We propose a reconsideration of John Dewey’s criticisms of Walter Lippmann’s ideas taking as guiding theme the arguments put forward in the successive reviews that Dewey wrote on Lippmann’s works. We maintain that the ideas that Dewey launched in these reviews pointed in a direction that became more explicit in the 1930s, when Dewey responded with socialist discourse to a Lippmann who appealed to something more that the authority of trained experts to counteract the drifts of democracy. According to our (...) view, the debate they held not only revealed two visions of the relationship between democracy and popular will, but also two discrepant conceptions about the economic bases of an open society and the necessary conditions for freedom exercise. (shrink)

(1999). Critical hermeneutics and American legal interpretation:A search for the meaning of new york times v. sullivan. Angelaki: Vol. 4, Judging the law, pp. 173-188.

This chapter presents the formalist account of the moral status of an artwork as an aesthetically significant and autonomous form, with due emphasis on the Anglo-American art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, as it developed between 1870 and 1960. The author shows that the formalist art-is-above-morals approach is a substantive moral stance in itself. Formalist aesthetics is usually presented in the literature as evincing a purist indifference to ethics, construing moral properties as external to art, in opposition to the internal pure properties of art’s (...) composition. The chapter demonstrates that this is a misrepresentation of the complex formalist prescriptive idea of the relations between art and ethics. Through its autonomy and imperviousness to external co-opting—which is accomplished by due focus on aesthetic form—art on the formalist account is held to be a paradigm of the liberalist principles of individual freedom and self-fulfillment, thus an inherent means to the good. (shrink)

Argues that the path to the good life does not consist in working toward some abstract concept of the good, but rather by ameliorating the problems of the practices and institutions that make up our practical life.

The ArgumentIn the nineteenth century, American legal educators drew on the idea of “legal science” the claim that the study of law was similar to the study of the natural sciences. In this paper, I propose to examine the particular conceptions of “science” that were incorporated into that idea. The primary point of the paper is to argue that in antebellum America, a particular view of the natural sciences dominated public discourse, and it was this conception that was appropriated by (...) contemporaneous legal scientists. Public discussions of natural science in lyceums, surveys, and journals, were carried out in a language grounded in the same religious commitments and the same normative conception of nature that drove the ideology of laissez-faire. Described under the rubric “Protestant Baconianism,” the approach was characterized by commitments to four elements: natural theology; a constrained version of Baconian inductivism; a belief in grand synthesis and proof by analogy; and claims of moral improvement. These elements were typical of the efforts of a particular influential circle of natural scientists and, similarly, of some of the more influential legal scientists in the antebellum period. This article examines the elements of the Protestant Baconian approach that were incorporated into Christopher Columbus Langdell's model of legal science in the 1870s, a model that continues to influence thinking about both legal education and jurisprudence to this day. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as “non-ideal theory.” My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of (...) pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. (shrink)

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century American intellectuals, (...) broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms. If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America. (shrink)

A. F. Bentley’s The Process of Government (1908) is widely accepted as an important source of contemporary interest group study. This paper argues to the contrary that Bentley’s arguments in this area are obscure and have contributed little to the programme of modern interest group research. His importance is as a contributor to the debate on the nature of social science and social science method and not as the starting-point for interest group analysis. The judgement about his role as a (...) social scientist should rest on consideration of his body of work and not simply the one book. In terms of his much cited book, Bentley, it is argued, is misread. The central purpose of this article is to explore the consequences of that misinterpretation. The misreading of The Process of Government, and the unmerited assumption that it is directly connected to modern interest group theory, has led to a misunderstanding of that contemporary theory. In particular his use of the term ‘group’ is much wider in scope than is now usually followed. This means that his claims are not so uni-dimensional as they appear when extracted from their context. Bentley used the term in a sociological sense that included informal social associations as ‘groups’: these are not the sort of formal, collective organizations of the interest group type as identified in political science. It is argued that the major sources of ideas current in the interest group field are Truman (1951) and the case-study authors of the 1930s such as Odegard, Childs, Herring and Schattschneider. Bentley’s contribution to political science is not as progenitor of interest group studies, but his emphasis on process anticipates the policy studies movement. (shrink)

Pragmatism has affected American historical writing since the early twentieth century. Such contemporaries and students of Peirce, James, and Dewey as Frederick Jackson Turner, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, Mary Beard, and Carl Becker drew on pragmatism when they fashioned what was called the “new history.” They wanted to topple inherited assumptions about the past and replace positivist historical methods with the pragmatists' model of a community of inquiry. Such widely read mid-twentieth-century historians as Merle (...) Curti, Henry Steele Commager, and Richard Hofstadter embraced the perspectivalism, fallibilism, and instrumentalism of the pragmatists, thereby helping to sustain the tradition during its nadir in American philosophy departments. Many historians have been drawn to the study of pragmatism during its recent renaissance; others have advanced pragmatist-inspired philosophies of history. Through such prominent contemporary historians as Thomas Haskell, David Hollinger, and Joyce Appleby, the ideas of Pierce, James, and Dewey continue to influence the historical profession. (shrink)

In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; and (...) this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available. (shrink)

This article considers moral philosophers’ responses to French existentialism at Manchester, Oxford, U.C.L.A., and Harvard after 1945. French existentialism was a philosophy of freedom that rose to...

In the twentieth century, philosophy came to be dominated by the English-speaking world, first Britain and then the United States. Accompanying this development was an unprecedented professionalization and specialization of the discipline, the consequences of which are surveyed and evaluated in this article. The most general result has been a decline in philosophy's normative mission, which roughly corresponds to the increasing pursuit of philosophy in isolation from public life and especially other forms of inquiry, including ultimately its own history. This (...) is how the author explains the increasing tendency, over the past quarter-century, for philosophy to embrace the role of "underlaborer" for the special sciences. Indicative of this attitude is the long-term popularity of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that fields reach maturity when they forget their past and focus on highly specialized problems. In conclusion, the author recalls the history of philosophy that, following Kuhn's advice, has caused us to forget, namely, the fate of Neo-Kantianism in the early twentieth century. Key Words: analytic philosophy • normative • positivism • pragmatism • professionalism • underlaborer. (shrink)

(2011). Playing with Fire, or the Stuffing of Dead Animals: Freire, Dewey, and the Dilemma of Social Studies Reform. Educational Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 71-91.

American legal realism is commonly treated as a theory-pariah. The article exposes certain reasons explaining such a treatment. Generally, it seems that such an attitude is a result of many misunderstandings of realist aims and ambitions, some of which pertain to the theoretical status of legal realism and its relation to so called general jurisprudential theories, such as legal positivism. In the first part of the article I explain generally what these aims were and how one should see these relations. (...) In the second part I briefly analyze B. Leiter’s famous claim that legal realism is conceptually dependent on hard legal positivism (as a general theory of law). The critique of this claim opens the possibility for some alternative understanding of legal realism. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to clarify the concept of “Anglo-American philosophy of law” and highlight the debate on its subject. Both the geographical reference to the Anglo-American tradition and the content of the philosophy of law itself need to be clarified. In order to understand what the Anglo-American philosophy of law is and what is the essence of the debate around its subject matter the author of the article firstly investigates the main stages in the development of the (...) Anglo-American philosophy of law, beginning with Jeremy Bentham and ending with modern authors. As a result, we arrive at a conclusion that the ways of development of the philosophical and legal tradition in Great Britain and the United States are not identical. Secondly, we should analyze the term “philosophy of law”. Overwhelming majority of Anglo-American scholars identify the terms “legal philosophy”, “jurisprudence” and “analytical legal positivism”. Therefore, “philosophy of law” and “jurisprudence” mostly are used as synonyms. It is also important that the concept “jurisprudence” in the Anglo-American Academy is not used in its wide sense as in Russian science. It includes only abstract theoretical, not practical, study of law and general legal concepts and theoretical foundations of branches of law and legal systems. The author concludes that the debate about the method that has been going on since the 50s of twenty century between positivists and anti-positivists, smoothly turned into a new dispute about the subject matter of Anglo-American philosophy of law. The main object of the dispute is the legal philosophy “analytical core”. Supporters of the core use a conceptual analysis of legal concepts beyond time, politics, morality, and social context. The author of the article analyzed the main critical papers devoted to the current state of the legal philosophy and came to the conclusion that we can distinguish two major types: papers that criticize the “analytical core” of the philosophy of law and try to separate pluralistic jurisprudence and limited abstract legal philosophy, papers which tend to change the very philosophy of law, reorienting it to the social context, political philosophy, ethics, etc. Also, as a result of the research two different understandings of the content of analytical philosophy of law were discovered. First on the one hand is analytical positivism, which includes legal positivists. On the other hand, in a broader sense, it is perceived as an intellectual style. In this sense we can call anti-positivists like natural lawyer J. Finnis and the founder of legal interpretivism, R. Dworkin as analytical scholars. (shrink)