Online research in philosophy

Scholars have a history of crossing intellectual borders (Abbott, 2001). In particular, educators draw from a diversity of intellectuals upon which to base our understanding of, for example, schools and society, curriculum content, teaching, and learning. In addition to icons such as Marx, James, Freud, and Dewey, the works of the Frankfurt School (e.g., Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Foucault, Gilligan, Derrida, Gramsci, West, Arendt, and Fraser, just to name a few, have been used to guide our scholarship and practice. However, with the exception of few scholars (e.g., Peters & Ghiraldelli, 2001), one of America's most controversial scholars,1 Richard Rorty, has been largely ignored. This situation is unfortunate ..

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I will argue, however, that those aspects of pragmatism which Rorty claims are the most relevant are actually the most out of date, and vice versa.

This paper presents the history of the Frankfurt School’s inclusion of normative concerns in social science research programs during the period 1930-1955. After examining the relevant methodology, I present a model of how such a program could look today. I argue that such an approach is both valuable to contemporary social science programs and overlooked by current philosophers and social scientists.

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.'.

The “Frankfurt School” refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).

This volume examines the ways in which the authors of the early Frankfurt School criticized, adopted and modified traditional forms of religious thought and practice. Focusing on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann, it analyzes the relevance of religious traditions and of the Enlightenment critique of religion for modern conceptions of emancipatory thought, art, law, and politics.

For some decades now, British cultural studies has tended to either disregard or caricature in a hostile manner the critique of mass culture developed by the Frankfurt school. [1] The Frankfurt school has been repeatedly stigmatized as elitist and reductionist, or simply ignored in discussion of the methods and enterprise of cultural studies. This is an unfortunate oversight as I will argue that despite some significant differences in method and approach, there are also many shared positions that make dialogue between the traditions productive. Likewise, articulation of the differences and divergences of the two traditions could be fruitful since, as I will argue, both traditions to some extent overcome the weaknesses and limitations of the other. Consequently, articulation of their positions could produce new perspectives that might contribute to developing a more robust cultural studies. Thus, I will argue that rather than being antithetical, the Frankfurt school and British cultural studies approaches complement each other and can be articulated in new configurations.

This paper explores the paradox of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory where the notion of "critical theory" became identified with aesthetics and asks whether the disappearance of the political dimension of critical theory was necessary.This disappearance of the political also presents some uncomfortable affinities between it and postmodernism. But in the more sober world after 1989, post-communism poses more relevant questions than post-modernism for an assessment of the history of the Frankfurt School.The political project of the old Frankfurt School has to be revivified - or at least given a decent burial.

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