rorty’s strong cultural connection to the American philosophical tradition and his commitment to making this pluralistic voice relevant again to contemporary conversations. (shrink)

Cet article explore la signification de l’espace comme un « lieu pratiqué » selon la notion reprise à Michel de Certeau, en examinant la construction d’un gymnase et ses effets sur les relations sociales et les réseaux disciplinaires. Tout comme le laboratoire ou le théâtre, le gymnase a été spécifiquement pensé pour permettre certaines actions et en témoigner, en reflétant des conceptions de l’entraînement et de l’éducation corporelle. Ses divers agencements de l’espace y favorisent une incorporation de la race, du (...) lieu, du genre et de l’identité. Le War Memorial Gymnasium de l’Université de Colombie britannique dans l’Ouest du Canada, construit en 1851, est utilisé pour illustrer la manière dont, sous des formes complexes, les géométries du pouvoir – ces multiples configurations de l’espace et des relations sociales à l’intérieur et autour du gymnase – produisent dans ses murs une culture didactique et sportive aux enjeux véritablement stratégiques et tactiques, qui active et articule les division de genre. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the issue of the consistency of Richard Rorty’s multi-layered approach of skepticism, examining three successive steps of this approach: the genealogical critique of theoretical skepticism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the surprising revival of a skeptical outlook in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and the promising sketch of a pragmatist skepsis emancipated from skepticism in the last works dedicated to the restatement of philosophy as “cultural politics.” According to some critical readers of Rorty, there (...) is a tension, if not a contradiction, between Rorty’s early dismissal of the skeptical stance in the name of pragmatism and the return of a “neo-Humean” stance in his political writings of the 1980’s. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no such contradiction between these two orientations, provided one keeps in mind that according to Rorty, philosophy is about creating, strengthening and undermining various descriptions of human culture. Rorty’s pragmatist redescriptions include “conceptual characters” which have to be regarded as philosophical tools fulfilling specific tasks: from this perspective, the liberal ironist is not to be considered as the final word of Rorty on political philosophy, but rather as a transitory figure which allows the author of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to address the specific problem of the relation between philosophy and politics in a liberal (anti-foundational) society. Therefore, liberal ironism is not a naive commitment to skepticism which is inconsistent with the fallibilistic claims of pragmatism: the best way of understanding it is to view it from the perspective of Rorty’s last works, i.e. from the perspective of “cultural politics,” and to compare it to other philosophical figures fulfilling different tasks, such as the “prophetic feminist.”. (shrink)

Asking if pragmatism, and John Dewey in particular, has a theory of power poses the question about the intellectual resources that pragmatism has to offer the social sciences. Pragmatism stands accused of being naïve about power and presenting the specter of an overly soft program for doing social science. Yet, Dewey’s philosophical method provides a distinctive transactional theory of power and untapped resources for advancing social science. Dewey’s melioristic philosophical vision develops a theory of praxis that is a tacit theory (...) of power. Explicating his concerns with experience, inquiry, and social life show how they converge into his theory of praxis and power. Developing this theory, next, enables distinctions to be outlined between Dewey’s transactional view of power and the mainstream interactional view seen in the work of Dahl, Lukes, and Mann. Furthermore, the theory of praxis establishes analytical categories for deconstructing the structure of transactional power, the patterns or modes of conjoint activity. Dewey’s pragmatist theory of power stands in marked contrast to interactional models and provides the analytical tools for the critical assessment of power. (shrink)

We are in the midst of a reevaluation of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The last few years have seen a spate of new books on Rorty. This year alone two critical anthologies already are out and two more are in preparation. A new volume of previously unpublished philosophical papers by Rorty will be released in a few months (see Rorty 2020). The intensification of interest since his passing in 2007 spans the globe and shows no signs of abating. Spurred in part (...) by a new generation of readers of Ame... (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by (...) situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noë’s enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5). (shrink)

The history of the encounters between pragmatism and phenomenology is long, fruitful, yet also tormented. From the time of the 19th century American phenomenology of Josiah Royce up to the arrival of Husserl’s phenomenology in North America, pragmatism was always one of the leading American philosophical movements that actively contributed to the re-elaboration of the issues and strategies of phenomenology in order to make them comply and adjust to the new context. This was possible, in the f...

This book explores the role that American pragmatism played in the development of social philosophy in 20th-century Europe. The essays in the first part of the book show how the ideas of Peirce, James, and Dewey influenced the traditions of European philosophy, especially existentialism and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, that emerged in the 20th century. The second part of the volume deals with current challenges in social philosophy. The essays here demonstrate how discussions of two core issues in (...) social philosophy--the conception of social conflict and the public--can be enriched with pragmatist resources. In featuring both historical and conceptual perspectives, these essays provide a full picture of pragmatism's role in the development of Continental social philosophy. Pragmatism and Social Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on American philosophy, social philosophy, and Continental philosophy. (shrink)

The emergence of the two great late modern crises—economic and environmental—has prompted calls for a return to Marx. This article describes a Marxian account of the 2008 economic crisis relating it to the phenomena of job polarization, de-industrialization, the decline of the middle class, and political populism in Europe and elsewhere. These are argued to spring from political mobilization due to certain kinds of capability deprivations as understood in Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The article demonstrates the continued relevance of Marx (...) for philosophy of the social sciences as well as for a better understanding of the future challenge of maintaining societal stability in the West. (shrink)