Education and Culture

As the title of the book indicates, Bernstein’s 2010 work The Pragmatic Turn is the common ground for this collection of twelve essays, with each contributor taking a theme from Bernstein’s volume and using it as a foundation to raise further issues concerning pragmatism after the “pragmatic turn.” Many essays also offer constructive criticism of Bernstein’s thought and positions, often suggesting possible alternatives. In a style reminiscent of the long-running Library of Living Philosophers series, Bernstein provides a short response to each essay, clarifying his thought in light of the points raised by the contributors. For those interested in Dewey specifically, rather than pragmatism more broadly, there are several chapters dealing with Deweyan democracy.

In her introduction, Judith M. Green sets out the goals of the book and offers a concise summary of each of the essays. As she notes, The Pragmatic Turn is essentially Bernstein calling on a new generation of philosophers to take up the classical pragmatists and their ideas, rather than sliding back into the Cartesianism the pragmatists strove to avoid. As such, Rekindling Pragmatism’s Fire is offered as “a response by younger pragmatists to Bernstein’s call” (4). Green highlights the intergenerational and conversational tone of the book, suggesting that this type of interaction offers the ideal form for pragmatic philosophy (and indeed, all philosophy) to be enacted and advanced. If this intergenerational call-and-response is the primary aim of the book, we should not forget that the book also endeavors “to create a reader’s companion to The Pragmatic Turn” on the one hand, and also to “serve as a stimulating introduction to pragmatism for educated readers” (5). These three aims function together as the heart of the book, and it is the success or failure of these aims that will serve as the criteria upon which I will evaluate the book at the end of this review.

Following Green’s introduction, Bernstein has written a five-page introduction of his own, entitled “Prelude to a Critical Conversation with Fellow Pragmatists.” [End Page 163] In the prelude, Bernstein makes three general comments. The first has to do with the difficulty of finding a common ground upon which all the various thinkers labeled as “pragmatists” might stand. Bernstein finds that while there are similarities between the classical pragmatists, a pluralistic pragmatist approach allows for differing opinions on what “counts” as pragmatism, given sufficient reasoning.

In Bernstein’s second comment, he laments the occasionally hostile relationship between pragmatist and “analytic” philosophers, taking care to distinguish between “analytic ideology” and the good work many linguistic thinkers actually perform, and he goes so far as to call the “linguistic turn” a deeply misleading myth.

Bernstein’s third and final note in the prologue is apologetic. He notes that, while he asserts that the pragmatic turn cuts across both American (North and Latin American) and Continental philosophy, he failed to fully develop the Continental and Latin American import of the movement in The Pragmatic Turn, despite gestures in that direction.

The main content of the book begins with a first essay entitled “Hegel and the Classical Pragmatists: Prolegomenon to a Future Discussion,” by Michael J. Baur. As a Hegel scholar, Baur seeks to emphasize the influence that Hegel had on the early pragmatists, especially Peirce, James, and Dewey, while also doing an admirable job describing the pragmatists’ critiques of Hegel. Bernstein agrees that the relationship between Hegel and the pragmatists was rich (albeit complicated); Bernstein also points to Josiah Royce as another figure whose influence needs to be better accounted for.

In “The Inferences That Never Were: Peirce, Perception, and Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn,” Richard Kenneth Atkins discusses Peirce’s theory of perception, and seeks to show that Peirce’s system ultimately depends on a type of “given” perception, and thus runs up against Sellars’s “The Myth of the Given...