Pragmatismo e a Perda da Inocência

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy

After Darwin, at the latest, the philosophical demand for absolute certainty had become problematic: How can we hold on to certainty when our abilities to acquire knowledge are the product of an ongoing evolutionary process of adaptation? It becomes apparent here that the rejection of epistemological fundamentalism as a core element of pragmatist philosophy can be interpreted as a reaction to the debate Darwinian theory of evolution evoked. Indeed, the close connection between the emergence and development of pragmatism and the controversies surrounding the theory of evolution in the second half of the 19th century are undisputed. It is all the more surprising that this central scientific and cultural context has not received sufficient attention in research literature on the history of pragmatism. Because of this lacuna, voices were raised from reserachers of history of science, calling for "a new good book on the subject" (Ruse 2009: 554). Trevor Pearce's Pragmatism's Evolution takes on this challenge and successfully closes this gap in research.

2017

stier.net

S.J. Gould’s proposal to distinguish between “adaptations” and “exaptations” is presently one of the most interesting attempts to overcome complications deriving from an “adaptationist” perspective of the theory of natural selection. This implies a clear distinction between the current use of a characteristic and its original function, and the permanently open possibility that a structure or faculty which developed for a certain function (or for no function at all, as illustrated by the case of so-called “spandrels of San Marco”) be co-opted aft erwards for a different use. Few modern scholars know that in the 1870s, Chauncey Wright, the “master” of the so-called American Pragmatists at the Metaphysical Club, had worked out an original interpretation of evolutionary theory which gained him Darwin’s high esteem. Wright’s theory held Goul d’s concept of evolution by “new uses of old powers”, as the philosopher expressed it, to be of primary importance. Wright developed this concept to overcome complications with the theory of natural selection. However, Wright was primarily concerned with providing a new approach to the question of how the human mind originated, combining this initial view with a new philosophy of “Habits” and “Signs” that already showed a tendency towards pragmatist thought. This approach, which outlines a theoretical direction joining the “Gouldian” perspective with a pragmatist orient ation, is currently one of the most promising paths for deeply re-thinking the question of the or igin and development of what is known as “human nature”.

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2021

I argue that American pragmatism can be understood as an effort to recuperate a sense of the animality of thought and thus as an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call a “becoming animal” within the field of philosophy. At issue in this becoming animal of pragmatism is the influence of Charles Peirce’s theory of abduction on the history of pragmatism from its origins to its more recent reception within Jacques Derrida’s (pra)grammatology and Brian Massumi’s speculative pragmatism. Predicated on the evolutionary notion that animal instinct is the source of language, thought, and inquiry, Peirce’s theory of creative inference, or “abduction” as he called it, has allowed generations of pragmatists to begin “shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild” (James); to recognize in the origin of their thought something like “the movements of a wild creature toward its goal” (Dewey); to define intellectual inquiry as “doing what comes naturally” (Fish), and to pursue such inquiry “without method” (Rorty). Emerging under the ostensible heading of a new “humanism,” pragmatism exceeds what Derrida calls “the anthropological limit” from the very start, relieving humanism of its exclusive claim to logocentrism by reinscribing the question if not the origin of the logos within the animal kingdom. Yet unlike Derrida whose rejection of biological continuism in the name of difference prevents him from committing fully to the logic of abduction, Massumi is able to rehabilitate Peirce’s theory of abduction as the foundation for his speculative pragmatism as a result of his commitment to a processual ontology that rejects binary oppositions in favor of “disjunctive syntheses” and “zones of indiscernibility.”

The uniquely pragmatic aspect of Charles Peirce's philosophy is a sentiment that competing theories ought to be referred to a single norm of inquiry and that such a norm will be located only in the contributions these theories make to repairing errant practices in the communities they serve. This pragmatic sentiment informs Peirce's efforts to integrate the two competing tendencies in his own theoretical work: an historicist tendency, exemplified in his critique of Cartesianism, and a foundationalist tendency, exemplified in his transcendentalism. Unmediated by a pragmatic sentiment, these two tendencies divide contemporary pragmatic scholarship into opposing schools of deconstructive historicists and semiotic foundationalists. A suggested remedy is to reread Peirce's later pragmaticism, pragmatically, as a dialoque between two complementary modes of philosophic inquiry: hermeneutics and logic.

M. De Caro and D. Macarthur (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, 2020

the pluralist, 2012