The Pluralist

This book is an extended and provocative exercise in describing pragmatism’s past and in attempting to chart a course for its future. This description is not merely a history of philosophy or paean to American thought. It is rather a re-description that draws attention to a neglected and potentially fruitful theme in pragmatism, one that Koopman has termed “transitionalism” for its focus on historicity and temporality. One of the enduring features of pragmatism is its commitment to the revisability of truth claims and even to revising its own methods and aims. If pragmatism encourages philosophers to revise old ways of thinking, then pragmatists are people who expect important ideas and institutions to develop historically, and to whom the historical transitions are important. Nevertheless, Koopman says, pragmatists have failed to pay sufficient attention to these transitions—an oversight Koopman’s book proposes to correct.

With the announcement of transitionalism, Koopman proposes a “renewed third wave of pragmatist philosophy,” one that will lift us past the “frustrating impasse” that has recently blocked the development of pragmatist thought (2). Koopman opens his book with these words: “[The] aim of this book is to describe what pragmatism does, what it has done, and what it may yet do” (1). A lofty goal, and one that ought to please pragmatists everywhere.

One impediment to immediately joining this “renewed third wave” is that it is not entirely clear what Koopman means by “transitionalism,” and that makes it a little difficult to follow him where he wants to lead. Koopman offers us no succinct definitions. He explains this intentional omission by saying that offering such a definition would be contrary to the spirit of transitionalism itself. Presumably, this is because definitions are static points of departure or destinations to be aimed for, not the transitions between departures and destinations that occupy Koopman. At any rate, rather than [End Page 70] giving definitions, Koopman offers to explicate, or to “develop and deploy” his key term (12). The word and the idea are both “improvisations” on an idea of James’s, that “life is in the transitions” (as cited by Koopman 12).

By transitions, Koopman refers to more than mere “dumb” changes. Rather, transitions are those changes that are the result of thoughtful and purposive activity. Koopman develops James’s point to mean that life is exclusively in the transitions. Everything—all our problems and all our resources for solving them, all of life—is, in both form and content, historically situated. To demand a grounding for beliefs or practices that transcends history is to return to foundationalism or givenism or something like them. It is to seek that which is irremediably stable in a world we know to be irresistibly and entirely in flow. Transitionalists recognize the temporal duration of all our valuations but retain a meliorist’s hope. Koopman urges us to notice that the “best exemplars of the tradition”—Emerson, James, Dewey, and Rorty—based the best of their thinking on this transitionalist understanding (14). In the first chapter he sums it up like this: “Meliorist transitionalism is a philosophical practice of reconstruction. This is as summary a statement of pragmatism as I can muster” (17). While one might quibble about whether this is the best “summary statement” of pragmatism and about Koopman’s unwillingness to define transitionalism, he makes a strong and interesting case for giving more of our attention to the importance of historicism for pragmatism.

Early chapters offer a concise and selective history of pragmatism, attempting to show that transitionalism has been the unrecognized heart of pragmatism. Later chapters offer accounts of how transitionalism can make contributions to epistemology, ethics, and political theory. A final chapter lucidly and provocatively brings transitionalist pragmatism into contact with genealogical philosophy, with the intention of engendering new forms of critique and inquiry. The whole is, as is often the case, greater than the sum of the parts. In this case, the whole amounts to a manifesto and a rallying call for...