Download or read book Poetry and Pragmatism written by Richard Poirier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.
Download or read book Philosophy as Poetry written by Richard Rorty and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-12-07 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound awareness of philosophical tradition and an urgent concern for how we create a society. As Michael Bérubé writes in his introduction to this new volume, Rorty looked upon philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." Drawn from Rorty’s acclaimed 2004 Page-Barbour lectures, Philosophy as Poetry distills many of the central ideas in his work. Rorty begins by addressing poetry and philosophy, which are often seen as contradictory pursuits. He offers a view of philosophy as a poem, beginning with the ancient Greeks and rewritten by succeeding generations of philosophers seeking to improve it. He goes on to examine analytic philosophy and the rejection by some philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, of the notion of philosophical problems that have solutions. The book concludes with an invigorating suspension of intellectual borders as Rorty focuses on the romantic tradition and relates it to philosophic thought. This book makes an ideal starting place for anyone looking for an introduction to Rorty’s thought and his contribution to our sense of an American pragmatism, as well as an understanding of his influence and the controversy that attended his work. Page-Barbour Lectures
Download or read book The Poetics of Transition written by Jonathan Levin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers the work of American pragmatists and of three major literary modernists, and reveals how their work foregrounds William James's concept of transitional consciousness.
Download or read book American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice written by Kristen Case and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2011 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wittgenstein wrote that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." American poetry has long engaged questions about subject and object, self and environment, reality and imagination, real and ideal that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment. Kristen Case's book argues that American poets from Emerson to Susan Howe have responded to the central problems of Western philosophy by performing, in language, the continually shifting relation between mind and world. Pragmatism, recognizing the futility of philosophy's attempt to fix the mind/world relation, announces the insights that these poets enact. Pursuing the flights of pragmatist thinking into poetry and poetics, Case traces an epistemology that emerges from American writing, including that of Emerson, Marianne Moore, William James, and Charles Olson. Here mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "part and parcel of Nature." Case presents a new picture of twentieth-century American poetry that disrupts our sense of the schools and lineages of modern and postmodern poetics, arguing that literary history is most accurately figured as a living field rather than a line. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and twentieth-century American poetry. Kristen Case is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington.
Download or read book Cognitive Pragmatism written by Nicholas Rescher and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cognitive Pragmatism, Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we've come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings.Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there's no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, "If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State." In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science.
Download or read book The Pragmatic Whitman written by Stephen John Mack and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this surprisingly timely book, Stephen Mack examines Whitman’s particular and fascinating brand of patriotism: his far-reaching vision of democracy. For Whitman, loyalty to America was loyalty to democracy. Since the idea that democracy is not just a political process but a social and cultural process as well is associated with American pragmatism, Mack relies on the pragmatic tradition of Emerson, James, Dewey, Mead, and Rorty to demonstrate the ways in which Whitman resides in this tradition. Mack analyzes Whitman's democratic vision both in its parts and as a whole; he also describes the ways in which Whitman's vision evolved throughout his career. He argues that Whitman initially viewed democratic values such as individual liberty and democratic processes such as collective decision-making as fundamental, organic principles, free and unregulated. But throughout the 1860s and 1870s Whitman came to realize that democracy entailed processes of human agency that are more deliberate and less natural—that human destiny is largely the product of human effort, and a truly humane society can be shaped only by intelligent human efforts to govern the forces that would otherwise govern us. Mack describes the foundation of Whitman’s democracy as found in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, examines the ways in which Whitman’s 1859 sexual crisis and the Civil War transformed his democratic poetics in “Sea-Drift,” “Calamus,” Drum-Taps,and Sequel to Drum-Taps, and explores Whitman’s mature vision in Democratic Vistas, concluding with observations on its moral and political implications today. Throughout, he illuminates Whitman's great achievement—learning that a full appreciation for the complexities of human life meant understanding that liberty can take many different and conflicting forms—and allows us to contemplate the relevance of that achievement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Naturalism written by Matthew C. Bagger and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most contemporary philosophers would call themselves naturalists, yet there is little consensus on what naturalism entails. Long signifying the notion that science should inform philosophy, debates over naturalism often hinge on how broadly or narrowly the terms nature and science are defined. The founding figures of American Pragmatism—C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952)—developed a distinctive variety of naturalism by rejecting reductive materialism and instead emphasizing social practices. Owing to this philosophical lineage, pragmatism has made original and insightful contributions to the study of religion as well as to political theory. In Pragmatism and Naturalism, distinguished scholars examine pragmatism’s distinctive form of nonreductive naturalism and consider its merits for the study of religion, democratic theory, and as a general philosophical orientation. Nancy Frankenberry, Philip Kitcher, Wayne Proudfoot, Jeffrey Stout, and others evaluate the contribution pragmatism can make to a viable naturalism, explore what distinguishes pragmatic naturalism from other naturalisms on offer, and address the pertinence of pragmatic naturalism to methodological issues in the study of religion. In parts dedicated to historical pragmatists, pragmatism in the philosophy and the study of religion, and pragmatism and democracy, they display the enduring power and contemporary relevance of pragmatic naturalism.
Download or read book How to Read a Poem written by Terry Eagleton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-10-20 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How To Read A Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader. Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content. Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis. Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and many more. Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.
Download or read book Lincoln s Tragic Pragmatism written by John Burt and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 818 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice In 1858, challenger Abraham Lincoln debated incumbent Stephen Douglas seven times in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. More was at stake than slavery in those debates. In Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism, John Burt contends that the very legitimacy of democratic governance was on the line. In a United States stubbornly divided over ethical issues, the overarching question posed by the Lincoln-Douglas debates has not lost its urgency: Can a liberal political system be used to mediate moral disputes? And if it cannot, is violence inevitable? “John Burt has written a work that every serious student of Lincoln will have to read...Burt refracts Lincoln through the philosophy of Kant, Rawls and contemporary liberal political theory. His is very much a Lincoln for our time.” —Steven B. Smith, New York Times Book Review “I'm making space on my overstuffed shelves for Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism. This is a book I expect to be picking up and thumbing through for years to come.” —Jim Cullen, History News Network “Burt treats the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates as being far more significant than an election contest between two candidates. The debates represent profound statements of political philosophy and speak to the continuing challenges the U.S. faces in resolving divisive moral conflicts.” —E. C. Sands, Choice
Download or read book Philosophy and Social Hope written by Richard Rorty and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1999-08-26 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Rorty is one of the most provocative figures in recent philosophical, literary and cultural debate. This collection brings together those of his writings aimed at a wider audience, many published in book form for the first time. In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives a stimulating summary of his central philosophical beliefs and how they relate to his political hopes; he also offers some challenging insights into contemporary America, justice, education and love.
Download or read book A Natural History of Pragmatism written by Joan Richardson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-12-21 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joan Richardson provides a fascinating and compelling account of the emergence of the quintessential American philosophy: pragmatism. She demonstrates pragmatism's engagement with various branches of the natural sciences and traces the development of Jamesian pragmatism from the late nineteenth century through modernism, following its pointings into the present. Richardson combines strands from America's religious experience with scientific information to offer interpretations that break new ground in literary and cultural history. This book exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary approaches to producing literary criticism. In a series of highly original readings of Edwards, Emerson, William and Henry James, Stevens, and Stein, A Natural History of Pragmatism tracks the interplay of religious motive, scientific speculation, and literature in shaping an American aesthetic. Wide-ranging and bold, this groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of American literature.
Download or read book A Companion to Rorty written by Alan Malachowski and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-13 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking reference work on the revolutionary philosophy and intellectual legacy of Richard Rorty A provocative and often controversial thinker, Richard Rorty and his ideas have been the subject of renewed interest to philosophers working in epistemology, metaphysics, analytic philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Having called for philosophers to abandon representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty introduced radical and challenging concepts to modern philosophy, generating divisive debate through the new form of American pragmatism which he advocated and the renunciation of traditional epistemology which he espoused. However, while Rorty has been one of the most widely-discussed figures in modern philosophy, few volumes have dealt directly with the expansive reach of his thought or its implications for the fields of philosophy in which he worked. The Blackwell Companion to Rorty is a collection of essays by prominent scholars which provide close, and long-overdue, examination of Rorty’s groundbreaking work. Divided into five parts, this volumecovers the major intellectual movements of Rorty’s career from his early work on consciousness and transcendental arguments, to the lasting impacts of his major writings, to his approach to pragmatism and his controversial appropriations from other philosophers, and finally to his later work in culture, politics, and ethics. Offers a comprehensive, balanced, and insightful account of Rorty's approach to philosophy Provides an assessment of Rorty’s more controversial thoughts and his standing as an “anti-philosopher’s philosopher” Contains new and original exploration of Rorty’s thinking from leading scholars and philosophers Includes new perspectives on topics such as Rorty's influence in Central Europe Despite the relevance of Rorty’s work for the wider community of philosophers and for those working in fields such as international relations, legal and political theory, sociology, and feminist studies, the secondary literature surrounding Rorty’s work and legacy is limited. A Companion to Rorty address this absence, providinga comprehensive resource for philosophers and general readers.
Download or read book The New Pragmatist Sociology written by Neil L. Gross and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today. In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism. Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.
Download or read book Kuhn s Legacy written by Bojana Mladenović and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its influence reaches far beyond the philosophy of science, and its key terms, such as “paradigm shift,” “normal science,” and “incommensurability,” are now used in both academic and public discourse without any reference to Kuhn. However, Kuhn’s philosophy is still often misunderstood and underappreciated. In Kuhn’s Legacy, Bojana Mladenović offers a novel analysis of Kuhn’s central philosophical project, focusing on his writings after Structure. Mladenović argues that Kuhn’s historicism was always coupled with a firm and consistent antirelativism but that it was only in his mature writings that Kuhn began to systematically develop an original account of scientific rationality. She reconstructs this account, arguing that Kuhn sees the rationality of science as a form of collective rationality. At the purely formal level, Kuhn’s conception of scientific rationality prohibits obviously irrational beliefs and choices and requires reason-responsiveness as well as the uninterrupted pursuit of inquiry. At the substantive, historicized level, it rests on a distinctly pragmatist mode of justification compatible with a notion of contingent but robust scientific progress. Mladenović argues that Kuhn’s epistemology and his metaphilosophy both represent a creative and fruitful continuation of the tradition of American pragmatism. Kuhn’s Legacy demonstrates the vitality of Kuhn’s philosophical project and its importance for the study of the philosophy and history of science today.
Download or read book The Line s Eye written by Elisa New and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is American vision implicitly possessive, as a generation of critics contends? By viewing the American poetic tradition through the prism of pragmatism, Elisa New contests this claim. A new reading of how poetry "sees," her work is a passionate defense of the power of the poem, the ethics of perception, and the broader possibilities of American sight. American poems see more fully, and less invasively, than accounts of American literature as an inscription of imperial national ideology would allow. Moreover, New argues, their ways of seeing draw on, and develop, a vigorous mode of national representation alternative to the appropriative sort found in the quintessential American genre of encounter, the romance. Grounding her readings of Dickinson, Frost, Moore, and Williams in foundational texts by Edwards, Jefferson, Audubon, and Thoreau, New shows how varieties of attentiveness and solicitude cultivated in the early literature are realized in later poetry. She then discloses how these ideas infuse the philosophical notions about pragmatic experience codified by Emerson, James, and Dewey. As these philosophers insisted, and as New's readings prove, art is where the experience of experience can be had: to read, as to write, a poem is to let the line guide one's way.
Download or read book Realism And Pragmatic Epistemology written by Nicholas Rescher and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2014-02-06 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of philosophical realism from the standpoint of pragmatic epistemology, Realism and Pragmatic Epistemology addresses the core idea of Rescher's work in epistemology: that functional and pragmatic concerns exert a controlling influence on the conduct of rational inquiry and on the ways in which we can and should regard its products.Pragmatism is widely regarded as a philosophical approach that stands at odds with realism, but Rescher takes a very different approach. He views pragmatism as a realistic position that can be developed from a pragmatic point of view, and utilizes a number of case studies to augment his position. Throughout, he shows how the pragmatic and purposive setting of our putative knowledge of the real world proves to be crucial for the constituting and also for the constitution of our knowledge.
Download or read book Democratic Hope written by Robert B. Westbrook and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The pragmatists' response to the claim that theirs is a deeply American philosophy has been less to challenge the claim than to attempt to embrace it on their own terms. . . . One could speak of a national philosophy as one could not speak of a national chemistry or physics. But national cultures were complicated and often conflicted. Hence the relationship between a philosophy and a national culture could be at once close and fraught with tension."—from Democratic Hope Pragmatism, as Richard Rorty has said, "names the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition." In Democratic Hope, Robert B. Westbrook examines the varieties of classical pragmatist thought in the work of John Dewey, William James, and Charles Peirce, testing in good pragmatic fashion the truth of propositions by their consequences in experience. Westbrook also attends to the recent revival of pragmatism by Rorty, Cheryl Misak, Richard Posner, Hilary Putnam, Cornel West, and others and to pragmatist strains in contemporary American political thinking. Westbrook's aims are both historical and political: to ensure that the genealogy of pragmatism is an honest one and to argue for a hopeful vision of deliberative democracy underwritten by a pragmatist epistemology and ethics.
