Download or read book Reconstructing Pragmatism written by Chris Voparil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the other, his polemical claims and selective interpretations function as a negative, fixed pole against which thinkers of all stripes define themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether classical or "new," Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a foil to justify their positions. The resulting internecine quarrels and divisions threaten to thwart and fragment the tradition's creative potential. More caricatured than understood, the specter of Rorty is blocking the road of inquiry and future development of pragmatism. Reconstructing Pragmatism moves beyond the Rortyan impasse by providing what has been missing for decades: a constructive, non-polemical account of Rorty's relation to classical pragmatism. The first book-length treatment of Rorty's intellectual debt to the early pragmatists, it establishes his selective appropriations not as misunderstandings or distortions but as a sustained, intentional effort to reconstruct their thinking. Featuring chapters devoted to five key pragmatist thinkers - Peirce, James, Dewey, Royce, and Addams - the book draws on archival sources and the full scope of Rorty's writings to challenge prevailing misconceptions and caricatures. By illuminating the critical resources, still largely untapped, that Rorty offers for articulating classical pragmatism's ongoing relevance, the book reveals limitations in the received images of the classical pragmatists that predominate in current debates and opens up new modes of understanding pragmatism and why it matters today"--
Download or read book The Revival of Pragmatism written by Morris Dickstein and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998-11-23 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism—with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth—lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. Since the 1960s, however, pragmatism in many guises has again gained prominence, finding congenial places to flourish within growing intellectual movements. This volume of new essays brings together leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, social thinkers, and literary critics to examine the far-reaching effects of this revival. As the twenty-five intellectuals who take part in this discussion show, pragmatism has become a complex terrain on which a rich variety of contemporary debates have been played out. Contributors such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Nancy Fraser, Robert Westbrook, Hilary Putnam, and Morris Dickstein trace pragmatism’s cultural and intellectual evolution, consider its connection to democracy, and discuss its complex relationship to the work of Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. They show the influence of pragmatism on black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, explore its view of poetic language, and debate its effects on social science, history, and jurisprudence. Also including essays by critics of the revival such as Alan Wolfe and John Patrick Diggins, the volume concludes with a response to the whole collection from Stanley Fish. Including an extensive bibliography, this interdisciplinary work provides an in-depth and broadly gauged introduction to pragmatism, one that will be crucial for understanding the shape of the transformations taking place in the American social and philosophical scene at the end of the twentieth century. Contributors. Richard Bernstein, David Bromwich, Ray Carney, Stanley Cavell, Morris Dickstein, John Patrick Diggins, Stanley Fish, Nancy Fraser, Thomas C. Grey, Giles Gunn, Hans Joas, James T. Kloppenberg, David Luban, Louis Menand, Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Poirier, Richard A. Posner, Ross Posnock, Hilary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michel Rosenfeld, Richard H. Weisberg, Robert B. Westbrook, Alan Wolfe
Download or read book Dewey s Critical Pragmatism written by Alison Kadlec and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kadlec posits that it is in the realm of contemporary deliberative democratic theory and practice that the greatest significance of critical pragmatism lies."--BOOK JACKET.
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 Pragmatism Pluralism and the Nature of Philosophy written by Scott F. Aikin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past fifteen years, Aikin and Talisse have been working collaboratively on a new vision of American pragmatism, one which sees pragmatism as a living and developing philosophical idiom that originates in the work of the "classical" pragmatisms of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, uninterruptedly develops through the later 20th Century pragmatists (C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine), and continues through the present day. According to Aikin and Talisse, pragmatism is fundamentally a metaphilosophical proposal – a methodological suggestion for carrying inquiry forward amidst ongoing deep disagreement over the aims, limitations, and possibilities of philosophy. This conception of pragmatism not only runs contrary to the dominant self-understanding among cotemporary philosophers who identify with the classical pragmatists, it also holds important implications for pragmatist philosophy. In particular, Aikin and Talisse show that their version of pragmatism involves distinctive claims about epistemic justification, moral disagreement, democratic citizenship, and the conduct of inquiry. The chapters combine detailed engagements with the history and development of pragmatism with original argumentation aimed at a philosophical audience beyond pragmatism.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Political Theory written by Matthew Festenstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-12-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism has enjoyed a considerable revival in the latter part of the twentieth century, but what precisely constitutes pragmatism remains a matter of dispute. In reconstructing the pragmatic tradition in political philosophy, Matthew Festenstein rejects the idea that it is a single, cohesive doctrine. His incisive analysis brings out the commonalities and shared concerns among contemporary pragmatists while making clear their differences in how they would resolve those concerns. His study begins with the work of John Dewey and the moral and psychological conceptions that shaped his philosophy. Here Festenstein lays out the major philosophic issues with which first Dewey, and then his heirs, would grapple. The book's second part traces how Dewey's approach has been differently developed, especially in the work of three contemporary pragmatic thinkers: Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and Hilary Putnam. This first full-length critical study of the relationship between the pragmatist tradition and political philosophy fills a significant gap in contemporary thought.
Download or read book Reconstructing Pragmatism written by Chris Voparil and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The figure of Richard Rorty stands in complex relation to the tradition of American pragmatism. On the one hand, his intellectual creativity, lively prose, and bridge-building fueled the contemporary resurgence of pragmatism. On the other, his polemical claims and selective interpretations function as a negative, fixed pole against which thinkers of all stripes define themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether classical or "new," Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a foil to justify their positions. The resulting internecine quarrels and divisions threaten to fragment and thwart the tradition's creative potential. More caricatured than understood, the specter of Rorty continues to block the road of inquiry and future development of pragmatism. Reconstructing Pragmatism moves beyond the Rortyan impasse by providing what has been missing for decades: a constructive, non-polemical account of Rorty's relation to classical pragmatism. The first book-length treatment of Rorty's intellectual debt to the early pragmatists, the volume establishes his selective appropriations not as misunderstandings or distortions but a sustained, intentional effort to reconstruct their thinking. Featuring chapters devoted to five key pragmatist thinkers--Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams--the book draws on archival sources and the full scope of Rorty's writings to challenge prevailing misconceptions and caricatures. By elaborating Rorty's still largely untapped reconstructive resources, the book reveals limitations in predominant views of the classical pragmatists in current debates and opens up new modes of understanding pragmatism and why it matters today.
Download or read book Pragmatism s Evolution written by Trevor Pearce and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An important contribution . . . invaluable to anyone interested in the history of pragmatism and the influence of biology and evolution on pragmatic thinkers.” —Richard J. Bernstein, The New School for Social Research, author of The Pragmatic Turn In Pragmatism’s Evolution, Trevor Pearce demonstrates that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism owes an enormous debt to specific biological debates in the late 1800s, especially those concerning the role of the environment in development and evolution. Many are familiar with John Dewey’s 1909 assertion that evolutionary ideas overturned two thousand years of philosophy—but what exactly happened in the fifty years prior to Dewey’s claim? What form did evolutionary ideas take? When and how were they received by American philosophers? Although the various thinkers associated with pragmatism—from Charles Sanders Peirce to Jane Addams and beyond—were towering figures in American intellectual life, few realize the full extent of their engagement with the life sciences. In his analysis, Pearce focuses on a series of debates in biology from 1860 to 1910—from the instincts of honeybees to the inheritance of acquired characteristics—in which the pragmatists were active participants. If we want to understand the pragmatists and their influence, Pearce argues, we need to understand the relationship between pragmatism and biology. “Pragmatism’s Evolution is about the role of evolution, as a theory, in American pragmatism, as well as the early evolution of pragmatism itself.” —Isis “Superb.” —Metascience “[An] important book.” —Acta Biotheoretica “A significant and edifying work.” —Choice “Pearce has done something remarkable and all too rare: written a book at the intersection of philosophy, science, and history that is equally excellent in all three respects.” —International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Download or read book John Dewey and the Artful Life written by Scott R. Stroud and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.
Download or read book Habermas and Pragmatism written by Mitchell Aboulafia and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the influences of pragmatism on Habermas' thought. The essays cover subjects including philosophy of language, democracy, nature of rationality and social theory.
Download or read book Political Philosophy and Political Action written by Adam Burgos and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-12 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political philosophers have long taken inspiration from political movements when crafting their theories, which they hoped would address the universal problems of democracy. Political Philosophy and Political Actioninvestigates the relationship between political practices of popular resistance and political theory. The text demonstrates how the lived experience on political resistance can help us to analyse and interpret theory, and also reveals how concrete resistance movements can challenge the ideals of political theory generally. It begins by examining the universal aspirations present within the contextual particularities of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring. Political Philosophy and Political Actionthen turns to critical examination of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, using novel interpretations of their philosophies of equality and democracy to construct a conceptual framework. More specifically, the chapters show how we can analyze resistance movements that incorporate the imperative to resist inequality in the name of democracy. The result is a novel means of thinking about important issues in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics.
Download or read book Rorty Pragmatism and Confucianism written by Yong Huang and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-05-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism offers a fascinating conversation between Confucianism, historically the dominant tradition in Chinese thought and society, and the contemporary philosophy of Richard Rorty. Well aware that his philosophical hero, John Dewey, has had a lasting influence among Chinese intellectuals, Rorty expressed a wish that his own books, which have been rapidly translated into Chinese, be read as an updated version of Dewey's philosophy. In this book, twelve authors engage Rorty's thought in a hermeneutic dialogue with Confucianism, using Confucianism to interpret and reconstruct Rorty while exploring such topics as human nature, moral psychology, moral relativism, moral progress, democracy, tradition, moral metaphysics, and religiosity. Rorty himself provides a detailed reply to each author.
Download or read book Confucian Democracy written by Sor-hoon Tan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a detailed study of relevant concepts and theories in Confucianism and John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy, this book illustrates the possibility of Confucian democracy and offers an alternative to Western liberal models. Sor-hoon Tan synthesizes the two philosophies through a comparative examination of individuals and community, democratic ideals of equality and freedom, and the nature of ethical and political order. By constructing a model of Confucian democracy that combines the strengths of both Confucianism and Deweyan pragmatism, this book explores how a premodern tradition could be put in dialogue with contemporary political and philosophical theories.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Democracy written by Dmitri N. Shalin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 643 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the roots of pragmatist imagination and traces the influence of American pragmatism in diverse areas of politics, law, sociology, political science, and transitional studies. The work explores the interfaces between the Progressive movement in politics and American pragmatism. Shalin shows how early 20th century progressivism influenced pragmatism's philosophical agenda and how pragmatists helped articulate a theory of progressive reform. The work addresses pragmatism and interactionist sociology and illuminates the cross-fertilization between these two fields of studies. Special emphasis is placed on the interactionists' search for a logic of inquiry sensitive to the objective indeterminacy of the situation. The challenge that contemporary interactionist studies face is to illuminate the issues of power and inequality central to the political commitments of pragmatist philosophers. Shalin explores the vital link between democracy, civility, and affect. His central thesis is that democracy is an embodied process that binds affectively as well as rhetorically and that flourishes in places where civic discourse is an end in itself, a source of vitality and social creativity sustaining a democratic community. The author shows why civic discourse is hobbled by the civic body that has been misshapen by past abuses. Drawing on the studies of the civilizing process, Shalin speculates about the emotion, demeanor, and body language of democracy and explores from this angle the prospects for democratic transformation in countries struggling to shake their totalitarian past. View Table of Contents
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rorty written by David Rondel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a comprehensive introduction to one of the most interesting and controversial philosophers of recent times.
Download or read book Pragmatism in International Relations written by Harry Bauer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays introduces pragmatism to the study of international relations and evaluates its potential for the theory and practice of global politics. Seeking to reorient the discipline of International Relations (IR) towards practices and problematic situations, the editors of this volume draw on the pragmatist tradition to provide critical inspiration for this task. Their book, organised into four distinct parts, aims to outline the potential of pragmatism to reconstruct IR. Through such an approach this volume seeks to re-invigorate the discipline and bridge the gap between IR academic communities in the US, UK, and continental Europe. This pioneering volume provides: the first book-length evaluation of the potential pragmatism holds for the practice as well as the epistemological, theoretical and normative debates within the discipline of IR theoretical reflections and empirical studies in the area of diplomacy, international law, public (environmental) policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict highly original contributions by prominent scholars in the field of IR, International Law, Sociology and Social Theory Drawing on research from several disciplines, Pragmatism in International Relations will be vital reading for students and scholars of International Relations, International Relations Theory, and Social Theory.
Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism written by Sami Pihlström and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism provides not just a theoretical perspective on science and inquiry, but ways of being in the world, of knowing the reality we inhabit. Approaching this philosophical tradition as a diverse set of philosophies that it is, The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism introduces many of the ideas and debates at the centre of the field today. Focusing on issues in 12 different subject areas, this up-to-date companion covers current research in aesthetics, economics, education, ethics, history, law, metaphysics, politics, race, religion, science and technology, language, and social theory. Supported by an introduction to research methods and problems, as well as a guide to past and future directions in the field, the chapters are also enhanced by a glossary, research guide and an annotated bibliography. For anyone working in contemporary pragmatism or modern American philosophy more generally, this companion provides a practical means of navigating what can sometimes feel like a disparate field. Showing where important work continues to be done, the tensions that exist, and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking, The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism expands our understanding of the role of pragmatism in 21st century philosophy.
