Rockmore on Analytic Pragmatism

Metaphilosophy 2008

Abstact: This article responds critically to Tom Rockmore's essay ''On Classical and Neo-Analytic Forms of Pragmatism,'' which appeared in Metaphilosophy in 2005. Rockmore charges analytic pragmatism with having a conflicted epistemology, relying on incoherent appropriations of Hegel, and maintaining an unpragmatic commitment to metaphysical realism. We rebut these charges by arguing that what Rockmore sees as conflicted in analytic pragmatist epistemology is simply fallibilism, that appropriations of Hegel needn't be as global as Rockmore claims, and that commitments to metaphysical realism need not disqualify philosophers from being pragmatists.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2014

In his program of analytic pragmatism, Robert Brandom has presented a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of the place of analytic philosophy in the history of philosophy by linking his own non-representational 'inferentialist' approach to semantics to the rationalistidealist tradition, and in particular, to Hegel. Brandom, however, has not been without his critics in regard to both his approach to semantics and his interpretation of Hegel. Here I single out four interlinked problematic areas facing Brandom's inferentialist semanticshis approach of perceptual content, to de re attitudes, to perceptual experience and to modality, and then go on to contrast the different approach to these issues that is found in Hegel. While Hegel can helpfully be understood as anticipating an inferentialist semantics as Brandom claims, his is a weak inferentialism in contrast to Brandom's strong version. With his weakly inferentialist approach Hegel can, I suggest, be seen as providing a solution to the tangle of problems facing Brandom in these four areas.

the pluralist, 2012

M. Festl (ed.) Handbuch Pragmatismus, 2018

The aim of this chapter is to explain the relationship between pragmatism and Hegel. Focusing on classical pragmatism in particular, I explore the various and contrasting ways William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey reacted to Hegel’s variety of post-Kantian idealism. I shall argue that Hegel’s reception by the early generation of pragmatist thinkers illustrates not only both important philosophical commonalities and differences between Hegel and the classical pragmatists, but also significant differences between James, Peirce, and Dewey. This conveys that classical pragmatism is not a monolithic bloc.

Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatic Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Rekindling Pragmatism's Fire, 2014

As Richard Bernstein has suggested, there is a very rich and interesting story to be told about how the classical pragmatists (Dewey, Peirce, and James) understood G. W. R Hegel, made use of Hegel, and ultimately distanced themselves from Hegel. That story cannot be told here. Indeed, the story is so rich and complicated that even its beginnings cannot be told here. But what can be provided, perhaps, is a limited, though hopefully illuminating, perspective on a few salient aspects of the relationship between the classical pragmatists and Hegel. While the following reflections offer no definitive answers about this relationship, they might at least suggest some fruitful lines of enquiry for future discussion.

This paper appears here by special permission from George Leaman at the Philosophy Documentation Center.The issue of this paper is the extent to which historicism excludes metaphysics in the contemporary revival of American philosophical pragmatism. Minimalist metaphysical assumptions are implied in philosophical neo-pragmatism, and so the author develops the dialectical position of religious neo-pragmatism, which is the unity of what is true in both theological and philosophical neo-pragmatism.

Praxis, 2010

Philosophia

In his Locke Lectures Brandom proposes to extend what he calls the project of analysis to encompass various relationships between meaning and use. As the traditional project of analysis sought to clarify various logical relations between vocabularies so Brandom's extended project seeks to clarify various pragmatically mediated semantic relations between vocabularies. The point of the exercise in both cases is to achieve what Brandom thinks of as algebraic understanding. Because the pragmatist critique of the traditional project of analysis was precisely to deny that such understanding is appropriate to the case of natural language, the very idea of an analytic pragmatism is called into question by that critique. My aim is to clarify the prospects for Brandom's project, or at least something in the vicinity of that project, through a comparison of it with what I will suggest we can think of as Kant's analytic pragmatism as developed by Peirce.

Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences, 2018

In the following essay, I was asked two questions posed to me by the Organizing Committee of the “150 Years of Pragmatism” Conference held by the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. Given my answers, I decided to unite them thematically. First, I answer – yes, however, narrow – there is some unifying thread in both classical, neogpragmatists, and contemporary pragmatists. I propose these below. Next, I answer exactly how I understand pragmatism as a method for settling the analytic and Continental Divide by first highlighting how James undersood metaphysics and how this understanding fueled his development of pragmatism as a method for settling disputes. Finally, through Jamesian pragmatism, I argue against the existence of the analytic/Continental Divide, and show how a Jamesian would agree with Todd May on this issue.