The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation (...) or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know. (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)

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)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

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)

Beyond a monolingual mentality and beyond the language that is typically observed in the prevalent discourse of education for understanding other cultures, this article tries to present another approach: Stanley Cavell's idea of philosophy as translation . This Cavellian approach shows that understanding foreign cultures involves a relation to other cultures already within one's native culture. Foreshadowing the Cavellian sense of tragedy, Emerson's 'Devil's child' helps us detect the sources of repression and blindness that are hidden behind the foundationalist approach (...) to other cultures. The child represents the human condition in which the self and language are simultaneously in the process of translation. On the strength of this I propose a possibility of understanding other cultures that is crucially related to language education, one that can point us beyond monolingualism . Cavell's view of language and the self envisions a way of releasing, not repressing, the desire to express one's inner light as a crucial source of the revival of one's native culture from within, while at the same time cultivating an eye for the other, the stranger, who is already here within oneself. This is to find alterity in the human condition in terms of the translation that is inherent to language and the immigrancy of the self. (shrink)

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)

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

The article deals with the social pragmatist approach to the political conception of community, especially in light of the challenges posed by the tendency to view democracy without community and blur the problem and boundaries between conflict and reconciliation. KEY WORDS – Community. Conflict. Democracy. Pragmatism. Reconciliation.

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)

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)

In this article, it will be my aim to outline the key features of Emerson’s original conception of Bildung, with special reference to the links, first, between the American essayist and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and second, Emerson and John Dewey. After introductory notes on how to map out Emersonian Bildung in relation to the available philosophical commentaries, I delineate some of the chief meanings of Bildung, showing how Emersonian self-culture aligns with Humboldtian Bildung. Second, I draw out concrete implications for (...) educational practice from an Emersonian view of self-culture vis-à-vis comparisons with Dewey. In addition to Bildung qua self-culture, another basic sense of Emersonian Bildung is education, and Emerson often deals with educational themes in his treatments of self-culture. In the final section, I return to the specifics of Emerson’s sense of Bildung, saying a few words on the alleged elitism of the term, and in particular, its neglected religious overtones. This section serves the purpose of distinguishing Emerson’s view not only from related accounts of Bildung, but also from the secondary commentaries available. (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)

Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition offers a new insight into how to understand pragmatism, particularly by connecting pragmatism’s melioristic approach to problems with a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the very problems that pragmatism hope to solve. Peculiarly absent from Koopman’s presentation is a consideration of Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism, which itself combined the melioristic problem-solving of pragmatism and the Foucauldian analysis proposed by Koopman. This absence is not malicious, of course, but it does bring to mind how West’s prophetic pragmatism (...) has been generally disregarded by mainstream pragmatism scholarship. (shrink)

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)

Ethics and responsibility would be a vexing or awesome topic that the contemporary citizen more likely wishes to avoid giving his or her views or opinions. That is perhaps because the society transforms rapidly and turns to become more diverse from the past decades. These concepts, on the other, comes not in the ancient or middle era classics, but from the near modern context in 18th England and French land. In dealing with the nature and relationship between the two concepts, (...) another notion of morality also comes into a comparative context. Morality, if often interchangeably used with the ethics, could be seen in some differences that ethics is a dimension one step removed from action. So we used to preach our dependents or subjects to conform their conduct to the kind of moral demand, "Exert your best to the interest of nations or society," "Practice a love and humiliation with brothers, sisters and neighbors," "Never be drunken while driving," "Do not commit an adultery or do not steal other’s property," and the likes. Law, then, would be a minimal of morality which prescribes a prohibited conduct and corresponding criminal sanctions proportionally with the gravity of culpability or social harms. Those concepts might share a common element in a great extent, but could be made distinguished in some of subtleties. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have devoted more attention to the “prophetic” critique of mass media. Clifford Christians has served as both an originator and an ongoing contributor to these discussions. Beginning with his doctoral thesis on Jacques Ellul, a concern for the prophetic has been a consistent thread throughout his career. This paper begins by examining Ellul's influence on Christians's approach, with an emphasis on media ecology, ontology, and the concept of technique. I then summarize Christians's critique of Ellul, and (...) explain how his unique vision addresses Ellul's shortcomings. In outlining Christians's unique approach, I highlight the ways in which authenticity serves as an axial value permeating his work. In Christians's work, prophetic witness against technological fetishism is a means of protecting certain universal values such as “cultural continuity” and “authentic Being.” Through a brief examination of media coverage of Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Jim Wallis, and the United Church of Christ, I show how Christians's discussion of authenticity and prophetic critique are not only applicable but uniquely relevant in the emerging new media environment. At this critical juncture in media, Christians's prophetic voice is among the most relevant and necessary that critical scholarship has to offer. (shrink)

The category of experience has constituted an important point for reflection in moral philosophy and theology, particularly among feminist and liberationist circles. The appeal to experience as an authoritative source has been met with criticism by those who understand the term to connote either radical interiority, on the one hand, or an uncritical foundation for truth claims, on the other. This essay argues that the respective works of classical pragmatist, John Dewey, and Catholic feminist theologian, Margaret Farley, provide a compelling (...) alternative to these characterizations of experience, which can help scholars in ethics and theology to better articulate the relationship of individual and social experience, as well as the ways by which people use experience to give legitimacy to moral practices. (shrink)

Minorities comprise a tiny fraction of media owners, and continued media consolidation exacerbates existing disparities. This article examines this problem by integrating the work of Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Ellul. These theorists identify a common concern—described alternately as technicization and colonization—involving homogenization of content, loss of localism, and decreased ownership diversity. In different ways, each acknowledges the possibility that social action can make a difference. Habermas' discourse ethics provides a normative foundation for arguing on behalf of ownership diversity and policy (...) reform. Though Ellul is skeptical of institutional reform, he offers a complementary vision of concrete action on the part of local, independent community groups. While their solutions are different, we argue that both are necessary. Media reform efforts must incorporate both Habermasian and Ellulian approaches by supplementing federal regulatory reform with independent grassroots activism. A combination of such efforts is essential to the movement's success. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay connects the two critical realist ideas of underlabouring and meta-theory, making the argument that the process of underlabouring and making ‘disclosure and transformation of the deep categorical structures of science and theory’ is ideal for clarifying strata of theory and therefore points of agreement between different practitioners. Using the 1980s debates over feminism in art history, I show how two important interlocutors – T. J. Clark and Griselda Pollock – used Marxist meta-theory to establish a baseline on which (...) their domain-specific concerns might diverge. A return to this sense of shared agreement and disagreement is urged. (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)

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...

The article suggests the philosophical pragmatist approach to the notions as to the components of social practices in the historical process. The question of their contents and interrelations shifts from the epistemic level to the practical one, in this way indicating the dimension of pragmatic intellectuality. It is pointed out that in various times the agents of pragmatic intellectuality used to employ in their practices the notions in perspective of the improving effect on the human’s life. From the angle of (...) the history of philosophy, the pragmatic intellectuality means an attitude of critical choice, comparison, and holistic arrangement of the notions in view of close grasping the novel practices which might be advantageous for the community. The history of philosophy justifies the fact that the pragmatic intellectuality has been generated by the tensions between various divisions of the social practices and set a locus of their transformation. The notion of the culture of democracy is interpreted not as a fixed theoretical criterion but as a changing through history vision of the community’s future, as well as the notion of practically possible social-cultural changes and the ways to make human life better. The features of pragmatic intellectuality are as follow: the priority of the future before the past, social hope, self-reliance, flexible and dynamic correction of notions, ideas, images on account of the humane interests, changes in the culture of thinking and senses, self-realization as self-transformation. The article relies on the works of the classics of American philosophical pragmatism and the writings by the authors on the akin topic. Manuscript received 01.03.2020. (shrink)

: 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)

Rorty's neopragmatism is an attempt to retrofit Dewey's experimentalism for the post-modern situation. Specifically, he substitutes "language" for "experience" and "culture" for "science", to arrive at a philosophy "no closer to science than to art". I argue that the first move results from misunderstanding of the role experience plays in the context of verification in Dewey's experimental logic. The second move leaves Rorty without any alternative method even for approaching the very problems which Dewey proposed to solve with his experimentalism.