Contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human effective possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill. The book is a critical survey of Richard McKay Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism”, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice.

The strong influence of pragmatism in the early 20th-century international debate, its subsequent and apparently inexorable decline, and its recent revival are intertwined with the fate of other currents of thought that have marked the development of contemporary philosophy. This volume clarifies the most recent events of this development focusing on key theoretical issues common both to American classic philosophical tradition and analytical thought. Many essays in this volume belong to what we can call “new” pragmatism, namely a pragmatist perspective (...) that is different from the postmodernist “neo” pragmatism à la Rorty. The volume shows that both pragmatists and analytic thinkers stress the importance of logic and scientific method in order to deal with philosophical problems and seek for a clarification of the relation between our ethical values and our understanding of natural facts. Moreover, the anti-skeptic attitude that characterizes pragmatism as well as most part of analytic philosophy, and their common attention to the problems of language and communication are emphasized. The more sophisticated tools for addressing both theoretical and methodological problems developed by analytic philosophy are pointed out, and the essays show the possible integration of these two forms of speculation that, for too a long time, mutually disregarded one another. (shrink)

§1 According to the paradigmatic formula offered by Kant, the philosopher’s task consists of demonstrating “how we ought to think” as opposed to “how we do think” – that is, logical rules or norms must be separated from the functioning principles of the human mind or from psychological laws. As it is well-known, in the “Preface” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the German philosopher stands against “some moderns” who “have thought to enlarge” logic “interpolating psycholo...

El presente trabajo busca reconstruir la posición de Hilary Putnam en torno a la filosofía de James, analizando los aspectos que han contribuido principalmente a la evolución del realismo putnamiano. Luego de precisar la afinidad entre Wittgenstein y James que guía el interés de Putnam por el pragmatismo de James, la autora recorre los temas éticos, epistemológicos y metafísicos a partir de los cuales surgen los aspectos más fructíferos de la filosofía pragmatista. Algunos de ellos son: la conjunción entre antidogmatismo (...) y antiescepticismo, la concepción procesal del conocimiento y de la verdad, la crítica al reduccionismo fisicalista y al realismo del sentido común, y, por último, la tesis de la importanciade la dimensión práctica en el desarrollo del análisis filosófico. Queda así subrayada la actualidad de la batalla jamesiana contra la lógica dicotómica que gobierna nuestra tradición teorética. (shrink)

The relationship between regularity and chance, or necessity and contingency, is a common concern of classical pragmatists. The metaphysical quality of this issue flows into the construction of postmodern discourse, although in a very different framework and, paradoxically, under the auspices of the anti-metaphysics that such a discourse claims. This paper proposes at first a brief reconstruction of the chance and regularity issue in postmodernism; then Peirce’s cosmological-metaphysical theory of chance, namely his ‘tychism,’ is recalled as a fruitful suggestion to (...) avoid the conceptual split between chance and regularity. Subsequently, considering the family resemblances between postmodernism and Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, the insistence upon history and contingency that stands out in his work will be tackled as a ‘postmodern tychism’ that, in fact, does not fit too-easy readings according to which he would have turned pragmatism into an extreme form of irrationalism and radical moral relativism. In particular, this paper aims to enlighten Rorty’s effort to re-propose, with new and more refined philosophical tools, the great challenge posed by the classical pragmatists: namely, the challenge to translate the pathos of contingency into an anti-dogmatic ethos, that is a cultural stance that might be able to combine the rejection of absolutes with the commitment to construct meanings and values hosting argumentative interpersonal and intercultural practices as the ‘rule’ of our moral history. (shrink)

La elegante traducción al español de Lógica. Teoría de la investigación, realizada por Ángel Faerna, confirma la importancia cultural, y no sólo filosófica, del pensamiento de Dewey, uno de los autores norteamericanos más estudiados hasta la fecha. Considerado en muchos sentidos como un punto de referencia ricamente sugerente para abordar viejos y nuevos “problemas del hombre” – por utilizar el título de un conocido volumen de Dewey –, este autor se presta, en particular, a una fructífera con...

This paper proposes the “conceptual pragmatism” of C. I. Lewis as a useful epistemological orientation for studying the relationship between the social and individual registers, in particular as it is set out in Bourdieu’s sociology of practice. Bourdieu’s concepts of habits based upon ‘social schematism’ and of culture as a ‘second nature,’ as well as Lewis’ conception of logical schemas constructed by humans are all formulated in the wake of Kant, and mediating between sensorial experience and the conceptual level is (...) a common issue for Lewis and the French sociologist. This paper discusses Lewis’ controversial idea of “sense meaning” in order to show his commitment to a pragmatic, interactive theory of knowledge and language. Moreover, I emphasize Lewis’ intertwining of conceptual schemas, actions, and reality as a theoretical network for reshaping analysis of the relationship between sociality and individuality according to a pragmatist perspective, and for implementing and improving Lewis’ commitment to observing, describing, and interpreting the effective functioning of conceptual schemas, one that includes an option in favor of an externalist philosophical methodology which, in principle, tallies with the methodological attitude that mostly characterizes the contemporary social sciences. (shrink)

Together with the members and promoters of the Associazione Culturale Pragma, we very pleased to celebrate the third anniversary of its foundation with the launching of a new journal devoted to the study of American philosophy, the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. It is, in fact, a particularly important achievement which comes to strengthen our confidence in the positive relationships among a wide international group of academics and scholars that already produced a nu...

The symposium “Peirce in the World” is a homage that EJPAP wants to pay to the Centenary of the death of the great American thinker Charles S. Peirce, one of the founding fathers of pragmatism. The idea of the symposium stems from observing that Peirce studies are nowadays spread out all over the world, and the scholarship that comes from outside the US is becoming more and more important in breadth and depth. This phenomenon is possibly the greatest change that (...) happened to Peirce scholarship... (shrink)

- Lo sfondo religioso del pensiero di John Dewey ha una forte incidenza sulla sua concezione della democrazia, la quale tuttavia prevede espressamente l'affrancamento dalle credenze nel soprannaturale. Il carattere ‘quasi-religioso'che egli assegna agli ideali democratici č un'espressione peculiare di un ‘naturalismo umanistico' che valorizza la capacitÀ immaginativa e la conoscenza scientifica, quali strumenti basilari per sviluppare le migliori possibilitÀ umane, prescindendo dall'individualismo e da ogni forma di dogmatismo. La complessitÀ del pensiero deweyano, delle sue fonti di ispirazione cosě come (...) delle sue istanze piů originali, sembra offrire sufficienti motivi tanto per mitigare i rischi di un incauto scientismo quanto per lasciare spazio a un ulteriore approfondimento del problema delle credenze religiose, problema che, nel nostro tempo, appare tutt'altro che secondario. (shrink)

It is common knowledge that pragmatism acquired a new and quite relevant space within European philosophical debate during the second half of Nineteen Century, and the leading actors of such a renewed interest for the classics of American thought have been Karl Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. Especially in Italy, the so called revival of pragmatism took place via their neo-kantianianism, and actually one could say that the pragmatist thought has been, so to speak, cleared from previous discred...

Neste ensaio, enquadro a narrativa de Rorty com relação ao ego na história das filosofias moderna e contemporânea. Minha tese é que sua rejeição tanto do introspectivismo cartesiano quanto das explicações reducionistas psico-biológicas nasce originalmente de uma epistemologia do ego que está alinhada aos insights de Hume sobre a contingência da individualidade, mas também, introduz uma abordagem complexa à questão filosófica sobre a relação entre os reinos estético e racional. Além disso, avanço em uma leitura anticética, dinâmica e normativa do (...) modelo narrativo de Rorty do ego, a qual associa seu entendimento de ironia – nós podemos sempre duvidar que nosso vocabulário final é o melhor disponível – e de solidariedade – concebido não apenas como um movimento afetivo em direção ao outro, mas também, como uma condição lógica para o funcionamento da comunicação humana. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteur examine le naturalisme de James comme un exemple des intersections entre la biologie, la psychologie et la philosophie. L’article reconstruit les principaux arguments épistémologiques, éthiques et métaphysiques de James pour montrer comment sa philosophie s’inscrit dans la biologie de Darwin. Ainsi, le contingentisme de James devient cohérent avec sa critique de l’interprétation du principe darwinien de la « sélection naturelle » et avec l’idée de Darwin de l’ambiguïté comme marque de la réalité physique et humaine.

Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature presents the most thorough and sustained critique of Western epistemology and foundationalism in the second half of the twentieth Century. The work deconstructs philosophy as an autonomous discipline generating a “neutral matrix” to assess knowledge, truth, and rationality, offering philosophical analyses of the mind-body distinction, representation, reference, and truth, and ultimately the concept of knowledge as a “mirror of nature.” The deconstruction of Cartesian dualism undermines the mind as the immaterial ground of absolute (...) certainty; the deconstruction of the Kantian empirical-transcendental distinction destroys the transcendental realm as philosophy’s uniquely accessible and founding domain. Instead, Rorty invites us to reconceive philosophy as an edifying voice in the “conversation of mankind.”. (shrink)

La centralitÀ della categoria temporale del futuro e la preminenza della "conversazione umana" sono gli aspetti basilari della versione rortiana del pensiero democratico americano e della filosofia pragmatista. Nel rinnovare gli assunti di base del migliorismo statunitense, Rorty chiama in causa le consonanze tra autori come John Dewey e William James e le istanze anti-fondazionaliste provenienti dall'Europa, in vista di un ripensamento radicale della pratica filosofica. Essa va intesa non piů alla stregua di una ricerca dei fondamenti ultimi della realtÀ (...) ma piuttosto come un impegno edificante basato sul criterio della Social Hope. Gli autori del pragmaatismo sono frequentati con disinvoltura da Rorty, che condivide con James e particolarmente con Dewey la fiducia nella capacitÀ costruttiva dell'intelligenza umana e nella cooperazione sperimentale degli individui, accantonando invece Peirce e la sua importante nozione di "infinite hope". (shrink)

With its emphasis on indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and chance, contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human practical possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill at the cost of repudiating concrete ways in which we grant epistemic and ethical meaning to our activities. Richard McKay Rorty's "neo-pragmatism" launched a powerful challenge to entrenched philosophical and pre-philosophical certainties of modernity, allowing us to articulate the powerful picture of normativity as a distinctive exercise and activity of human (...) beings. The book is a critical survey of his philosophy, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice by using the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of both analytic philosophy and pragmatism. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Michela Bella, William Curtis, and Emil Višňovský for their thorough and generous interventions on my latest work. I would also like to thank EJPAP’s executive editors, Roberta Dreon and Sarin Marchetti, for hosting a symposium on this book and Michela Bella for her editorial work. Each of the three contributions to the symposium grasps some key features of my work, indeed the spirit that animated it, even if, at times, my statements are not entirely explicit. (...) Since the... (shrink)

The paper firstly reconstructs Mario Calderoni’s criticism of the Jamesian version of pragmatism, which corresponds to his philosophical choice in favor of the ethical value assigned by Peirce to the scientific-experimental method. In this light, I propose a reading of some Calderoni’s arguments concerning the link between the construction of beliefs, practical norms and moral or legal responsibility, trying to reassess his criticisms of James and then his conception of philosophy as a practical and therapeutic activity. The latter will be (...) discussed considering Wittgenstein’s analysis of intentional verbs and Calderoni’s approach to the issues of freedom, of the definition of voluntary acts as well as of individual responsibility, both moral and legal. In particular, I will focus on the paradigm shift suggested by Wittgenstein with regard to the problem of human will, which seems useful for enhancing Calderoni’s pragmatist insights. (shrink)

“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.” Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism I. Introducción: ¿es Richard Rorty el hombre que mató a la verdad? En el año 2003, apenas cuatro años antes de la muerte de (...) Richard Rorty, la cadena BBC emit... (shrink)

Introduction and Historical Framework Pragmatism and analytic philosophy are two very complex and ramified schools of thought, two ways of conceiving the philosophical work, both of which extremely hard to define in a satisfactory and shared manner. For this reason, the attempt to make a study of their relations and interactions, encounters and clashes, may seem even more risky and uncertain. But New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy (Rodopi 2011), edited by Rosa Calcaterra,...

In February 1907 Giovanni Papini wrote on Leonardo that “Pragmatism” did not exist; there were “only pragmatist theories and more or less pragmatist thinkers.” Rather than “a nice system born out of the brain of a single philosopher” or of “an homogeneous school,” pragmatism was “a coalition of theories of various origins and nature.” The rich pragmatist genealogy offered by Il pragmatismo. Dalle origini agli sviluppi contemporanei, edited by Rosa M. Calcaterra, Giovanni Maddalena and Giancar...

Somewhat unexpectedly, given the weighty baggage of anything-goes relativism that long trailed him, a central concern in work on Richard Rorty since his passing in 2007 has been his normativity.1 Rosa Calcaterra's Contingency and Normativity is the most ambitious and most illuminating effort to date in this vein. The book helps us better understand Rorty's pragmatism by using his challenges to us as the basis for an inquiry into epistemic and moral normativity in the wake of the critique (...) of foundationalism and rise of "contingentism," which Calcaterra understands as "a conceptual net tied to the criteria of indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty and randomness". Ultimately, Calcaterra's contribution is the... (shrink)

Rosa M. Calcaterra's new book is a critical interpretation of Richard Rorty's intellectual path as structured around the problem of normativity. How can we justify our normative claims in epistemology, morality, and politics, without lapsing into either ahistorical foundationalism or some form of skepticism? Calcaterra discusses the Rortyan answers to this question with a critical but sympathetic eye. In doing so, she stresses Rorty's relation to the broader pragmatist family even more than Rorty himself would have been (...) willing to do. Overall, three major strategies to bridge contingency and normativity emerge from the book. The first centers on meliorism as a powerful instrument to make sense of the idea of... (shrink)

Perguntas-máquinas se desenvolvem em problemas e perseguem uma pergunta fundamental que não se satisfaz e perdura através de todas as respostas. Assim a aprendizagem conduz as faculdades ao exercício transcendente e requer uma educação voltada para a emissão e a exploração dos signos.

Virtue ethics has often been regarded as complementary or laissez-faire ethics in solving business problems. This paper seeks conceptual and methodological improvements by developing a virtue character scale that will enable assessment of the link between organizational level virtue and organizational performance, financial or non-financial. Based upon three theoretical assumptions, multiple studies were conducted; the content analysis of 158 Fortune Global 500 firms ethical values and a survey of 2548 customers and employees. Six dimensions of organizational virtue (Integrity, Empathy, Warmth, (...) Courage, Conscientiousness and Zeal) are identified through confirmatory factor analysis, and validated against satisfaction measure. Strategic implications of virtue characters are discussed. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

How do engineers respond to ethical dilemmas that occur in practice? How do they view their individual and collective responsibilities? How do they make decisions before all the facts are in? Using the space shuttle programme as the framework, this book examines the role of ethical decision making in the practice of engineering. In particular, the book considers the design and development of the main engines of the space shuttle as a paradigm for how individual engineers perceive, articulate, and resolve (...) ethical dilemmas in a large, complex organisation. A series of in-depth case studies show engineers at work on various stages of the project as they balance budgets, deadlines and risks. By documenting the historical development of a single system, the book provides a unique opportunity to explore the complex interactions between political, organisational and technical pressures and engineering and management decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo propone que la 31ª Bienal de Sao Paulo entraña un afán emancipador para los "sin tierra" - errantes, migrantes y viajeros. Para ello se conforma como un cuerpo sin órganos, que despliega estrategias liberadoras promoviendo: desarticulación, experimentación, vagabundeo y tránsito de sujetos y pueblos. Esta Bienal, en tanto CsO, mueve intensidades como flujos sensibles por los intersticios de los proyectos artísticos dispuestos en organismo. Acá el CsO es un conjunto de prácticas reservadas a desterritorializar los estratos (...) del "organismo social" y hacer estallar los órganos estructurados en dichos sistemas.: This article shows that the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial has an emancipatory affinity for the landless - wanderers, migrants, and travelers. As such it becomes a Body without Organs that displays liberating strategies, promoting disarticulation, experimentation, wandering, and the transit of subjects and peoples. This Biennial, as a BwO, moves intensities as sensible flows through the interstices of the artistic projects inside the organism. Here, the BwO becomes a set of practices that deterritorialize the strata of the "social organism", making the structured organs in these systems explode. (shrink)

This study compares the different emphases on virtuous characters presented in their values, across global firms considering country and industry of origin. It presents a content analysis of the 122 codes of conduct statements from Fortune Global 500 firms, drawn from four sectors and using correspondence analysis. American firms tend to emphasize courage, while European firms emphasize integrity and empathy, surprisingly with Asian firms being closer to European ones. Retailers and pharmaceutical firms emphasize empathy, while banks and petroleum emphasize courage. (...) This study extends the newly emerging strategic paradigm of organizational virtue, by introducing an empirical study of ethical values. Implications for multinational companies are then discussed. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)