R. Frega (ed.), Pragmatist Epistemologies, Lexington, Lanhan, 2011.

the pluralist, 2012

2021

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: • Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; • Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; • Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; • Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; • Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

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.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a summary compilation of the main achievements in recent scholarship on the issue of pragmatic ethics -underlining the lack of consensus, but also showing basic agreement about the key features of the ethical philosophy of pragmatism. Second, it focus on two strands of pragmatism: the one spearheaded by Charles S. Peirce, which stresses the importance of habits, and the tendency of things (including human beings) to become habit-governed as the key to the development of 'concrete reasonableness', the ultimate end by which human action ought to be guided; and the one led by John Dewey, which stresses the importance of deliberative activity -a 'dramatic rehearsal' of the possible consequences of every course of actionand the central role of educational work in developing the 'growth' of human nature, in itself the highest ethical ideal -an ideal that manifests itself in the 'reconstruction' of a new and more democratic society.

Praxis, 2010

2010

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a summary compilation of the main achievements in recent scholarship on the issue of pragmatic ethics-underlining the lack of consensus, but also showing basic agreement about the key features of the ethical philosophy of pragmatism. Second, it focus on two strands of pragmatism: the one spearheaded by Charles S. Peirce, which stresses the importance of habits, and the tendency of things (including human beings) to become habit-governed as the key to the development of 'concrete reasonableness', the ultimate end by which human action ought to be guided; and the one led by John Dewey, which stresses the importance of deliberative activity-a 'dramatic rehearsal' of the possible consequences of every course of actionand the central role of educational work in developing the 'growth' of human nature, in itself the highest ethical ideal-an ideal that manifests itself in the 'reconstruction' of a new and more democratic society. At the beginning of the last decade, Richard Bernstein (1992) wrote about the resurgence of pragmatism in the Anglo-American academic world; since that time, it has become almost a cliché to note the significance that American philosophical thought has acquired in areas of culture as diverse as sociology, law, political science, literature and philosophy itself. Furthermore, this rediscovery has given pragmatism back its status as the 'perennial American philosophy', because of the central role it attributes to experimentation, reflecting the typically American preference for action over reflection, for facts over theories and, above all, for results (Dickstein 1998: 7, 16). This new recognition is due in large part to the exhaustion of analytical philosophy, the materialist tendencies of logical positivism, the nihilistic sunset of hermeneutical philosophy and the dead-end of postmodernity. In response to this context in recent years, various philosophers-both in Europe and America-have revitalized philosophical reflection on the basis of a rigorous reconstruction of the pragmatist legacy. Yet, it would appear that work remains to be done in reconstructing the moral philosophy of pragmatism. Part of this deficiency resides in the diversity existing amongst pragmatist thinkers, which prompted F. C. S. Schiller to claim that there were as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. While it is possible to trace a certain common method in their approaches to examining moral experience, it is also the case that the first impression that one receives on studying this field is that of a debate between mutually opposed positions, rather than a unified and homogenous discourse. With the intention of contributing to this task, in what follows I will offer a summary of what, de facto, the work of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey contributes to ethical reflec

Philosophical Frontiers, 2009

In this paper, I evaluate three views of philosophical pragmatism’s practical implications for academic and non-academic or public discourses, as well as offer my own view of those implications. The first view is that of George Novack. In an underappreciated tract, Pragmatism versus Marxism, the American Trotskyite and union organizer launched a vicious attack on John Dewey’s career as a professional philosopher. He alleged that Dewey’s ideas were inaccessible to all but a small community of fellow academicians. While Novack conceded that Dewey’s philosophical inquiries had a cross-pollinating influence on other academic fields, he doubted that the beneficial products of those inquiries traveled far beyond the walls of the so-called ‘ivory tower.’ Larry Hickman offers a second view. He understands Dewey’s claim in Experience and Nature that philosophy serves as a “liaison officer” to mean that philosophers should provide a common lexicon that translates between the languages of distinct disciplines. In other words, for Dewey, the role of philosophy, including philosophical pragmatism, is to facilitate interdisciplinarity. Since interdisciplinary sharing is usually confined to academic discourse, Novack’s challenge is perfectly compatible with Hickman’s interpretation of Dewey’s ‘liaison officer’ claim. Both Novack and Hickman are mistaken, though in different degrees and for different reasons. The third, and more promising, view is advanced by Robert Talisse. He cites the life and works of Sidney Hook, one of Dewey’s better-known students, as an exemplary case of a pragmatist who consistently realized his pragmatic commitments in public discourse. The most important reason for qualifying Hickman’s interpretation of Dewey’s ‘liaison officer’ claim is that the measure of pragmatism’s value is not solely the ability of pragmatists to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, but their ability to also insert their ideas into public discourse. In my view, philosophical pragmatists, and philosophers generally, should both facilitate interdisciplinarity in academic discourse and introduce philosophical notions into public discourse—that is, serving in the dual capacity of interdisciplinary scholar and public intellectual.

Philosophy in Review, 2000

This book is an introduction to pragmatism, but also an explication of Rescher's own version of a realistic pragmatic philosophy. Rescher's realistic pragmatism is designed to dispel a number of traditional objections that figure prominently in the history of pragmatism from Peirce to the present day. Rescher contrasts a pragmatism of the 'left'-associated with James, Schiller, Dewey, Rorty-with a pragmatism of the 'right'-represented by Peirce and himself. Rescher carefully lays out a methodological version of pragmatism that is marked by metaphysical realism, objectivity, rationality, a hard-nosed theory of truth, but tempered with methodological flexibility and a healthy epistemological fallibilism. Rescher's distinction between truthconditions and use-conditions in his discussion of language and logic presents an intriguing strategy for cleaning up a pragmatist theory of truth and meaning. Rescher applies equal attention to presenting a pragmatic moral theory that is objective, principled, rational, sensible, capable of accommodating the highest human values, while shunning the conventional, pluralistic, crass-materialistic, anything-goes socio-cultural relativism traditionally associated with pragmatists of the left. All in all, Rescher forcefully addresses well-known criticisms leveled against earlier forms of pragmatism, presenting an alternative view that fares well as a response to recalcitrant problems of modernist philosophy without succumbing to tenuous laxities of post-modernism. This book is to be recommended for its effective portrayal of a hardnosed objectivist, realist pragmatism. Unfortunately the book will disappoint readers familiar with classical pragmatist texts.

2017

Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia

It is not easy to explain what pragmatism is. Everybody who has had to teach pragmatism to university students has found herself or himself in a difficult situation trying to make a clear exposition. Moreover, it was not easy for Charles S. Peirce himself to explain in a simple manner the pragmatic maxim. In this contribution, I will not go into the technicalities of the pragmatic maxim, but I will share the fruits of my reflection of many years about how pragmatism can be more easily understood and taught. The article is arranged in two parts: the first one is dedicated to the old logical rule of the gospel, “By their fruits ye shall know”, which appears in two texts of Peirce; and the second one to what I call the “logic of the kitchen”, in which I will pay attention also to Peirce’s example of the apple pie. I will add a final consideration about how to teach philosophy today, according to Peirce.