This manuscript is the introductory article for the special issue of the Journal of Social Studies Research titled Teaching Disciplinary Thinking, Literacy, and Argumentation Skills. In it, the authors provide an historical overview of disciplinary thinking as outlined by Edwin Fenton and Sam Wineburg. They talk about how the C3 Framework is a melding of a focus on disciplinary thinking outlined by Fenton and Wineburg with the emphasis on preparing K-12 students for their future roles as democratic citizens as stressed (...) by scholars like Shirley Engle. Then, the focus of the manuscript shifts to highlight the underdeveloped areas of disciplinary thinking in civics, geography, and economics. The authors define economic, civic, and geographic thinking and provide habits of mind for each of these disciplines along with classroom activities for each. They close with arguments for why K-12 social studies teachers and social studies education scholars should focus on developing K-12 students’ civic, economic, and geographic thinking skills. (shrink)

Russell Goodman tells the story of the development of philosophy in America from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century. The key figures in this story, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the writers of The Federalist, and the romantics Emerson and Thoreau, were not professors but men of the world, whose deep formative influence on American thought brought philosophy together with religion, politics, and literature.

This 2002 book explores Wittgenstein's long engagement with the work of the pragmatist William James. In contrast to previous discussions Russell Goodman argues that James exerted a distinctive and pervasive positive influence on Wittgenstein's thought. For example, the book shows that the two philosophers share commitments to anti-foundationalism, to the description of the concrete details of human experience, to the priority of practice over intellect, and to the importance of religion in understanding human life. Considering in detail what Wittgenstein (...) learnt from his reading of Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience the author provides considerable evidence for Wittgenstein's claim that he is saying 'something that sounds like pragmatism'. This provocative account of the convergence in the thinking of two major philosophers usually considered as members of discrete traditions will be eagerly sought by students of Wittgenstein, William James, pragmatism and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Professional philosophers have tended either to shrug off American philosophy as negligible or derivative or to date American philosophy from the work of twentieth century analytical positivists such as Quine. Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds not from Puritan theology or from empirical science but from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism. This insight leads Goodman, through Cavell, back to Emerson and Thoreau and thence to (...) William James and John Dewey, as they assimilated to American circumstances and intellectual habits the currents of European thought from Kant to Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Three claims wittgenstein makes in the tractatus are explicated via schopenhauer's idealism: 1) ethical reward and punishment lie in the action itself, 2) the good or bad exercise of the will alter the world's limits, So that it waxes or wanes, 3) eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Schopenhauer's theory fills out some of wittgenstein's statements. For example, The happy man's world waxes to the degree that he frees himself from the false perspective of the "principium (...) individuationis". However, The link between schopenhauer's metaphysics and his ethics is tighter than the analogous link in wittgenstein. (shrink)

In this paper I reconsider James and Wittgenstein, not in the quest for what Wittgenstein might have learned from James, or for an answer to the question whether Wittgenstein was a pragmatist, but in an effort to see what these and other related but quite different thinkers can help us to see about animals, including ourselves. I follow Cora Diamond’s lead in discussing a late paper by Vicki Hearne entitled “A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at Liberty”, which (...) draws on Wittgenstein and offers some insights that accord with pragmatist accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

In addition to facing the known competitors in the formal economy, entrepreneurs must also be concerned with rivalry emanating from the informal economy. The informal economy is characterized by actions outside the normal scope of commerce, such as unsanctioned payments and gift-giving, as means of influencing competition. Scholars and policy makers alike have an interest in mitigating the impacts of such informal activity in that it might present an obstacle for legitimate commerce. Received theory suggests that country institutions can enable (...) and constrain productive activity, and, in doing so, influence competitive obstacles in a country. Leveraging 13,670 responses from entrepreneurs distributed across 59 countries, we provide evidence that two particular types of enabling institutions, countries’ property rights regulations and cooperative actions, are useful for lowering the obstacles presented by informal activity. We also find evidence that two constraining institutions, economic and financial regulations lead to more obstacles presented by informal activity. We describe implications for entrepreneurs, policy makers, and future researchers stemming from these findings. (shrink)

Russell Goodman examines the curious reemergence of pragmatism in a field dominated in the past decades by phenomenology, logic, positivism, and deconstruction. With contributions from major contemporary and classical thinkers such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Nancy Fraser, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson Russell has gathered an impressive chorus of philosophical voices that reexamine the origins and complexities of neo-pragmatism. The contributors discuss the relationship between pragmatism and literary theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and the work of Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson. They question the meaning of pragmatics, what it is to be practical, and ask provocative questions such as: what is reading? and whether or not democracy is a precondition for the functioning of intelligence. This work places this reemergent and interesting neo-development in its proper context and will provide readers with a strong sense of the movement's foundations, history, and subtlities. (shrink)

The essay begins with a history of the term pluralism, the philosophical uses of which owe much to William James. Following Jean Wahl and others, we can distinguish various senses of the term in James’s writings, including the metaphysical theses that human action is not fully determined, and that the world contains a multiplicity of unique entities that cannot be fully described in concepts. On the epistemological front, James embraces scheme pluralism, the view that there are many correct schemes for (...) describing the universe. According to James’s vertical scheme pluralism, there are different non-rival schemes, for example those of mathematics, ethics, and the consular service. According to his horizontal scheme pluralism there can be more than one correct account of how things are in any given domain. James also embraces ethical pluralism, the thesis that there are different reasonable or valid systems of values, and point of view pluralism, that claim that there are many legitimate but—at least in some cases—incommensurable points of view on the universe. James is particularly interested in the cases of human/human, human/animal, and human/higher consciousness points of view. The essay traces the development of James’s views about pluralism from the early eighteen eighties onward, including the essays collected in The Will to Believe (1897), his lecture “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899) Pragmatism (1907), and from the last years of his life, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). It concludes with a brief discussion of contemporary pluralism in the work of Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, and others. (shrink)