Download or read book Pragmatism as Transition written by Colin Koopman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools.

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 Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution 1850 1940 written by James Livingston and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an "age

Download or read book Pragmatism as Transition written by Colin Koopman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools.

Download or read book Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr Pragmatism and the Jurisprudence of Agon written by Allen Mendenhall and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes’s literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought: “superfluity” and the “poetics of transition,” concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes’s dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the “canon” of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.

Download or read book Pragmatism in Philosophical Inquiry written by Nicholas Rescher and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy. It does this not only by describing its mode of operation and explaining its legitimating rationale, but also by substantiating its claims by a series of instructive case studies. The unifying insight of this approach is that the natural criterion of merit within any goal-oriented enterprise—be its orientation practical or cognitive—pivots on its contribution to the effective and efficient realization of the aims at issue. The aim of this volume is to describe and illustrate this broadened conception of pragmatism as a far-reaching and many-sided approach to philosophical inquiry. Theoretical considering apart, it offers a variety of case studies to illustrate the range and fertility of this approach. Nicholas Rescher has published extensively on the history and theory of pragmatism and on its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy over the last 30 years.

Download or read book Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism written by Mark David Wood and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wood evaluates the political consequences of a shift in West's position from an earlier, revolutionary socialist stance to a later, progressive reformist one. Wood shows how West's subsequent reworking of Marxism supports his transition from a socialist to a progressivist politics."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Open Science the Very Idea written by Frank Miedema and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book provides a broad context for the understanding of current problems of science and of the different movements aiming to improve the societal impact of science and research. The author offers insights with regard to ideas, old and new, about science, and their historical origins in philosophy and sociology of science, which is of interest to a broad readership. The book shows that scientifically grounded knowledge is required and helpful in understanding intellectual and political positions in various discussions on the grand challenges of our time and how science makes impact on society. The book reveals why interventions that look good or even obvious, are often met with resistance and are hard to realize in practice. Based on a thorough analysis, as well as personal experiences in aids research, university administration and as a science observer, the author provides - while being totally open regarding science's limitations- a realistic narrative about how research is conducted, and how reliable ‘objective’ knowledge is produced. His idea of science, which draws heavily on American pragmatism, fits in with the global Open Science movement. It is argued that Open Science is a truly and historically unique movement in that it translates the analysis of the problems of science into major institutional actions of system change in order to improve academic culture and the impact of science, engaging all actors in the field of science and academia.

Download or read book The Ethics Epistemology and Politics of Richard Rorty written by Giancarlo Marchetti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features fourteen original essays that critically engage the philosophy of Richard Rorty, with an emphasis on his ethics, epistemology, and politics. Inspired by James’ and Dewey’s pragmatism, Rorty urged us to rethink the role of science and truth with a liberal-democratic vision of politics. In doing so, he criticized philosophy as a sheer scholastic endeavor and put it back in touch with our most pressing cultural and human needs. The essays in this volume employ the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy and pragmatism and demonstrate the relevance of Rorty’s thought to the most urgent questions of our time. They touch on a number of topics, including but not limited to structural injustice, rule-following, Black feminist philosophy, legal pragmatism, moral progress, relativism, and skepticism. This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across disciplines who are engaging with the work of Richard Rorty.

Download or read book Reconstructing Individualism written by James M. Albrecht and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers’ shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived—or, in Dewey’s term, “reconstructed”—individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.

Download or read book South Korean civil movement organisations written by Amy Levine and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a unique ethnographic study of the practical, theoretical, methodological, ethical and social dimensions of some key non-governmental organisations (NGOs), non-profit organisations (NPOs), and think tanks in Seoul during Roh Moo Hyun’s tumultuous presidency (2003-8).

Download or read book Pragmatism Kant and Transcendental Philosophy written by Gabriele Gava and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers working within the pragmatist tradition have pictured their relation to Kant and Kantianism in very diverse terms: some have presented their work as an appropriation and development of Kantian ideas, some have argued that pragmatism is an approach in complete opposition to Kant. This collection investigates the relationship between pragmatism, Kant, and current Kantian approaches to transcendental arguments in a detailed and original way. Chapters highlight pragmatist aspects of Kant’s thought and trace the influence of Kant on the work of pragmatists and neo-pragmatists, engaging with the work of Peirce, James, Lewis, Sellars, Rorty, and Brandom, among others. They also consider to what extent contemporary approaches to transcendental arguments are compatible with a pragmatist standpoint. The book includes contributions from renowned authors working on Kant, pragmatism and contemporary Kantian approaches to philosophy, and provides an authoritative and original perspective on the relationship between pragmatism and Kantianism.

Download or read book The Promise of Pragmatism written by John Patrick Diggins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-05-15 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of our century, pragmatism has enjoyed a charmed life, holding the dominant point of view in American politics, law, education, and social thought in general. After suffering a brief eclipse in the post-World War II period, pragmatism has enjoyed a revival, especially in literary theory and such areas as poststructuralism and deconstruction. In this sweeping critique of pragmatism and neopragmatism, one of our leading intellectual historians traces the attempts of thinkers from William James to Richard Rorty to find a response to the crisis of modernism. John Patrick Diggins analyzes the limitations of pragmatism from a historical perspective and dares to ask whether America's one original contribution to the world of philosophy has actually fulfilled its promise. In the late nineteenth century, intellectuals felt themselves in the grips of a spiritual crisis. This confrontation with the "acids of modernity" eroded older faiths and led to a sense that life would continue in the awareness, of absences: knowledge without truth, power without authority, society without spirit, self without identity, politics without virtue, existence without purpose, history without meaning. In Europe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber faced a world in which God was "dead" and society was succumbing to structures of power and domination. In America, Henry Adams resigned from Harvard when he realized there were no truths to be taught and when he could only conclude: "Experience ceases to educate." To the American philosophers of pragmatism, it was experience that provided the basis on which new methods of knowing could replace older ideas of truth. Diggins examines how, in different ways, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., demonstrated that modernism posed no obstacle in fields such as science, education, religion, law, politics, and diplomacy. Diggins also examines the work of the neopragmatists Jurgen Habermas and Richard Rorty and their attempt to resolve the crisis of postmodernism. Using one author to interrogate another, Diggins brilliantly allows the ideas to speak to our conditions as well as theirs. Did the older philosophers succeed in fulfilling the promises of pragmatism? Can the neopragmatists write their way out of what they have thought themselves into? And does America need philosophers to tell us that we do not need foundational truths when the Founders already told us that the Constitution would be a "machine" that would depend more upon the "counterpoise" of power than on the claims of knowledge? Diggins addresses these and other essential questions in this magisterial account of twentieth-century intellectual life. It should be read by everyone concerned about the roots of postmodernism (and its links to pragmatism) and about the forms of thought and action available for confronting a world after postmodernism.

Download or read book Teaching for Dissent written by Sarah Marie Stitzlein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching for Dissent looks at the implications of new forms of dissent for educational practice. The reappearance of dissent in political meetings and street protests opens new possibilities for improved democratic life and citizen participation. This book argues that this possibility will not be fulfilled if schools do not cultivate the skills necessary for our citizens to engage in political dissent. The authors look at how practices in schools, such as the testing regime and the 'hidden curriculum', suppress students' ability to voice ideas that stand in opposition to the status quo. Teaching for Dissent calls for a realignment of the curriculum and the practices of schooling with a guiding vision of democratic participation.

Download or read book Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era written by Sarah M. Stitzlein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Honesty in a Populist Era asserts that honesty is an important component in a healthy democracy and yet very few schools overtly teach it. This book describes what honesty is, how it is connected to truth, why both are important to and at risk in democracies today, and how we should teach them in schools.

Download or read book Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience written by Tobias Timm and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Rorty, perhaps the most important philosopher of the past century, refused to write meaningfully about experience due to his postmodern inclination to associate experience with a belief in objectivity and foundational truths. Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience: A Reconstruction explores the context, reasoning, and consequences of this resistance. While for much of our history experience was valued for its potential to teach us about the world, Rorty and his fellow postmodern thinkers encouraged us to doubt the narrative that we can use experience to make epistemological progress. Rather than pursue universal truths about the world, Rorty suggested that we recognize all of our beliefs about the world as being social constructions. In his project to recover a concept of experience from within the framework Rorty has constructed, Tobias Timm describes how classical pragmatist theories of experience are naïve about the problem of foundationalism. He also explains how the most common phenomenological work lacks an active subject; experience here is simply something that happens to us, rather than something we actively seek to improve. Timm demonstrates that despite Rorty’s insistence that we talk about language instead of experience, there are strong experiential elements in his work. Rorty’s romanticism, and his optimism about the accomplishments of western culture, are remedial to the pessimism of postmodern discussions about experience.

Download or read book Henry James and the Philosophy of Literary Pragmatism written by Gregory Phipps and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interdisciplinary foundations of pragmatism from a literary perspective, tracing the characters and settings that populate the narratives of pragmatist thought in Henry James’s work. Cultivated during a postwar era of industrial change and economic growth, pragmatism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the new shape of American intellectual identity. Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. were close friends who founded different branches of pragmatism while writing on a vast array of topics. Skeptical about philosophy, William James’s brother, Henry, stood at the margins of this group, crafting his own version of pragmatism through his novels and short stories. Gregory Phipps argues that James’s fiction weaves together the varied depictions of individuality, society, experience, and truth found in the works of Peirce, Holmes, and William James. By doing so, James brings to narrative life a defining moment in American intellectual and material history.