Reviewing the work of a single author collected and edited by someone other than the author presents itself as a uniquely difficult task. The principles that ordinarily serve to structure and facilitate the review process—logically analyzing a thinker’s argument, judging her contribution to the field, relating her work to the wider context of current intellectual debates or trends, and so on—prove to be of limited or no use. Yet this doesn’t mean there exist no principles by which to critically evaluate (...) the content and significance of such types of works. The principles at one’s disposal merely happen to be those of curation rather than creation.Now there are surely as many ways to curate a body of work as there.. (shrink)

With the publication of Jay Schulkin’s Naturalism and Pragmatism, pragmatist philosophers and theologians have been done a great service. A neuroscientist by training, Schulkin brings robust scientific data to bear on pragmatism’s naturalistic theory of inquiry, often charged as superficially concerned with practical expediency—that is, with “what works” apart from considerations of meaning and value that befit what Ernest Sosa influentially called “serious philosophy.”1 To serious-minded pragmatists, it is frustrating that facile readings of pragmatism—namely, that it is simply a disguised (...) form of antirealism and/or relativism—remain a century after Dewey dutifully clarified what practicality means for .. (shrink)