Abstract:Jane Addams’ short book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, which has largely been ignored by philosophers, identifies two important powers of memory. In addition to consoling the elderly and enabling them to make meanings of their pasts, memories also have the power to calcify into stories that reinforce shared moral values and incite moral progress. These observations serve as the starting point for a conversation on narrative medicine and its potential for improving medical treatment for patients receiving end-of-life care. (...) In addition to filling in one of the many gaps that exists in the literature surrounding Addams’ work, I also aim to contribute to the growing scholarship on person-centered end-of-life care in the field of bioethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Correspondence of Charles S. Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company, 1890–1913 ed. by Stetson J. RobinsonCornelis de WaalEdited by Stetson J. RobinsonThe Correspondence of Charles S. Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company, 1890–1913 Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 666pp., incl. indexThe fifth volume in the Peirceana series brings us the extensive correspondence between Peirce and the Open Court Publishing Company (abbreviated to OCP by Robinson). The (...) double-barreled opening shot consists of two letters (one by Francis Russell and one by Open Court’s Editor Paul Carus) aimed at soliciting a contribution from [End Page 109] Peirce for the inaugural issue of a new quarterly journal to be published by the Open Court, called The Monist. Carus had been particularly impressed by Peirce’s Illustrations of the Logic of Science papers, which had appeared over a decade earlier in Popular Science Monthly, and to which Russell had drawn Carus’s attention.1 Peirce quickly responded, suggesting not one but an entire series of articles, the first of which to be titled “The Architecture of Theories.” It proved the beginning of a productive but also turbulent relationship between Peirce and the publishing company. The final letter in the exchange comes again from Carus, written September 10, 1913, about seven months before Peirce died.The Open Court Collection at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, from which much of the correspondence is drawn, is a truly magnificent collection. It contains not only business correspondence and financial records, but also the various stages of the publishing process. It includes the original texts that Peirce sent to the publisher, as well as the often heavily corrected galleys and proofs—material that is used appreciatively by the Peirce Edition Project for its critical edition of Peirce’s Writings. When we combine this record with the Nachlass of a philosopher who lived in a continuously expanding mansion with a penchant for keeping each and every scrap of paper, we get a remarkably full picture of everything that went into the publication of Peirce’s work with the Open Court. In contrast, we know painfully little of what went on at the Century Company, which published the Century Dictionary to which Peirce so heavily contributed, or of James Mark Baldwin’s treatment of Peirce’s submissions when he compiled his Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. Neither venture seems to have left any records, apart from what survived within Peirce’s own papers— at least no such records have so far been found. We know a bit more about Peirce’s dealings with The Nation, but again, almost exclusively because of what has been preserved in Peirce’s papers.Robinson’s hefty tome makes the correspondence between Peirce and the Open Court widely available for the first time. The book opens with a short explanation of the editorial method, a helpful chronology, and a brief historical introduction describing Peirce’s relationship with the Open Court. The work also contains fourteen illustrations, mostly of letters. The introduction to the volume is brief and largely piggybacks on a handful of sources, such as the Introduction to Volume 8 of the Writings, rather than that it was inspired by the collection of letters that follows it, or by a closer familiarity with the archival holdings of the Open Court.2 In his introduction, Robinson divides Peirce’s relationship with the publishing company in four periods: A very active 1890–1894, which includes Peirce’s familiar Monist Metaphysical papers, his contributions to the fortnightly The Open Court, and his [End Page 110] attempts at writing an elementary arithmetic. This period ends with a falling out between Peirce and Hegeler. It is followed by a far more subdued 1894–1897, where the relationship with the publisher is largely restored by Russell, and which results in an extensive discussion by Peirce of the third volume of Ernst Schröder’s Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik, which appeared in two parts in The Monist. This period too ends with a falling out. The activity picks up again in 1904, resulting in Peirce’s famous pragmatism papers as well as the “Some Amazing Mazes” series of 1908... (shrink)

Abstract:This paper presents a model of the continuous structure of Cognition based on several theses proposed by Charles S. Peirce in his youth and in his mature period. In this model, cognitions are discontinuous parts on a continuum and a cognitive process becomes “individually-synthetic,” as a hypostatic abstraction from discontinuous transformations of informational fluxes in the continuous course of experience. That is, they are salient regions or neighborhoods on a continuum rather than points, and the relations of succession and precession (...) among them are inferential, fluid, time sensitive, and goal-directed. First, this paper will outline the theses found in the young Peirce’s work, which inspire a conception of continuous Cognition. Two questions will be raised regarding such a conception: (1) at what point does a particular act of cognition conclude? and (2) how should we characterize individual cognitions? To address these questions, the paper will later introduce the concept of continuity that Peirce developed in his mature years. The synthetic character of the continuum leads to the formulation of the concepts of neighborhood and synthetic individuality. These notions support the conception of a continuous model of Cognition in which the relations of succession and precession between individual finite cognitions are explained. The paper ends with a brief reflection regarding the possibility of developing this model of continuous Cognition as a theory of extended cognition. (shrink)

Abstract:American philosophy has an uneasy relationship with sex. At least, this is the central claim of Richard Shusterman’s recent article, “Pragmatism and Sex: An Unfulfilled Connection,” in which he provides for us an overview of the failures of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead to theorize about erotic life in any particularly “useful” way. This paper will critically examine this claim by advocating for a more careful reading of the appearance of sexuality within classical American thought—particularly as it is cast within (...) Dewey’s aesthetics—while ultimately sympathizing with the felt need for American philosophers to engage intimate experience with more frankness, respect, and focus. Although American philosophy has erred on the side of reserve, Shusterman’s misreading of Dewey’s critique of Freud, and his mistaking the appearance of Darwin’s theories as reductive, are critical blunders that paint the tradition as overly prudish, and egregiously dismissive of this important sphere of experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New by Todd LekanHenry JackmanBy Todd LekanWilliam James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning New York: Routledge, 2022. 156pp., incl. indexWhile William James wrote just a single article in theoretical ethics, it has often been said that ethical concerns animate almost all of his work.1 Indeed, there has been a growing interest in James’s moral philosophy, and Todd Lekan’s William (...) James and the Moral Life: Responsible Self-Fashioning is the latest, and arguably the best, sustained attempt to introduce readers to James’s ethical thought. The task is not an easy one, since the one essay of James’s that explicitly focuses on theoretical ethics, 1891’s “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, deals with ‘social’ concerns that don’t clearly align with the more ‘existential’ questions that run through the rest of his corpus.2 In particular, James’s main ‘ethical’ concerns in most of his writings seem to relate more to our living ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ lives than it does to our living a ‘moral’ ones. Consequently, writings on James’s ethics tend to treat these two strands separately, either focusing disproportionately on just one of these two aspects, or treating the two as separate components that do not affect one another.3 Weaving both strands of James’s ethical though into a coherent whole may be the primary achievement of Lekan’s book, but he provides much insight into interpretive problems relating to the individual threads along the way.The more ‘social’ strand is admirably explained in Lekan’s first chapter, “Pragmatist Moral Philosophy and Moral Life: Embracing the Tensions”, where he outlines James’s meta-ethical views from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, and gives an account of the regulative assumptions and regulative ideals that James appeals to in order to go from his initial thesis that all goodness originates from the desires of sentient beings to the conclusion that “we are morally obligated to [End Page 105] satisfy as many demands as possible”, and that among the available ideals we might choose, “we are morally obligated to adopt ideals whose realization does not undermine the ideals held by others” (15).Ideals move to center stage in the book’s second chapter, “Ideals and Significant Lives”, which trades the social ethics of the first chapter for more existential concerns, and explains how James takes the strenuous pursuit of our own ideals to amount to a kind of ‘self-fashioning’ that makes for a ‘meaningful’ life (36). This answer to the existential question is, however, ambivalent about the social one. Unlike some other interpreters who focus primarily on the existential question, Lekan notes that James’s pluralism about ideals seems to leave plenty of room for ideals that were very much out of line with the moral injunctions of James’s social ethics to produce perfectly significant lives.4 So, for instance, pursuing an ideal tied to the promotion of the supremacy of one’s religion at the expense of all others might satisfy the requirements for creating a significant life, even if that ideal required the relentless persecution of those who did not share it. Indeed, the ideals in question need not be as extreme as this; even more mundane ideals like becoming a great painter, while not directly requiring that you harm others, might still be successfully pursued in a way that ignored the demands of others that was in tension with “The Moral Philosopher”’s emphasis on maximizing overall demand satisfaction.5As the book’s subtitle suggests, Lekan attempts to harmonize the social and existential strands of James’s thought by arguing that our self-fashioning is “responsible” when the ideals involved satisfy the constraints of the moral philosopher discussed in chapter one (50). In particular, the subject who strenuously pursues such moral ideals is characterized as the “existential moral philosopher” (29–30) and striving to satisfy that ideal would produce a life that met both James’s social and existential concerns. That said, it would have been helpful to see a little more about the tension between these two sides... (shrink)

Abstract:This article builds on Bellucci’s and Murphey’s accounts of Peirce’s early logic of signs by making a pair of contributions to the literature on Peirce’s reduction of illation to the sign relation. First, I reinvesti-gate the connection between the structure of inference and the representative relation, relying here on Peirce’s early accounts of sign inference from 1865 and 1866. Second, with the development of Peirce’s theory of inquiry in mind, I elucidate the implications of Peirce’s early view of sign inference. (...) These contributions deepen our understanding of Fisch’s claim that the Illustrations series “is thought out within the framework of the doctrine of signs.”. (shrink)

Abstract:Moral prophets are agents who aim to transform the customs and practices of their community. They are critics of the social order whose calls for change are often met by skepticism, resentment, and hostility from those around them. This paper takes up the phenomenon of moral prophecy as a way of elucidating the relationships between three key features of a pragmatist ethics: fallibilism, hope, and sociality. I begin by discussing a problem that moral prophecy poses for pragmatists, wherein their commitment (...) to evaluative fallibilism appears to conflict with the fact that moral prophecy requires resolve in the face of disagreement. I then look to the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey to develop a pragmatist account of moral prophecy and argue that it can overcome this problem. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts about how a pragmatist account of moral prophecy presents a challenge to forms of evaluative realism. (shrink)

Abstract:Rorty in private exchanges and public discourse occasionally gave me remarkably bad advice (e.g., in teaching pragmatism, especially to undergrads, it is better to focus on James and Dewey to the exclusion of Peirce). He however was far better than this. As a philosopher preoccupied with meta-philosophy and intimately linked to this with issues of justification, he displayed reflexive finesse unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. As someone who identified with James and Dewey even more than Marx, Freud, Foucault, and (...) Derrida, he was animated by a pragmatic imagination oriented to the ongoing task of reconstructing the democratic ethos of our daily lives. Chris Voparil has made a painstaking and responsible case for taking the thought of Rorty to be continuous with that of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams. It is far from clear that the path forward requires us to go through, rather than ‘round, Rorty; but it is one possible route. Moreover, even if Voparil in the end offers a “weak misreading” of a “strong misreader,” he offers an engaging, erudite, and illuminating portrait of a controversial figure. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Venn. A Life in Logic by Lukas M. VerburgtClaudia CristalliLukas M. VerburgtJohn Venn. A Life in Logic Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 411 pp., incl. indexThis is the first intellectual biography of John Venn (1834–1923), British logician, “philosopher and antiquarian” (DNB). Until now, Venn had not been studied as a philosophical figure in its own right. He is mostly remembered today for the (...) “Venn Diagrams,” a graphical device illustrating logical relations such as inclusion, exclusion, conjunction, disjunction, and for having systematically articulated a frequentist theory of probability. Together with an in-depth account of Venn’s logical developments, of his studies in probability theory, and of its applications to history and to anthropometry, Lukas M. Verburgt brings to life Venn’s spiritual struggles within—and eventually out of— his family’s religion, evangelicalism. Verburgt’s reconstruction is substantiated by many extracts from Venn’s correspondence and private notes, which add substantially to the value of this biography. (Of note is Verburgt’s 2022 editon of Venn’s unpublished writings and slected correspondence, which can be considered a companion to this biography).While showing the connections of epistemology, religion and academic politics in Victorian Cambridge, Verburgt contributes an important chapter in the history of logic and of empiricist philosophy.The book opens with a chapter on Venn’s childhood and early youth (1834–53), largely drawn from manuscript material of the Venn family—the “Parentalia”—and from Venn’s Annals of a Clerical Family, where he included “autobiographical recollections” (p. 2). The chapter introduces the reader to the values of a prominent evangelical family and to their peculiar way of understanding Christianity as a faith to be embedded in habit and to be taught by example. The following two [End Page 385] chapters follow Venn’s development, first as a student at Caius college, Cambridge (1853–57) and then as a country curate; the chapters elaborate on the institutional history of the college and on parish life from the perspective of evangelical orthodoxy. Chapter 4 is still chronologically situated within Venn’s early clerical service but is arranged thematically around his first publication (1862), “Science of History,” which contains some elements of the fundamental ideas elaborated in the Logic of Chance (1866): namely, that probability theory could only make predictions about long-run frequencies of events, and never about individual cases (p. 77). The core of Venn’s argument in 1862 revolved around possible atheistic implications of a science of history. If at some point it would be possible to predict future events, would there still be free will? Or a God? In his reply, Venn maintained that any prediction concerning individual agents could be defeated by assuming that the agent gets to know the prediction and changes her actions accordingly (pp. 74–76).After the publication of the “Science of History” essay, Venn left the parish for Cambridge, where he worked first as a Catechist (1862– 1867) and then as a moral sciences lecturer. Verburgt devotes chapter 5 to that and to the Cambridge milieu, where Venn sides for university reforms and engages with the Grote Club, all while drifting away from evangelical orthodoxy. After laying out Venn’s theory of probability (Chapter 6), Verburgt returns to an integrated analysis of Venn’s scientific and religious thought in chapter 7. This chapter may be particularly relevant for pragmatist readers, since here Verburgt highlights the commonalities between Venn’s “religious logic” and the notion of belief that will be expressed in more detail by pragmatism. Verburgt focuses on Venn’s logic in three subsequent chapters (Chapters 8, 9 and 11). Considered together, they provide a comprehensive history of Venn’s logical development, which Verburgt proudly announces as the first of this kind (p. xx). The last chapter on Venn’s logic (Chapter 11) also includes Verburgt’s argument for “includ[ing] Venn in the local history of early analytic philosophy at Cambridge” (p. 262). Chapters 10 and 12 recount Venn’s last years with particular emphasis on his interests in natural and historical sciences; they provide relevant material for scholars interested in the history and philosophy of... (shrink)

Abstract:We argue that traditional formulations of the reduction thesis that tie it to privileged relational operations do not suffice for Peirce’s justification of the categories and invite the charge of gerrymandering to make it come out as true. We then develop a more robust invariant formulation of the thesis, one that is immune to that charge, by explicating the use of triads in any relational operations. The explication also allows us to track how Thirdness enters the structure of higher order (...) relations and even to propose a numerical measure of it. Our analysis reveals new conceptual phenomena when negation or disjunction are used to compound relations. (shrink)

Abstract:This article raises a series of doubts about Chris Voparil’s reading of Rorty, particularly the claim that what he calls “Rorty’s Pragmatic Maxim” represents what is at the heart of his philosophical vision. Those doubts are tied together with some scattered thoughts about how Voparil describes the affinities between Rorty and William James in chapter 2 of Reconstructing Pragmatism. Voparil is correct to claim that it is James, more than any other figure in the pragmatist tradition, who shares the most (...) with Rorty in “basic philosophical orientation”. Yet I also argue that Voparil fails to correctly puts his finger on what that “basic philosophical orientation” really comes to, due in large part to an excessively political reading of James and Rorty that he relies on. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay seeks to untangle some of the issues that arise in multi-generational conversations. Doing so uncovers the traps set by time and place. These include how to recognize changing vocabularies, shifting interests, interpretive strategies, and multiple perspectives. It explores how speaking for, to, about, and beyond others without distortions can honestly co-exist with new things to say. It highlights Voparil’s goal of promoting active engagement with others for everyone’s benefit.

Abstract:In this essay, I respond to Chris Voparil’s reconstruction of Richard Rorty’s engagement with Josiah Royce’s pragmatism in chapter 4 of Reconstructing Pragmatism. I first express my thoughts about Voparil’s three main claims about Rorty’s reconstruction of Royce’s pragmatism. I then mention what I took to be the least interesting part of this chapter. Finally, I propose that Alain Locke’s pragmatism, and more specifically his approach to resolving conflicting loyalties and his appropriation of Royce’s concept of wise provincialism, could function (...) as a bridge between Royce’s absolute pragmatism and Rorty’s pragmatism. Readers should take the last part of this essay as a prolegomenon to a study of Locke’s appropriation of Royce’s concept of wise provincialism. (shrink)

Abstract:A summary of central points I made in my book Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Abstract:In this essay I respond to four commentators who participated in a symposium on my book, Reconstructing Pragmatism. Issues that emerge include: Addams’s and Rorty’s mutual commitment to cultivating affective rationality; how Royce and Rorty share an ethical imperative in their philosophy and where both can learn from Alain Locke; what a post-Rortyan pragmatism might look like and the best path toward realizing it; the significance of recovering the serious, unironic Rorty and the limits of weak misreadings; Rorty’s pragmatic maxim; (...) and reflections on how best to sustain the habits and practices of a robust pragmatic tradition and community. In places, for understandable reasons the commentaries stray from the book’s argument about Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism and address larger issues surrounding Rorty’s work and its broader reception. I don’t respond to all such matters but try to here and there, which hopefully gives what follows a relevance for contemporary pragmatism beyond the book itself. (shrink)