American Pragmatism: Three New Readings

2017

Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 2007

Praxis, 2010

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2006

This paper examines the origins of philosophical pragmatism in the USA in the second half of the 19th-century and its development and use up to the Second World War. The story is told through the lives and ideas of some of the main originators, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Charles Saunders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. The core idea of pragmatism, that beliefs are guides to actions and should be judged against the outcomes rather than abstract principles, dominated American thinking during the period of economic and political growth from which the USA emerged as a world power. The paper suggests that the practical, commonsense, scientific approach embedded in pragmatism resonates with OR as practised and that much of pragmatism could be attractive to practitioners and academics alike.

Philosophy Journal, 2019

John E. Smith argued that there were almost as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Almost all pragmatists criticized abstractive and reductive reasoning in the modern academy, but most entertained different visions of how and to what end academic reasoning should be repaired. Smith's vision was shaped by his strong preference for the classical pragmatisms of Peirce, Dewey, James and also Royce, whose differences contributed to the inner dynamism of Smith's pragmatism. Smith was far less impressed with the virtues of neopragmatists who rejected key tenets of the classical vision. My goal in this brief essay is to outline a partial list of these tenets, drawing on Smith's writings and those of a sample of recent pragmatists who share his commitment to the classical vision, such as Richard Bernstein, John Deely, and Doug Anderson. I restate the tenets in the terms of a pragmatic semiotic, which applies Peirce's semeiotic to classical doctrines of habit-change and reparative inquiry. I conclude by adopting the tenets as signs of pragmatism's elemental beliefs. Consistent with Peirce's account of "original" beliefs, these are not discrete claims about the world or well-defined rational principles but a loose and dynamic network of habits. The habits grow, change, inter-mix or self-segregate through the run of intellectual and social history. They can be distinguished but only imprecisely, described but only vaguely, encountered per se only through their effects. Among these effects are sub-communities of pragmatic inquiry, sub-networks of habits, and existentially marked series of social actions and streams of written and spoken words: including context-specific, determinate claims about the world, about other claims, and about habits of inquiry like pragmatism. Among these claims are my way of stating the tenets and my arguments about the history of pragmatism. Such claims are determinate, but the habits and tenets of pragmatism are not.

2012

Hispanic philosophy is no longer what it used to be. One of the defining features of Hispanic way of thought in the last century has possibly been its isolation from the rest of the world and an individualism of which Spaniards have always been proud. Fortunately, this feature does not characterized Contemporary Hispanic Philosophy (at least that brand that vindicates strong links to the Analytic Tradition), since with the very same passion with which Spanish Philosophers defended their differential traits in past centuries, are we nowadays determined to defend our place in the international scene. A proof of this interest in not-being-different is the fact that a substantial part of the philosophy produced in Spain is not produced in Spanish.

The Journal of American History, 1996

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