Online research in philosophy

Arthur O. Lovejoy famously referred to thirteen pragmatisms. If he were called on to enumerate postmodernisms, no doubt he would increase this number tenfold.1 Fortunately I need not follow his lead for the task at hand, namely, to discuss whether the pragmatic tradition can narrow the divide between modernism and postmodernism on the topic of cosmopolitanism. To do so I will focus on specific sets of ideas that have been associated with these terms. So, for example, modernists have been viewed (...) as defenders of some form of universality, ethical or conceptual, and of a responsible, self-actuating, authentic subject. Postmodernists look toward particularity and alterity, and stress that notions of a unitary subject .. (shrink)

In the first part of this essay (The Pluralist 7.2, Summer 2012, pp. 1-29), I argued against the Narrow Conception of phaneroscopy by showing that it is not to be found in Peirce's writings and that several passages in Peirce's writings indicate the Narrow Conception is false. As a consequence, we must broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's aim. In this part, I shall argue that we should broaden our understanding of phaneroscopy's method, that is, our understanding of phaneroscopic observation, description, (...) and analysis.However, before proceeding, I should reply to one claim that has cropped up every now and then. Some interpreters of Peirce have commented in correspondence with me that Peirce's phaneroscopy .. (shrink)

An important feature of so-called rational decision making, at least in times of crisis, is arational: that is, our ability to decide manifests features of our characters or the values we hold rather than our reasoning abilities.1 Such a position stands in obvious opposition to the Western philosophical tradition. Consider, by comparison, the view of Immanuel Kant, who held that reason could, and perhaps sometimes ought to, operate independently of (and in opposition to) our sentiments. Contrary to Kant, William James (...) argues in "The Sentiment of Rationality" that arational mental states and phenomena—such as feelings, emotions, values, and attitudes—are indispensable to practical rationality (317). The attempt to .. (shrink)

The chapters of Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself originally were given as the Spinoza Lectures for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2002. In this work, Butler returns to the problem of subjectivity and subject formation, but this time in the context of ethics and ethical philosophy. Pulling together ethical considerations and theories of the self from authors including Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, and Levinas, Butler deftly and successfully decenters and refocuses ethical (...) analysis by claiming that the subject is not the ground for ethics but rather the problem for ethics. Central to this thesis is the claim that the self is inherently relational, and emerges .. (shrink)

The recent publication of Dewey's seminar lectures on Hegel's philosophy of spirit, which he delivered in Chicago in 1897, contributes significantly to the ongoing task of more accurately appreciating the confluence of historical influences that shaped the trajectory of classical American philosophy. Dewey's 1897 Hegel lectures are situated within their philosophical context by two seminal essays describing the relevance of recent scholarship to the philosophical or historical question of Dewey's ambivalent indebtedness to Hegel. In their essays, Shook and Good emphasize (...) the positive roles that certain Hegelian themes played in Dewey's mature thought—that is, in texts produced many years after Dewey's alleged .. (shrink)

All knowledge 'begins with experience,' but it does not therefore 'arise' from experience.The classical American pragmatists are usually considered to be either empiricists or heirs to the empiricist tradition in philosophy. This is unsurprising given the nature of the pragmatist philosophical program as a late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century reaction against transcendental idealism. Pragmatists sought to ground their inquiry resolutely in experience sans speculative metaphysics. However, the pragmatists were also stridently opposed to certain doctrines and epistemological tendencies in British empiricism that (...) they regarded as either implicitly idealist, or as laying a groundwork that stood as the .. (shrink)

Pragmatism, with its insistence that philosophy attend to practical affairs of what Charles Sanders Peirce called "vital importance," has always faced a unique double bind. If it spent too much time on philosophical speculation, it made no difference to practical affairs. But if it fixated on the practical affairs of the social and political realm, it was no longer engaged in philosophy. This double bind is not unique to pragmatism and has shown itself repeatedly in the last two hundred years (...) as feminist and anti-racist philosophy have gained traction in academia. Feminists who worry about concrete cases of oppression, who work in practical ways to end this oppression, are not regarded as true philosophers. .. (shrink)

My paper is the outcome of a puzzlement concerning the absence of a word in Dewey and a refinement of a disagreement with Stanley Cavell. It also is motivated by my recognition (nearly thirty-five years after the publication of The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning)1 of how much more remains to be said regarding habit, drama, and the dramatic in Dewey's pragmatism. Clarification of the convergence of these seemingly disparate elements requires a brief introduction to each of (...) them. I will start with the disagreement with Stanley Cavell.The disagreement goes back a number of years, but it began to loom larger in my thinking while I was writing The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey .. (shrink)

In the past twenty years, scholarly interest in John Dewey's later writings has surged. While later works such as Art as Experience (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), and Freedom and Culture (1939) have received considerable attention, Knowing and the Known (1949), Dewey's late-in-life collaboration with Arthur F. Bentley, has been largely neglected. A common bias among Dewey scholars is that this work, instead of developing Dewey's Logic, departs from its spirit, reflects the overbearing influence of Bentley on Dewey (...) (who was at the time an octogenarian), and, therefore, merits little serious scholarly consideration. However, Dewey and Bentley engaged in an extended correspondence, collected in John .. (shrink)