This chapter introduces W.E.B. Du Bois’s original political thought and his strategies for political advocacy. It is limited to explaining the pressure he puts on the liberal social contract tradition, which prioritizes the public values of freedom and equality for establishing fair and inclusive terms of political membership. However, unlike most liberal theorists, Du Bois’s political thought concentrates on the politics of race, colonialism, gender, and labor, among other themes, in order to redefine how political theorists and activists should build (...) a democratic polity that is truly free and equal for all. Additionally, this chapter defines some key concepts Du Bois developed to scrutinize a white-controlled world that does not welcome black and brown persons as moral equals. These trailblazing concepts include: the doctrine of racialism, double consciousness, and Pan-Africanism. Finally, this chapter defends Du Bois’s contributions to black feminist thought and American labor politics, which inspired major social justice movements in the twentieth century, in which he played a notable role. (shrink)

An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century. (Last updated: Monday 30th September 2024.).

Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies. They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain (...) “technology blindness,” the most influential approaches within STS show a “normative deficit” and display an agnostic or even antagonistic attitude toward ethics. To repair the blind spots of both applied ethics and STS,the authors sketch the contours of a pragmatist approach. They will explore the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics and pay special attention to the exploration of future worlds disclosed and shaped by technology and the management of deep value conflicts inherent to a pluralist society. (shrink)

We identify a normative paradox of responsible management education. Business educators aim to promote social values and develop ethical habits and socially responsible mindsets through education, but they attempt to do so with theories that have normative underpinnings and create actual normative effects that counteract their intentions. We identify a limited conceptualization of freedom in economic theorizing as a cause of the paradox. Economic theory emphasizes individual freedom and understands this as the freedom to choose from available options. However, conceptualizing (...) individuals as profit-maximizing actors neglects their freedom to reflect on the purposes and goals of their actions. We build on the work of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who distinguishes between habitualized and creative problem-solving behaviors, conceptualizes knowledge construction as a process of interdependent scientific social inquiry, and understands actors as having the freedom to determine what kind of people they wish to be. We apply pragmatist theory to business education and suggest equipping students with a plurality of theories, supplementing neoclassical economics with other economic perspectives and views from other disciplines on economic behavior. Moreover, we suggest putting students into learning situations that require practical problem solution through interdependent social inquiry, encouraging ethical reflection. In doing so, we contribute by linking the problematic conceptions of freedom identified in economic theorizing to the debate on responsible management education. We conceptualize a pragmatist approach to management education that explicitly re-integrates the freedom to discursively reflect on the individual and societal purpose of business activity and thereby makes existing tools and pedagogies useful for bringing potential freedom back into business. (shrink)

-/- Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in (...) hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech? -/- In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep (...) moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

You have to be careful, very careful, introducing the truth to the Black man who has never previously heard the truth about himself, his own kind, and the white man … The Black brother is so brainw...

: This essay explores some themes in use of a relativized Kantian a priori in the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Friedman. It teases out some shared and some divergent beliefs and attitudes in these two philosophers by comparing their characteristic questions and problems to the questions and problems that seem most appropriately to attend to an adequate understanding of games and their histories. It argues for a way forward within a relativized Kantian framework that is suggested but not (...) argued for in Friedman (2001): philosophers of science should move from a concern with unreason as meaninglessness to a concern with unreason as argumentative coercion. It ends with a few suggestions regarding a place for philosophy in the history of reason. (shrink)

Teresa Brennan was born in 1952 in Australia and died in South Florida, following a hit-and-run car accident in December 2002. In the ten years between her doctorate and her death, Brennan published five monographs, the most famous posthumously. The Transmission of Affect begins with a question that readers often remember: “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” Here and throughout her work, Brennan challenges the self-contained subject of Western modernity, (...) whose affects are presumed to be possessions of that self, underscoring the historical emergence of this egoic construction.I never met Teresa Brennan; I did not know her name until a decade after she... (shrink)

Unlike our counterparts in Europe who have rewritten their specific cultural philosophical heritage, American feminists have not yet critically reappropriated our own philosophical tradition of classical American pragmatism. The neglect is especially puzzling, given that both feminism and pragmatism explicitly acknowledge the material or cultural specificity of supposedly abstract theorizing. In this article I suggest some reasons for the neglect, call for the rediscovery of women pragmatists, reflect on a feminine side of pragmatism, and point out some common features. The (...) aim is to encourage the further development of a feminist revisioning of pragmatism and a pragmatist version of feminism. (shrink)

In this paper we (1) define and describe the practice of narrative medicine, (2) reveal the need for narrative medicine by exposing the presuppositions that give rise to its discounting, including a reductive empiricism and a strict dichotomy between scientific fact and narrative value, (3) show evidence of the effects of education in narrative competence in the medical clinic, and (4) present Peircean realism as the proper conceptual model for our argument that the medical school curriculum committees should give space (...) to the employment of the scientific and literary knowledge in medical practice. On account of our argument, we contend that the medical community should tend to latitude and openness with regard to the tools we use to resolve medical problems. These tools include both biomedical and narrative knowledge. (shrink)

This article makes the case for the necessity of a multi-focal conception of violence in religion and peacebuilding. I first trace the emergence and development of the analytical concepts of structural and cultural violence in peace studies, demonstrating how these lenses both draw central insights from, but also differ from and improve upon, critical theory and reflexive sociology. I argue that addressing structural and cultural forms of violence are concerns as central as addressing direct (explicit, personal) forms of violence for (...) purposes of building just and sustainable peace. Moreover, religiously informed and/or motivated peacebuilders are especially well-appointed and equipped to identify and address violence in its structural and cultural manifestations. I the examine how concepts of structural and cultural violence, in effect, centrally inform the efforts of Martin Luther King and Cornel West to cultivate just and sustainable peace in a context as putatively peaceful and prosperous as the United States. (shrink)

This paper elucidates the pragmatist elements of Thomas Reid's approach to the justification of first principles by reference to Charles S. Peirce. Peirce argues that first principles are justified by their surviving a process of ‘self-criticism’, in which we come to appreciate that we cannot bring ourselves to doubt these principles, in addition to the foundational role they play in inquiries. The evidence Reid allows first principles bears resemblance to surviving the process of self-criticism. I then argue that this evidence (...) allows Reid and Peirce a way out of the dilemma between dogmatism and skepticism regarding the justification of such principles, insofar as they are epistemically, and not solely practically, justified. (shrink)

This article explores pragmatism's associationwith relativism, not to rescue it fromrelativism but rather to highlight how aspectsof the classic pragmatists' positions supportqualified relativism. I do so in an effort tohelp restore ``relativism'' as a meaningfulconcept that is nuanced and complex, ratherthan naive and vulgar, as it is regularlyportrayed by more traditional philosophers. This nuanced relativism I call qualifiedrelativism. Qualified relativists insist thatall inquiry are affected by philosophicalassumptions which are culturally bound, andthat all inquirers are situated knowers who areculturally bound as (...) well. However, we cancompensate for our cultural embeddedness byopening our horizons and including others inour conversations. I connect the classicpragmatist points to current feministepistemological work and show that qualifiedrelativists (pragmatists, feminists, andpostmodernists) can claim roots to theirpositions in Peirce, James, and Dewey, some ofthe very scholars others turn to for theirpragmatic realism and their nonvulgar absolutism. (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)

We critically examine pragmatism's approach to skepticism and try to elucidate its certain limits. The central questions to be addressed are: whether “skepticism” interpreted through the lens of problem-solving does justice to the human condition; and whether the problem-solving approach to skepticism can do justice to pragmatism's self-proclaimed anti-foundationalism. We then examine Stanley Cavell's criticism of Dewey's “problem-solving” approach. We propose a shift from the problem-solving approach's eagerness for solutions to a more Wittgensteinian and Emersonian project of dissolution.

This contribution is a critical and constructive engage ment with discourse ethics. First, it clarifies why discourse ethics has difficulties with the grounding and application of moral norms. Second, it turns to a positive appropriation of the formal and proce dural aspects of discourse ethics. The goal is the elaboration of an ethics that is able to incorporate the material aspects of goods and the formal dimension of ethical validity and consensuability. Every morality is the formal application of some substantive (...) good. Every ethical perspective demands its evaluation in terms of its uni versability. In order to achieve this mediation, it is suggested that we must incorporate not only the historical dimension of moral systems, but also the role of critical consciousness and the negativity embod ied by those who are victims of the existing consensus. The essay con cludes with six points that need to be considered when formulating a material ethics that is universalizable and, most importantly, that can address the massive poverty and dehumanization of those excluded from the present community of communication. Key Words: application • consensual • corporeality • discourse ethics • formal • grounding • intersubjective • Kantian • liberation • ethics • material • phronesis • procedural • validity. (shrink)

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

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)

In this chapter, the points of intellectual consonance between Jane Addams and John Dewey are explored, specifically their (1) shared belief that philosophy is a method, (2) parallel commitments to philosophical pragmatism and (3) similar convictions that philosophy should serve to address social problems. Also highlighted are points of divergence in their thinking, particularly their positions on U.S. entry into World War I and, more generally, the value of social conflict. Finally, the chapter concludes with what the author believes is (...) Addams's and Dewey's most significant joint contribution to the contemporary philosophical landscape: a vision of practically engaged pragmatism. (shrink)

An identification is made of the core metaphilosophical, philosophical, and intellectual history theses in Richard Rorty's pragmatism. Their rationale is displayed and it is argued that his metaphilosophical theses are very much dependent on certain of his non‐metaphilosophical philosophical theses, most centrally his anti‐representationalism. Questions emerge about the status and justification of these theses. Rorty, in his programmatic pronouncements, resists providing a vindication of them. Seeking to avoid what has been called performative contradictions, he regards it as sufficient to provide (...) the best narrative going of what is to be said here. It is argued that a more straightforward defence can be provided that does not depart from his holism or his historicism with its setting aside of claims of necessity. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive bibliography of all works on Giambattista Vico available in English. It includes not only monographs and articles, but also a substantial list of scholarly works that mention Vico, as well as a section of literary works mentioning Vico. It has been made available gratis by New Vico Studies and Philosophy Documentation Center.

While working to build his aesthetic theory from the qualities of normal, healthy experience, John Dewey diagnoses a rarely recognized experiential ailment -- what might be called the anesthetic malady. This illness generally results when experience is deprived of meaning due to the poverty of the predominant forms of activity available in one's environment. In Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience lies an easily overlooked social/political approach that predates, by almost half a century, recent social theoretical concerns in phenomenology and everyday (...) aesthetics. Dewey takes notice of experience and prompts inquiry into sometimes obviously important, but often dismissed as irrelevant and mundane, paths. (shrink)

In Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Bellah et al. diagnose our loss of public life in areas such as education and relate this loss both to flaws in moral ecology and to our institutions. Their opposition to the Lockean metaphysic of self and community and to objectivist epistemology as a way of understanding schools is helpful in that it naturally suggests the kind of piecemeal, contextualized change that we locate within Dewey's viewpoint. But, I argue, Bellah et (...) al.'s penchant for “first philosophy” ultimately taints their work. While I applaud their turn to Dewey, I find their choice of a “metaphysical”, rather than a Rortyan reading of Dewey misguided. The proper alternative to a Lockean metaphysics is not a communitarian/Aristotelian one; the proper corrective to objectivist epistemology is not “Deweyan epistemology” or “critical theory”. We need to see, as in Rorty, that democracy exists prior to normative philosophy just as it has priority over substantive religion. To think otherwise would lead to a loss of contact with the ordinary, specific, ever-changing realms where our lives, and our democratic institutions — including the university — must either thrive or flounder. Finally, there is no epistemology or metaphysics that will adequately “ground” the university's workings. Instead, there is only, as Dewey put it, growth or failure to grow, guided by hints and resonances that arise in evolving circumstances. (shrink)

This article turns one of most cited philosopher's John Dewey's title, How We Think (1933/1998) back upon itself to consider how ‘thought’ or ‘reason’ are cultural practices that historically order and generate principles for reflection and action. The discussion proceeds thusly: (1) Schooling is about changing people; (2) Changing people embodies cultural theses about modes of living, such as that of being a lifelong learner or a Learning Society. The modes of living in modern pedagogy embody changing cultural norms and (...) values about systems of reason that are to express universal cosmopolitan qualities; (3) Pedagogy fabricates the systems of reason to principles for reflection and participation that shreds provincial values in the name of greater universal cosmopolitan values; (4) This ‘making’ of cosmopolitan ‘reason’ forms through cultural practices that have overlapping sets of distinctions and differentiations about agency, the rational planning of one's biography in time, and science as a procedure for action in daily life. The educational sciences and philosophy of education are inscription devices or intellectual tools in the governing practices; (5) The inscriptions of reason, however, are more than mere qualities of thought or the mind. The narratives and images of cosmopolitan reason embody particular sublimes about collective hopes, desires and fears; (6) Further, the distinctions of cosmopolitan reason are comparative in that the very qualities of the ‘reasonable person’ create maps of its opposite: those who do not ‘fit’ the normalized qualities of the cosmopolitan thus stand outside that mode of living; The last section (7) provides three exemplars of the changing notions of the cosmopolitan and its ‘other’ in school subjects (literacy, mathematics, and music). School subjects are viewed as alchemies that transmogrify disciplinary thinking into normalizing pedagogies that fabricate who the child is and should be. The historical sketch has two layers in its educational study. One is to explore the politics of schooling with cosmopolitanism as a comparative method to consider the changing cultural practices that fabricate who child is and should be. The second raises questions about taken‐for‐granted categories and their systems of reason of education and reform. The very categories and distinctions of policy, educational research and philosophy are historicized as cultural practices to order, classify and divide what is ‘seen’ and felt as experience. (shrink)

This article is a close reading of two essays by Donna Haraway on feminist philosophy, the biophysical sciences, and critical social theory. Haraway's strong social constructionist approach to science is criticized by colleague Sandra Harding, resulting in an epistemological reconceptualization of objectivity by Haraway. Haraway's notion of “situated knowledges” provides a workable epistemology for all social and biophysical sciences, while inviting the reintegration of religions as critical conversation partners in an emancipatory hermeneutics of nature, culture, and technology.

The study analyzes the theoretical basis of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) program elaborated by Matthew Lipman. The aim is, firstly, to identify the main philosophical and pedagogical principles of P4C based on American pragmatism, and to locate their pedagogization and possible problems in Lipman’s thinking. Here the discussion is especially targeted to the thinking of John Dewey and George H. Mead as well as Lev Vygotsky, whom Lipman himself names as the most pivotal sources for his own thinking. On (...) the other hand, the study aims at opening up new perspectives and thematizations on P4C from the viewpoint of the continental tradition of thought. The essential principles of P4C connected with reasonableness and judgment are ultimately interpreted as a neo-Aristotelian effort to contextualize philosophy by tracing it back to moderation, the man’s ability to consider and solve problems that he meets in practical life kata ton orthon logon — by doing right things in the right place at the right time in the right way. This phronetic idea of ‘humanizing modernity’ combined with the evolution of the adult-child concept is argued to be one of the conditions for the possibility of P4C, yet leaving unsolved the basic problems involving pedagogical action as such. John Dewey’s ideas arising from the critique of the modern philosophy of consciousness, focusing on the significance of philosophy in practical human life and linked to the basic nature of human knowing and intellectual growth and, further, to the ideal of a democratic community, are shown to form the main intellectual sources of P4C. Dewey’s philosophy as a general theory of education means a solid linking of the concepts of experience and inquiry to the practice of education. This is based on the naturalistic conception of man according to which man is built in dynamic transaction with his environment, experiencing the true meanings of his ideas in the consequences of his actions as he tries to solve problematic situations. So, inquiry as a method of reflective thinking forms the basis for education based on intellectual growth. A condition for it is a context meaningful for the child in which the paradigm of inquiry can be realized authentically. It is therefore important in education to provide circumstances that stimulate the child’s curiosity, initiating a process of inquiry that further enables, through the formation of reflective habits, the development of a democratic community. The purpose of the pedagogical interaction taking place in the process of inquiry is to produce educative experiences for the child, making the pedagogical relationship vanish at the same time. The idea is that in pedagogical action the child’s subjectivity, his desire and impulses are adapted to the tradition, yet generating at the same time a prospective, reflective habit, thus freeing the educatee to think intelligently for himself. The study shows the articulation of these principles in Lipman’s practical effort to convert the classroom into a community of inquiry, but it also argues that the above-mentioned Bildung theoretical core problem of pedagogical action, related to its paradoxical special characteristics to produce autonomous subjectivity, is not thematized. In connection with this issue, the educational thinking of Kant and Hegel is discussed especially from the viewpoint of philosophy teaching. To provide a new perspective for the discussion, the study outlines the community of inquiry as an ‘educative space’ from the viewpoints of the pedagogical relationship typical of hermeneutic pedagogy and of non-reflective functional structures and phenomena based on pedagogical intuition that are linked to it. (shrink)

This review essay provides an analysis of the context and content of Trevor Pearce’s Pragmatism’s Evolution. The work highlights the bond between organisms and their environments.

This chapter explores some features of pragmatic pluralism as an ethical perspective on climate change. It is inspired in part by Andrew Light’s work on climate diplomacy as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs, and by Bryan Norton’s environmental pragmatism, while drawing more explicitly than Light or Norton from classical pragmatist sources such as John Dewey. The primary aim of the chapter is to characterize, differentiate, and advance a general pragmatist approach to climate ethics. The main line of (...) argument is that we are suffering culturally from a sort of “moral jetlag” due in part to “moral fundamentalist” habits, and that a critical focus on pragmatic pluralism—in moral theory generally and climate ethics particularly—would be salutary for our recovery if philosophers are to speak more effectively to “wicked problems” in a way that aids public deliberation and social learning. Moral fundamentalist habits, and the monistic one-way assumption that unintentionally—but not blamelessly—exercises and unduly reinforces them, are obstacles to fostering habits of moral and political inquiry better suited to dealing with predicaments rapidly transforming our warming planet. (shrink)

I am called herewith a collaborator-in-chief, mountain climber, and prophet. They all arise from the writers' largesse, not facts on the ground. But I will embrace them momentarily and then turn to...

This article posits a pragmatist philosophy of history as exemplified in the work of British Philosopher F.C.S. Schiller (1864–1937). Part of this argument for a pragma-tist philosophy of history resides on pragmatism’s key notion of “experience” be-ing presented here as both related to human forces that are operant in history, and the particularly important “temporal” nature within the term, making it also in part “historical.” The goal is to more generally broaden scholarship in pragmatism as both containing important elements of (...) a unique and coherent philosophy of history, and to bring Schiller closer into the academic circle of the history of pragmatist thought. Available for download. (shrink)

This essay is a review of Peter McLaren's most recent work, Capitalists and Conquerors: A Critical Pedagogy Against Empire. The essay situates McLaren's work in the philosophical tradition of Marxist Humanism, with reference specifically to Raya Dunayevskaya and Paulo Freire. Despite invoking the work of Dunayevskaya as a foundation for his own project, McLaren does not offer a robust explication of this important thinker, nor of the Hegelian‐Marxist discourse she embraced. Here, as in much of McLaren's work, the reader is (...) not offered rigorous analysis of his philosophical assumptions. The dearth of such analysis, this essay argues, compromises the critical thrust of McLaren's work. In turn, the essay sketches a framework for unpacking the Marxist Humanist paradigm, and, thereby, rethinking the philosophical foundations of contemporary critical pedagogy. (shrink)