Online research in philosophy

This paper is a discussion of points of agreement and conflict between Rorty and Putnam.

Although Dewey’s influence has remained strong amongst the community of educators, his reputation amongst philosophers has had a remarkably volatile history. He was unquestionably the most influential figure in American philosophy until his death in 1952. Almost immediately after his death, however, Dewey’s writings almost completely disappeared from the American philosophy syllabus. They were replaced by the analytic philosophers of the logical positivist tradition, who thought that philosophical problems could be solved by unraveling puzzles that came from a lack of understanding of proper language use. After several decades, however, the inadequacies of this view became unavoidably obvious, and the next generation of analytically trained philosophers began to find themselves saying things that sounded remarkably like Dewey. Many analytic philosophers began to use the word “pragmatist” to describe some aspect of their positions: Quine, Churchland, Davidson, Feyerabend, Rorty, Putnam, among many others. Putnam and Rorty, in particular, have made a serious effort to restudy the original pragmatist texts, and reinterpret them for use in modern contexts. Not everyone is satisfied with their reinterpretations, however. Rorty, in particular has been criticized in some detail by Dewey scholars (see especially Saatkamp 1995). But Rorty admits that his ideas differ significantly from Dewey’s, because he is trying to revive only those aspects of Dewey’s ideas which are relevant for our times. I will argue, however, that those aspects of pragmatism which Rorty claims are the most relevant are actually the most out of date, and vice versa.

Stanley Cavell has been a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and controversial presence in American philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies for years. Even as he continues to produce new writing of a high standard -- an example of which is included in this collection -- his work has elicited responses from a new generation of writers in Europe and America. This collection showcases this new work, while illustrating the variety of Cavell's interests: in the "ordinary language" philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, in film criticism and theory, in literature, psychoanalysis, and the American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The collection also reprints Richard Rorty's early review of Cavell's magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), and it concludes with Cavell's substantial set of responses to the essays, a highlight of which is his engagement with Rorty.

Thirteen of the most distinguished living philosophers - including Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett - assess Richard Rorty's arguments for revising our philosophical conceptions of truth, reality, objectivity, and justification. These essays, together with Rorty's substantial replies to each, and other new material by him, offer by far the most thorough and thoughtful discussion of the work of the thinker who has been called 'the most interesting philosopher alive.'.

I juxtapose Quine's and Davidson's approaches to naturalized epistemology and assess Davidson's reasons for rejecting Quine's account of the nature of knowledge. Davidson argues that Quine's account of the nature of knowledge is Cartesian in spirit and consequence, i.e. it is essentially first person and invites global skepticism. I survey Quine's response to Davidson's criticisms and suggest that the view that Davidson criticizes may not be Quine's after all. I conclude by raising some questions about Quine's definition of ?observation sentence?

Alongside Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell is arguably one of the best-known philosophers in the world. In this state-of-the-art collection, Alice Crary explores the work of this original and interesting figure who has already been the subject of a number of books, conferences and Phd theses. A philosopher whose work encompasses a broad range of interests, such as Wittgenstein, scepticism in philosophy, the philosophy of art and film, Shakespeare, and philosophy of mind and language, Cavell has also written much about Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Including contributions from Hilary Putnam, Cora Diamond, Jim Conant and Stephen Mulhall, this book is a must-have for libraries and students alike.

This volume brings together for the first time thirteen recent interviews with the brightest names in contemporary philosophy, including W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam and John Rawls. The pieces are culled from the Harvard Review of Philosophy, which has operated at the core of Harvard's Philosophy Department since 1991. Covering wide range of topics from the philosophy of law to logic to metaphysics to literature, the interviews provide a fascinating introduction to some of the most influential thinkers of the day. The book also includes a foreword by Thomas Scanlon. Interviews with Henry Alison, Stanley Cavell, Alan Dershowitz, Cora Diamond, Umberto Eco, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Alexander Nehemas, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Michael Sandel, Cornel West.

Both Kuhn and Cavell acknowledge their indebtedness to each other in their respective books of the 60s. Cavell in (Must We Mean What We Say (1969)) and Kuhn in (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962). They were together at Berkeley where they had both moved in 1956 as assistant professors after their first encounter at the Society of Fellows at Harvard (Kuhn 2000d, p. 197). In Berkeley, Cavell and Kuhn discovered a mutual understanding and an intellectual affinity. They had regular conversations which Cavell describes as "extremely important" (Conant 1989, p. 40; cf. Cavell 1979, p. xix). Cavell says that he felt he wanted to assure Kuhn that "philosophy did not have standing answers to the questions [Kuhn] ..

In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's The American Scholar , this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. The American Philosopher explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy.