Beginning with a thought experiment about a mysterious Delphic oracle, this article motivates, explains, and attempts to defend a view it calls Ethical Pragmatism. Ethical Pragmatism is the view that we can and should carry on our practice of moral deliberation without reference to moral truths, or more broadly, without reference to metaethics. The defense the article mounts tries to show that neither suspicions about the tenability of fact-value distinctions, nor doubts about the viability of global (...) class='Hi'>pragmatism, nor worries about the “force” of ethical injunctions without reference to moral truths constitute good reason to reject Ethical Pragmatism. (shrink)

Are the distinctions between past, present and future, and the apparent ‘passage’ of time, features of the world in itself, or manifestations of the human perspective? Questions of this kind have been at the heart of metaphysics of time since antiquity. The latter view has much in common with pragmatism, though few in these debates are aware of that connection, and few of the view’s proponents think of themselves as pragmatists. For their part, pragmatists are often unaware of this (...) congenial application of their methodology; some associate pragmatism with the other side of the old debate in the metaphysics of time. In my view, this link between time and pragmatism only scratches the surface of the deep two-way dependencies between these two topics. The human temporal perspective turns out to be deeply implicated not merely in our temporal notions themselves, but in many other conceptual categories – arguably, in fact, in all of them, and in the nature of language and thought. In this way, reflection on our own temporal character vindicates James’ famous slogan for global pragmatism: ‘The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything.’. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the advantages of a theory of political representation for a prag- matist theory of (global) democracy. I first outline Dewey’s disregard for political rep- resentation by analyzing the political, epistemological and aesthetic underpinnings of his criticism of the Enlightenment ideal of democracy and its trust in the power of the detached gaze. I then show that a theory of political representation is not only com- patible with a pragmatist Deweyan-pragmatist perspective on democratic politics but (...) also that Dewey’s concept of “publics”, if applied to contemporary circumstances of globalized politics, requires such a theory. I suggest a pragmatic theory of political rep- resentation that combines elements of Dewey’s aesthetics, particularly his own theory of vision, with Michael Saward’s conception of representative claim-making into the notion of aesthetic democratic representation. (shrink)

English Abstract This work expands the crucial and evolving Inter-American philosophical dialogue from its current state, which has focused on establishing commonalities between the Americas, to include conversations that intelligently and candidly address points of contention. This paper strives to constructively introduce into this dialogue a trenchant critique of one of the most influential English language philosophers of the Americas – John Dewey—made by one of the most influential Spanish language philosophers of the Americas – José Vasconcelos. In particular, this (...) paper examines Vasconcelos’ charge that Dewey’s Pragmatism was merely a gunship philosophy designed to provide ideological cover for a U.S. led Anglo-Saxon global empire. This critique merits scholarly attention not only because it is virtually unknown among English language philosophers (as it is still only available in Spanish), but because it anticipates later discussions about the relationship between Pragmatism, democracy and empire in the United States. -/- Resumen en español Este trabajo expande el diálogo filosófico Inter-Americano crucial y en evolución de su estado actual, el cual se ha enfocado en establecer los puntos comunes entre las Américas, para incluír conversaciones que de forma inteligente y cándida abordan los puntos de discordia. Este ensayo se esfuerza para introducir constructivamente al diálogo una crítica incisiva de uno de los más influyentes filósofos de lengua inglesa de las Américas – John Dewey – hecha por uno de los más influyentes filósofos de lengua española de las Américas – José Vasconcelos. En particular, este ensayo examina el aporte de Vasconcelos de que el pragmatismo de Dewey era simplemente una filosofía de intimidación con el único propósito de proveerle un amparo ideológico a un imperio global anglosajón comandado por los Estados Unidos. Esta crítica merece atención académica no solo por ser virtualmente desconocida entre los filósofos de lengua inglesa (por seguir siendo solamente disponible en español), pero porque anticipa siguientes discusiones sobre la relación entre el pragmatismo, la democracia, y el imperio en los Estados Unidos. -/- Resumo em português Este trabalho amplia o diálogo filosófico Interamericano crucial e em evolução do seu estado atual, que tem focado em estabelecer pontos em comum entre as Américas, para incluir conversas que de forma inteligente e candidamente abordem pontos de discórdia. Este artigo se esforça para introduzir construtivamente neste diálogo uma crítica mordaz a um dos mais influentes filósofos de língua inglesa das Américas -- John Dewey -- feito por um dos mais influentes filósofos de língua espanhola das Américas - José Vasconcelos. Em particular, este artigo examina a acusação de Vasconcelos de que o pragmatismo de Dewey era meramente uma filosofia de intimidação para fornecer cobertura ideológica para um imperio global anglo-saxão conduzido pelos EUA. Esta crítica merece a atenção acadêmica não só porque é praticamente desconhecida entre os filósofos de língua inglesa (como ainda só está disponível em espanhol), mas porque antecipa discussões posteriores sobre a relação entre o pragmatismo, a democracia e o império nos Estados Unidos. (shrink)

Pragmatism’s heartening recent revival (spearheaded by Richard Rorty’s bold intervention into analytic philosophy Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) has coalesced into a distinctive philosophical movement frequently referred to as ‘neopragmatism’. This movement interprets the very meaning of pragmatism as rejection of metaphysical commitments: our words do not primarily serve to represent non-linguistic entities, but are tools to achieve a range of human purposes. A particularly thorough and consistent version of this position is Huw Price’s global expressivism. (...) We here critically appraise Price’s understanding of a commitment to pragmatism as a rejection of metaphysics, and argue that such rejection is not as easy or desirable as Price claims. First we argue that Price’s global expressivism itself draws on significant metaphysical assumptions (a ‘word-world’ dualism, and a nominalism concerning the meaning of general terms). Then we seek to resolve neopragmatist anxieties about metaphysics by arguing that metaphysics is indispensable for pragmatist philosophizing insofar as it seeks ways for human beings to realise themselves through practices of understanding reality and their place in it. If, as we argue, metaphysics consists in a maximally general inquiry into the nature and structure of reality, to try to block it seems a puzzling exercise in epistemic self-harm. (shrink)

Abstract. In Dynamics of Reason Michael Friedman proposes a kind of synthesis between the neokantianism of Ernst Cassirer, the logical empiricism of Rudolf Carnap, and the historicism of Thomas Kuhn. Cassirer and Carnap are to take care of the Kantian legacy of modern philosophy of science, encapsulated in the concept of a relativized a priori and the globally rational or continuous evolution of scientific knowledge,while Kuhn´s role is to ensure that the historicist character of scientific knowledge is taken seriously. More (...) precisely, Carnapian linguistic frameworks, guarantee that the evolution of science procedes in a rational manner locally,while Cassirer’s concept of an internally defined conceptual convergence of empirical theories provides the means to maintain the global continuity of scientific reason. In this paper it is argued that Friedman’s neokantian account of scientific reason based on the concept of the relativized a priori underestimates the pragmatic aspects of the dynamics of scientific reason. To overcome this short-coming, I propose to reconsider C.I. Lewis’s account of a pragmatic the priori, recently modernized and elaborated by Hasok Chang. This may be<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br&g t;<br><br><br><br><br><br>Keywords: Dynamics of reason, Paradigms, Logical Empiricism,Neokantianism, Pragmatism, Mathematics, Communicative Rationality. (shrink)

In an era of global interdependence, the concept of autonomy may no longer name our core moral need. Shifting friendships and enmities across political boundaries bear significant consequences for the individual. Perhaps social alliances and hostilities have always had an impact on the flourishing of individuals and communities. But globalization (especially as viewed through the technology of the information age) magnifies the impact of external forces on sovereign bodies. These forces remind individuals of the need to establish the right (...) kind of connections, and diminish (but do not exclude) the relative importance of autonomy for moral and political discourse. (shrink)

According to recent suggestions within the global pragmatism discussion, metaethical debate must be fundamentally re-framed. Instead of carving out metaethical differences in representational terms, it has been argued that metaethics should be given an inferentialist footing. In this paper, I put inferentialist metaethics to the test by subjecting it to the following two criteria for success: Inferentialist metaethicists must be able to save the metaethical differences between moral realism and expressivism, and do so in a way that employs (...) understandings of these metaethical accounts which would be acceptable to moral realists or expressivists who endorse an inferentialist theory of meaning. Two results follow from my discussion. The first concerns inferentialist metaethics more narrowly, casting doubts on inferentialists’ ability to fulfil the two criteria for success by showing that proposed metaethical demarcation attempts either meet the first criterion but violate the second, or pass the second criterion but fail the first. The second upshot pertains to the global pragmatism debate more widely, pressing the point that inferentialists have not as yet provided a convincing account of ontological commitment. (shrink)

For Van Rensselaer Potter (1911–2001), Global Bio-Ethics is about building on the legacy of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), one of the most notable forest managers of the twentieth century who brought to light the importance of pragmatism in the sciences and showed us a new way to proceed with environmental ethics. Following Richard Huxtable and Jonathan Ives's methodological 'Framework for Empirical Bioethics Research Projects' called 'Mapping, framing, shaping,' published in BMC Medicine Ethics (2019)), we propose operationalizing a framework for (...) Global Bio-Ethics by hybridizing approaches in empirical bioethics and ecosystem management. We explain this framework using the metaphor of forest management. This mixed approach is articulated through three phases: (1) mapping the “landscape” to build a working theory, (2) framing the “scene” to prepare the fieldwork, and (3) shaping bioethics “tools” to stimulate cooperation. Applying this methodology, an adaptive management cycle is outlined to help ensure that political processes are sustainable and socially acceptable, still based on strategic and ethical thinking, but also capable of reshaping failing policies. (shrink)

Local expressivism is the idea that some kinds of sentences express mental states other than beliefs. Global expressivism is the idea that all sentences are similarly expressive (of attitudes) instead of representational. They appear to disagree, but due to the vagueness of these big-picture ideas, the disagreement between them has not yet been clearly pinned down and has been suspected to be empty. This paper fixes this problem and shows not only how and where they disagree, but also that (...) their disagreement is more profound than it has usually been conceived as. I first show that local and global expressivism have very different conceptual origins and thus that we should not think of them as carrying the same project to different extents. I then show their disagreement: global expressivists think that the meaning of all kinds of sentences is primarily inferential, and the meaningfulness of language is to be primarily explained by our trying to agree with our peers, while local expressivists think that the meaning of some kinds of sentences is primarily representational, and the meaningfulness of language is to be primarily explained by our trying to agree with the environment. An important upshot of this reframing of the debate is that global expressivists’ arguments to convince local expressivists are not successful. (shrink)

This collection stands out from what has come to resemble a cottage industry of volumes on global democracy and cosmopolitanism. Tan and Whalen-Bridge’s collection has the distinction of exploring whether Deweyan democracy, or the account of democracy inspired by Dewey’s writings and embraced by contemporary Deweyans, can be disseminated globally and across diverse cultures. According to the collection’s editors, the eleven essays share a single approach: ‘By examining the implications for conceiving of democracy as culture, rather than as something (...) that precedes or follows from cultural formations, the essays in this volume consider Dewey’s adumbrations of democracy as one face of globalization’ (1). Since the volume is dedicated to the late Richard Rorty, it is unsurprising that the relevance of Rorty’s neopragmatism to Dewey’s pragmatism also emerges in several of the essays. (shrink)

The global relation between logical empiricism and American pragmatism is one of the more difficult problems in history of philosophy. In this paper I’d like to take a local perspective and concentrate on the details that concern the vicissitudes of a philosopher who played an important role in the encounter of logical empiricism and American pragmatism, namely, Ernest Nagel. In this paper, I want to explore some aspects of Nagel’s changing attitude towards the then „new“ logical-empiricist philosophy. (...) In the beginning Nagel welcomed logical empiricism whole-heartedly. This early enthusiasm did not last. At the end of his philosophical career Nagel’s early positive attitude towards logical empiricism shown in the 1930s had been replaced by a much more reserved one. Nagel’s growing dissatisfaction with the Carnapian version of logical empiricist philosophy was clearly expressed in Nagel’s criticism of Carnap’s inductive logic and more generally in his last book Teleology Revisited and Other Essays on History and Philosophy of Science. There he critized harshly Carnap’s philosophy of science in general as ahistoric and non-pragmatist. One of the distinctive features of Nagel’s philosophy of science is the emphasis that he put on the role of history of science for philosophy of science. A compelling evidence for this attitude are his works on the history and philosophy of geometry and algebra One may say that Carnap and Nagel represented opposed possibilities of how the profession of a philosopher of science could be understood: Carnap as a „conceptual engineer“ was engaged in the task of inventing the conceptual tools for a better theoretical understanding of science, while Nagel was to be considered more as a „public intellectual“ engaged in the project of realizing a more rational and enlightened society. (shrink)

the two-and-a-half years that Dewey lived in Japan and China offered him an East-West comparative standpoint to examine Euro-American presuppositions. In subsequent work, he took steps in the direction of a global philosophical outlook by promoting a fusion of aesthetic refinements with democratic experimentalism. The year 2021 marks the centennial of Dewey’s return to the United States, yet philosophers in this country have only begun to take in an emerging global philosophical scene that includes unfamiliar questions, angles, idioms, (...) and emphases. This includes American pragmatists. In a sense, as Gregory Pappas has observed in the context of Latin American philosophies, pragmatism did not “grow up” in the United... (shrink)

This study focuses on the foundations of Slovak critical environmentalism laid by work of Juraj Kučírek, who is also the author of the first ever monograph focused on the philosophical reflection of the causes and possible consequences of the global environmental crisis in Slovakia. Kučírek pointed out the need to combine reflection on subsequent solution of the global environmental crisis with the problems of social inequality and oppression. This unconventional approach in the context of the Slovak public and (...) academic discourse of the 1990s he termed as environmental anthropocentrism. Thus, he had a critical approach to biocentric concepts, which gained a dominant position in the Slovak environmental discourse. His work was followed by Ivan Dubnička, who extended Kučírek´s position to include cultural, political, and religious aspects of the causes of environmental devastation. His research was focused on the relationships of sociobiological and sociocultural determinants that shape human behaviour as a result of biological and cultural evolution. Based on evolutionism and anthropocentrism, he developed the concept of environmental pragmatism. Concepts of both are characterized by the critique of biocentric egalitarianism principle and the emphasis on democratic and human rights aspects of environmental devastation, as well as social and political causes of these phenomena. (shrink)

Any treatment of the relationship between pragmatism and politics would be incomplete without considering the multiple areas in which pragmatist thought and political studies intersect. Extensive scholarly work on pragmatism and politics can be found in the broad literature on political science, democratic theory, global political theory, public administration, and public policy. To a lesser extent, scholarship employing a pragmatist approach can be found in other subfields of political studies, including American politics and international relations. Unfortunately, the (...) few works in these subfi elds tend to appeal to a generic form of pragmatism (e.g., pragmatism as brute instrumentalism or pragmatism as vicious opportunism), not the robust version associated with classic and contemporary philosophical pragmatism.1 Most works on classic pragmatism and politics draw heavily on John Dewey’s political writings. Pragmatism’s two other founders remained relatively silent on the subject; in Robert Talisse’s words, “neither [Charles Sanders] Peirce nor [William] James wrote systematically about politics.” Neo-pragmatist treatments of politics can be found in the works of the late Richard Rorty, Cornell West, and Richard Posner. (shrink)

Eliminativism is a position most readily associated with the eliminative materialism of the Churchlands, denying that there are such things as propositional states. This position has created much controversy, despite the fact that intentionality has long been seen as perhaps the core problem for naturalistic philosophy. There is a more radical interpretation of eliminativism, however, denying not only mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but also intentionality (i.e., aboutness) on a global level. This position traces its contemporary origin (...) back to Quine, but has generally been assumed to undermine naturalism or, worse, to be incoherent by the majority of philosophers who maintain that there clearly are things or mental states that are about others. In a recent paper, Hutto and Satne (2015a) offer an update that tries to revive John Haugeland’s baseball analogy from his influential 1990 review paper The Intentionality All-Stars on the state of the game to argue that the failure of Neo-Cartesians, Neo- Behaviorists, and Neo-Pragmatists should urge us to make them work together to naturalize content and “win the game.” But Hutto and Satne misunderstand what the game is ultimately about. The goal of the Intentionality All-Stars is not to naturalize content against eliminativism but to defend a naturalist “thirdperson” view of the problem against first-person phenomenalists. For this goal, a naturalist defense of global content eliminativism would equally enable them to emerge victorious. Revisiting Haugeland, I will offer my own analysis of the current state of play to argue that global content eliminativism has not received sufficient attention and deserves a more prominent place in the debate than it currently occupies. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, the logic and functions of character-trait ascriptions in ethics and epistemology is compared, and two major problems, the "generality problem" for virtue epistemologies and the "global trait problem" for virtue ethics, are shown to be far more similar in structure than is commonly acknowledged. I suggest a way to put the generality problem to work by making full and explicit use of a sliding scale--a "narrow-broad spectrum of trait ascription"-- and by accounting for the various (...) uses of it in an inquiry-pragmatist account. In virtue theories informed by inquiry pragmatism, the agential habits and abilities deemed salient in explanations/evaluations of agents in particular cases, and the determination of what relevant domains and conditions an agent's habit or ability is reliably efficacious in, is determined by pragmatic concerns related to our evaluative epistemic practices. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that global scientific promises aka “scientific world-conceptions” have an interesting history that should be taken into account also for contemporary debates. I argue that the prototypes of many contemporary philosophical positions concerning the role of science in society can already be found in the philosophy of science of the 1920s and 1930s. First to be mentioned in this respect is the Scientific World-Conception of the Vienna Circle (The Manifesto) that promised to (...) contribute to the realization of an enlightened, rational and science-oriented society and culture. The Manifesto was not the only „scientific world-conception“ that philosophers and scientists put forward in the 1920s. Also the scientific world-conception of the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, and the Weltanschauung of Sigmund Freud deserve to be mentioned. Still other examples of are Carnap’s Scientific Humanism and the project of The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science which was related to American pragmatism as well, as is shown by Charles W. Morris and others. Forgotten for a long time, since the beginning of the 21rst century, at least some of the Viennese projects are reconsidered in a new wave of „socially engaged philosophy of science”. (shrink)

In chapter 14 of Zahavi’s recent book, Self and Other, the notion of shame is discussed. In feeling shame one experiences oneself as experienced by others. For Sartre, that experience in itself is sufficient for shame, as one experiences oneself as determined in the experience of others and hence as shamefully not self-determining. But Zahavi introduces an extra condition for shame, which is a ‘global decrease in self-esteem’. This paper questions the need for this condition and argues that seeing (...) oneself as shameful in the eyes of others needs to be spelt out in a pragmatist way in terms of certain shame-involving practices rather than in a purely phenomenological way. (shrink)

Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. -/- As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; (...) it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and that of the relationship between the same and the other. -/- Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist. The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges’ essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. (shrink)

John Dewey proposed soon after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that citizens of techno-industrial nations suffer from "cultural lag" (LW 15:199-200; cf. LW 4:203-28). He had in mind a sort of moral jet lag, a condition in which most of the basic alternatives we have on hand to think and talk about moral and political life, from customary moralizing to sophisticated theorizing, were developed, canned, and pickled on a shelf so long ago that they now lag far behind (...) the multi-faceted problems that our values must speak to. The failure of many countries, most visibly the United States, to effectively navigate climate change and the Covid-19 global pandemic exemplifies our moral jet lag. Our collective responses to the new normal of global disruptions are, in William James’s words in Pragmatism, “out of plumb and out of key and out of ‘whack’” (1907, 37). The American philosophical tradition that includes James and Dewey has long sought to compensate for the excesses of America’s hyper-individualism and its anti-naturalistic distrust of experimental intelligence. In this brief analysis of our morally jet lagged response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we draw heavily on two highly articulated intellectual resources for America’s moral, political, and educational recovery: Jane Addams’s social ethics and Dewey’s deeply democratic theory of moral and political deliberation. (shrink)

Habermas's collection of essays "The Future of Human Nature" is of particular interest for two sorts of reasons. For those interested in bioethics, it contains a genuinely new set of arguments for placing serious restrictions on using prenatal genetic technologies to “enhance” offspring. And for those interested in Habermas’s moral philosophy, it contains a number of new developments in his “discourse ethics”—not the least of which is a willingness to engage in applied ethics at all. -/- The real key to (...) Habermas’s argument is that human personhood and moral agency presuppose certain modes of relating to oneself that are threatened by the asymmetrical way in which genetic enhancements would presumably work. Thus, instead of taking up and then extending familiar normative concerns about unequal opportunities or the criteria for moral personhood, Habermas believes that the emerging technologies of genetic enhancement demand genuinely new arguments, and he proposes to focus on the effects of genetic programming on whether the agent can consider herself free and equal—effects, that is, regarding what one might call the reflexive attitudinal preconditions for moral agency. -/- Like contractarians and Kantians more generally, Habermas faces difficulties accommodating the intuition that we might have obligations toward potential persons. The difficulty is particularly pronounced in the case of Habermas’s “discourse theory of morality,” since it construes the moral point of view in terms of processes of deliberation among all those affected by the norm at issue which the participants consider in the deliberative process to be open, fair, and inclusive. Future generations do not fit neatly into this deliberative process, nor do prepersonal humans. Moral norms adjudicated in such discourse clearly affect their interests, but they cannot themselves participate in the discourse. In the past, Habermas and other “discourse ethicists” have tried to address this worry by introducing “advocatory discourses.” But this move threatens to undo a distinctive, appealing feature of Habermas’s moral theory: the pragmatist insistence on the innovative, critical, unpredictable discourse generated by actual participants in discourse and the refusal (contra Rawls, in particular) to rely on hypothetical representatives. -/- In The Future of Human Nature, Habermas ventures a different strategy,focused on expanding what he calls the “ethical” domain, which differs from the “moral” domain in being a matter of a community’s articulation of its core values and conception of the good. Previously, Habermas distinguished “ethical-existential” and “ethical-political” domains, as a matter of who an individual or a community, respectively, is and wants to be. In the present book, Habermas makes the remarkable move of introducing the category of the “species-ethical,” which is supposed to be the domain of questions raised by the human species as a whole about the question of what it is to be human. This theoretical move extends further steps Habermas had already taken in speaking of ethical solidarity within the global community. -/- . (shrink)

Little attention is given to Richard Rorty’s metaethical views. No doubt this stems from the fact that most commentators are more interested in his metaphilosophical views; most see his metaethical views, offered in scattered passages, as just the downstream runoff from higher-level reflection. This article considers Rorty’s metaethics on their own merits, quite apart from whether his global picture works. I ultimately argue that Rorty’s metaethical outlook is attractive but beset by internal difficulties. Specifically, I contend that Rorty does (...) not and cannot remain faithful to the methodological approach to metaethics for which he advocates. At the paper’s close, I gesture at a nearby methodological approach that best approximates Rorty’s metaethical methodology. (shrink)

MERC Global’s International Journal of Management (MERC Global’s IJM) is an international peer-reviewed, open access quarterly journal of management science, being brought out with a view to facilitating effective dissemination of the latest thinking and research with respect to various management issues and problem solving methodology relevant for practicing executives as well as for academicians and researchers working in the field of management around the globe. -/- MERC Global’s IJM publishes articles, research papers, abstracts of doctoral dissertations, (...) book reviews, case studies, short communications and bibliography that are interdisciplinary in nature as well as those within the major disciplines, including: marketing, OB/HR, entrepreneurship, production, operations, accounting, finance, business economics, international business, information technology management, social sector management, public sector management, healthcare management, management strategy, research methods, and so forth. (shrink)

Eetu Pikkarainen describes the educational thinking of Johann AmosComenius (1592-1670) from a perspective of Bildung -theoretical problems. Comenius has had a remarkable influence on modern education, particularly through his language-learning and general didactical methods and principles. However, Comenius’ broader pansophic views have had somewhat more benign later effects. Comenius developed a reformation programme concerning the ‘main areas’ of reality, from theology and education to philosophy and language to social questions and world peace. This program has important connections to the modern (...) theories of Bildung. Comenius connects individual human growth with global issues such as the growth of scientific knowledge, the justice of political systems, and world peace. In his philosophy, Comenius strongly criticises the problems of the rising modern thinking such as trapping to dualisms. From that angle, Comenius appears an almost postmodern thinker with surprising similarity to the thoughts of C S Peirce. (shrink)

MERC Global’s International Journal of Management (MERC Global’s IJM) is an international peer-reviewed, open access quarterly journal of management science, being brought out with a view to facilitating effective dissemination of the latest thinking and research with regard to various management issues and problem solving methodology relevant for practicing executives as well as for academicians and researchers working in the field of management around the globe. -/- MERC Global’s IJM publishes articles, research papers, abstracts of doctoral dissertations, (...) book reviews, case studies, short communications and bibliography that are interdisciplinary in nature as well as those within the major disciplines, including: marketing, OB/HR, entrepreneurship, production, operations, accounting, finance, business economics, international business, information technology management, social sector management, public sector management, healthcare management, management strategy, research methods etc. (shrink)

What should the Buddhist attitude be to rebirth if it is believed to be inconsistent with current science? This chapter critically engages forms of Buddhist agnosticism that adopt a position of uncertainty about rebirth but nevertheless recommend ‘behaving as if’ it were true. What does it mean to behave as if rebirth were true, and are Buddhist agnostics justified in adopting this position? This chapter engages this question in dialogue with Mark Siderits’ reductionist analysis of the Buddhist doctrine of the (...) two truths, conventional and ultimate. Richard Hayes (1998) characterises talk of rebirth as a useful fiction. Siderits characterises talk of persons as a useful fiction and explains and justifies statements that involve it as conventionally true despite persons not featuring in our final or ultimate ontology. Does rebirth satisfy the same criteria to count as conventionally true, and does thinking of it in these terms help explain and justify what it might mean to behave as if rebirth were true? This chapter will defend a conditional yes to these questions. In the process, it will clarify what is distinctive about the traditional Buddhist approach to rebirth, provide an analysis of how the concept of rebirth might relate to practical outcomes, and address some limitations of this approach. (shrink)

Feminist theorists have shown that knowledge is embodied in ways that make a difference in science. Intemann properly endorses feminist standpoint theory over Longino’s empiricism, insofar as the former better addresses embodiment. I argue that a pragmatist analysis further improves standpoint theory: Pragmatism avoids the radical subjectivity that otherwise leaves us unable to account for our ability to share scientific knowledge across bodies of different kinds; and it allows us to argue for the inclusion, not just of the knowledge (...) produced from marginalised bodies, but of the marginalised themselves. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is examine the recent literature on the intersection between philosophical pragmatism and International Relations (IR), including IR theory and IR research methodology. One of the obstacles to motivating pragmatist IR theories and research methodologies, I contend, is the difficulty of defining pragmatism, particularly whether there is a need for a more generic definition of pragmatism or one narrowly tailored to the goals of IR theorists and researchers.

This chapter examines the pragmatist approach to cognition and experience and provides some of the conceptual background to the “pragmatic turn” currently underway in cognitive science. Classical pragmatists wrote extensively on cognition from a naturalistic perspective, and many of their views are compatible with contemporary pragmatist approaches such as enactivist, extended, and embodied-Bayesian approaches to cognition. Three principles of a pragmatic approach to cognition frame the discussion: First, thinking is structured by the interaction of an organism with its environment. Second, (...) cognition develops via exploratory inference, which remains a core cognitive ability throughout the life cycle. Finally, inquiry/problem solving begins with genuinely irritating doubts that arise in a situation and is carried out by exploratory inference. (shrink)

Pragmatism is resurging, especially among embodied cognitive scientists. The growing appreciation of the body accompanying this fits with increasing recognition that cognition and perception are valuative, which is to say, emotional, interested and aesthetic. In what follows, I detail how classical pragmatic thinking—specifically that of William James and John Dewey—anticipates recent valuative theories of mind and how it can be used to develop them further.I begin by discussing James's concept of selective interests, how it meshes with contemporary research and (...) how the two together suggest not only that cognition is valuative, but that emotions bring us rationally into touch with our worlds. Recent advocates cite... (shrink)

This volume offers a collection of in-depth explorations of pragmatism as a framework for discussions in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Each chapter involves explicit reflection on what it means to be pragmatist, and how to use pragmatism as a guiding framework in addressing topics such as realism, unification, fundamentality, truth, laws, reduction, and more. -/- .

Almost twenty years ago, a genuinely new school of thought emerged in the field of jurisprudential methodology. It is a pragmatist school. Roughly, the pragmatists contend that, when inquiring about the nature of law, we should evaluate potential answers based on practical criteria. For many legal philosophers, this contention seems both unclear and unhinged. That appearance is lamentable. The pragmatist approach to jurisprudential methodology has received insufficient attention for at least two reasons. First, the pragmatists do not conceive of themselves (...) as comprising a school; in fact, these proponents have different names for their common position, which makes it hard to see the commonalities. Second, the most famous statement of the pragmatist view has received withering criticism, criticism that has not been sufficiently answered, a fact that may lead opponents of pragmatism, as well as potential supporters, to doubt that a viable view of this kind can be held. This Essay aims to serve as a corrective. (shrink)

Nietzsche holds that one should believe what best promotes life, and he also accepts the correspondence theory of truth. I’ll call this conjunction of views Nietzschean pragmatism. This article provides textual evidence for attributing this pragmatist position to Nietzsche and explains how his broader metaethical views led him to it.The following section introduces Nietzschean pragmatism, discussing how Nietzsche expresses it in BGE, and distinguishing it from William James’s pragmatism about truth. The second section explains how Nietzsche’s skepticism (...) about values that can’t be grounded in individual passion attracted him to this kind of pragmatism. The third section explores an early application of Nietzschean... (shrink)

According to doxastic pragmatism, certain perceived practical factors, such as high stakes and urgency, have systematic effects on normal subjects’ outright beliefs. Upholders of doxastic pragmatism have so far endorsed a particular version of this view, which we may call threshold pragmatism. This view holds that the sensitivity of belief to the relevant practical factors is due to a corresponding sensitivity of the threshold on the degree of credence necessary for outright belief. According to an alternative but (...) yet unrecognised version of doxastic pragmatism, practical factors affect credence rather than the threshold on credence. Let’s call this alternative view credal pragmatism. In this paper, I argue that credal pragmatism is more plausible than threshold pragmatism. I show that the former view better accommodates a cluster of intuitive and empirical data. I conclude by considering the issue of whether our doxastic attitudes’ sensitivity to practical factors can be considered rational, and if yes, in what sense. (shrink)

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of (...) class='Hi'>pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism. (shrink)

Pragmatism is typically understood as a philosophy embedded in scientific inquiry. Thinkers, like Charles Peirce (1877), C.I. Lewis (1923) and Susan Haack (1998) envisioned pragmatism and its scientific inquiry as a method of systematizing our beliefs and acquiring knowledge. They thought that scientific practice and its implied standards, techniques, and values is the only source of hope for scientific and philosophical progress. In this dissertation, I construct a pragmatic approach to the meta-ethical questions of our moral truths, beliefs (...) and principles that proposes a normative systematization of ethics grounded in moral practice, development and experimentation. I argue that maintaining a pragmatic faith in the origination and formation of our moral constitutions will provide us with a realist, cognitivist and objective view of reality subject to the capacities of our human cognition and empirical evidence and not subject to metaphysical and universal methods of reasoning. (shrink)

In this article I examine the main conceptions of public reason in contemporary political philosophy in order to set the frame for appreciating the novelty of the pragmatist understanding of public reason as based upon the notion of consequences and upon a theory of rationality as inquiry. The approach is inspired by Dewey but is free from any concern with history of philosophy. The aim is to propose a different understanding of the nature of public reason aimed at overcoming the (...) limitations of the existing approaches. Public reason is presented as the proper basis for discussing contested issues in the broad frame of deep democracy. (shrink)

C. S. Peirce once defined pragmatism as the opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: ‘Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’ (Peirce 1982a: 48) More succinctly, Richard Rorty has described the position in this way.

Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct. -/- In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth (...) as correspondence, I develop a kind of alethic pluralism, which treats pragmatist truth as theoretically fundamental to truth as correspondence. This theoretical fundamentality of pragmatist truth allows the pragmatist to conditionally accept truth as correspondence for certain discourses without falling prey to the typical pragmatist objections to correspondence. This pluralist account of truth thus allows pragmatists to concede that, for certain domains of discourse, truth is correspondence, without thereby betraying their pragmatist principles. (shrink)

In a series of ten articles from leading American and European scholars, Pragmatist Epistemologies explores the central themes of epistemology in the pragmatist tradition through a synthesis of new and old pragmatist thought, engaging contemporary issues while exploring from a historical perspective. It opens a new avenue of research in contemporary pragmatism continuous with the main figures of pragmatist tradition and incorporating contemporary trends in philosophy. Students and scholars of American philosophy will find this book indispensable.

A theory of learning for the future advocates the teaching of a preparedness to respond in a creative way to difference and otherness. This includes an ability to act imaginatively in situations of uncertainties. John Dewey’s pragmatism holds the key to such a learning theory his view of the continuous meetings of individuals and environments as experimental and playful. That pragmatism has not yet been acknowledged as a relevant learning theory for the future may be due to the (...) immediate connotation and the many interpretations associated with the term ‘experience’, which is at the heart of Dewey’s educational thinking. Dewey defi ned experience in a way that is not well understood within educational research, and in a way that is easily confused with the term ‘experiential learning’. The latter refers to the importance of participants’ ‘experiences’ derived from bodily actions and stored in memory as more or less tacit knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter introduces and defends a pragmatist model of aesthetic disagreement that avoids many of the philosophical puzzles generated by the traditional, semantic, approach. Mainstream philosophical inquiry into aesthetic disagreement begins with a rather innocuous assumption: to understand what’s going on we must first explain what disputants are saying, which involves identifying the meaning of the relevant expressions or determining how aesthetic claims could be true. However, this task brings with it a new host of semantic and epistemic puzzles and (...) fails to vindicate the central role aesthetic disagreements occupy in our aesthetic lives more generally. Further, it isn’t clear how settling the meaning of aesthetic expressions bears on everyday aesthetic disagreements. Paying attention to what we do in an aesthetic disagreement will give us a better chance at identifying what matters for determining what we say. (shrink)

Richard Bernstein is among the pragmatist philosophers that have most significantly contributed to the advancement of a philosophical conversation between the American and the European traditions. His work has greatly helped the task of dismantling the boundaries that in the last decades had been erected between philosophical traditions. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure that The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy inaugurates his series of monographs with Bernstei...

Overview of the pragmatist philosophy of history.

A common objection to a pragmatist perspective on scientific expertise is that, while there is a well-known pragmatist theory of inquiry, which was formulated first by Peirce, then refined by Dewey and others, this theory cannot provide a clear-cut account of scientific expertise. In this paper, after addressing this objection in the second section, I claim that, on the contrary, pragmatism offers robust tools to think scientific expertise. In Sections 3 to 7, I present five important insights that one (...) can derive from a pragmatist epistemology when responding to contemporary problems posed by expertise: about science and scientific expertise in a legal context (sections 3 and 4), about collective expertise (sections 5 and 6), and even about expertise on ignorance (section 7). (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

In classical American pragmatism, fallibilism refers to the conception of truth as an ongoing process of improving human knowledge that is nevertheless susceptible to error. This paper traces appearances of fallibilism in Jewish thought in general, and particularly in the halakhic thought of Eliezer Berkovits. Berkovits recognizes the human condition’s persistent mutability, which he sees as characterizing the ongoing effort to interpret and apply halakhah in shifting historical and social contexts as Torat Ḥayyim. In the conclusion of the article, (...) broader questions and observations are raised regarding Jewish tradition, fallibility, and modernity, and the interaction between Judaism and pragmatism in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic (...) approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’. (shrink)

Richard Rorty is well known as a propagandist of pragmatism and of a "post-philosophical" culture in which many traditional philosophical debates are dismissed as outrightly fruitless. The paper is mainly concerned with Rorty's dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate. The shift from argument to propaganda which is typical of much of Rorty's reasoning is critically investigated from different perspectives. In particular, it is argued that Rorty cannot convincingly establish a pragmatist position beyond realism and antirealism, and that pragmatism seems (...) to be inadequate with respect to scientific practice. Finally, the fruitfulness of the realism-antirealism debate is defended. (shrink)