Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

The late Richard Rorty has sometimes been described as a controversial, or even outrageous, thinker. Yet the reasons that stand behind such a reputation are obviously quite different from in the ca...

The authority of the social : a pragmatic ethos of enquiry -- Rorty and continental political thought : ontology, naturalism and history -- Theorizing after foundations : ontology, language, and heidegger -- Reconstructing naturalism : pragmatic or ontological? -- History and modernity : self-assertion and critical reflexivity -- Rorty's insights for contemporary political theory : pragmatic socio- -- Political criticism -- Pragmatic political thinking : Rorty in contemporary critical social theory -- Rorty and political theory : how pragmatism constrains and (...) enables political -- Thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I take Rorty’s self-description as a “hedgehog” as the starting point for a portrait of his intellectual temperament. I re-examine in the first instance Isaiah Berlin’s contrast between hedgehogs and foxes as inspired by the proverb of Archilocus. I then analyze, in philosophical terms, some differences between foxes and hedgehogs. I distinguish different types of hedgehogs in order to make clear exactly what kind of hedgehog Rorty was. In spite of his multiple interests and conversations, I argue, (...) Rorty portrayed himself as a hedgehog with only one important idea: the need to overcome notions such as Truth and Reason and to promote a less cruel and more anti-authoritarian way of living. I claim that this single idea is better understood when we pay special attention as to why Rorty gave priority to literature over philosophy, why he made distinctions between different types of writers, and why one of his favorite writers, Nabokov, was only apparently a fox. (shrink)

In this paper I take Rorty’s self-description as a “hedgehog” as the starting point for a portrait of his intellectual temperament. I re-examine in the first instance Isaiah Berlin’s contrast between hedgehogs and foxes as inspired by the proverb of Archilocus. I then analyze, in philosophical terms, some differences between foxes and hedgehogs. I distinguish different types of hedgehogs in order to make clear exactly what kind of hedgehog Rorty was. In spite of his multiple interests and conversations, I argue, (...) Rorty portrayed himself as a hedgehog with only one important idea: the need to overcome notions such as Truth and Reason and to promote a less cruel and more anti-authoritarian way of living. I claim that this single idea is better understood when we pay special attention as to why Rorty gave priority to literature over philosophy, why he made distinctions between different types of writers, and why one of his favorite writers, Nabokov, was only apparently a fox. (shrink)