1. Pragmatism and Feminism: Movements in Waves The first woman to have access to the university and finish a bachelor degree in the United States was presumably Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910). She studied Medicine, but significantly, as many other women of her generation, she encountered a strong social rejection to her aspirations to work as physician and she often worked as schoolteacher to support her family. She was also a social reformer deeply devoted to social justice. She was a pione...

While pragmatism as a philosophy and intellectual movement has been gaining inroads in international ethics and international political theory scholarship, feminist pragmatism is not yet as widely regarded. This paper explores the intellectual contributions of feminist pragmatism to international political thought, particularly Jane Addams’s social ethics which is largely overlooked in the literature on women’s contributions to international normative theory. Here I add to efforts to reconsider Addams as a thinker that was concerned with the multiplicity and diversity, features of (...) social life that make a foundational premise of international normative thought. In the paper, I explore how feminism and pragmatism challenge ideas about normatively constitutive communities. The nexus of the two philosophies come clearly in Addams’s progressive communitarianism and her ideas on the significance of settlement to social ethics. In addition to Addams’s pacifist thought and international humanism, I argue that her practice in Hull House draws attention to the site as a normatively significant category. The paper casts Hull House as an international social space that sustained social connections, instrumental to social ethics. Hull House serves as an exemplar that can inform further thinking about the international community and more democratised global governance structures. (shrink)

The paper seeks to explain in what sense pragmatism was for Peirce a doctrine of logic. It is argued that pragmatism is a doctrine of logic for Peirce because its maxim, the pragmatic maxim, is a maxim of the methodeutic of abduction, i.e., concerns the method of selecting hypotheses for experimental testing. The paper also connects this idea to Peirce’s 1913 thesis according to which pragmatism contributes to the security but not to the uberty of reasoning. The connection consists in (...) that by excluding hypotheses that cannot be tested, the maxim renders the whole process of reasoning more secure, while any explanatory hypotheses is “uberous” in Peirce’s sense as any other. (shrink)

Rodrigo Cárcamo: Professor Bernstein, thanks to your books we have become aware of the importance of fallibilism and the dangers of the Cartesian anxiety. So, to start our interview I would like to ask you: Do you see the Cartesian anxiety operating relevantly in the current philosophical landscape? Richard J. Bernstein: First of all, it is important to say that I do not see Cartesian anxiety only as an epistemological anxiety, but I see it as something that has a much (...) more general significan... (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...

Storytelling is a central device in cultures of resistance, which enables us to trace back such cultures to precedents in the history of literature that in turn can furnish new strategies of resistance by providing narrative tactics. This paper argues that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper develops narrative tactics of resistance which can be fruitful for contemporary Mad Pride activism and poetic practices. To do so, I borrow a Foucauldian approach to account for how Gilman challenges the (...) psychiatric industrial medical complex in her writing. First, the story is contextualized in nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and some critical warnings on the writer’s position concerning liberation movements are offered. Subsequently, I focus on three narrative tactics of resistance deployed in The Yellow Wallpaper: (1) an indetermination of genre, (2) a tension between form and dementia, and (3) a double subjectivity in the oscillation between the pronouns “one” and “I”. Finally, the reassessment of Gilman’s writing from the lens of Disability Justice is summarized in two results: first, it strengthens the grounds of Mad Pride by imbricating it in American literary and philosophical canons and, second, it provides tactics to open spaces of resistance for contemporary authors in the movement. (shrink)

This article examines the political and theoretical life of Jane Addams and the women of Hull House, who gave rise to a constellation of new subjects and practices in nineteenth-century Chicago. In particular, the article highlights the importance of women’s relations in the settlement in Halsted Street, which were a fundamental part of the group’s political practice and reflection on democracy, society, and justice: on the one hand, they reconfigured the traditional dichotomy between private and public space, revealing its inherent (...) porosity; on the other, relations of proximity, friendship, and love proved to be transformative forces and an embodied practice of justice that escaped the dynamics of the dual subject/object relationship, becoming an element of social change. Love, considered in the triple sense of romantic and intimate love, affectionate and cooperative love, and love of Humanity, turned out to be a political element that could redefine the norms and spaces of social action for Victorian women. Moreover, it extended the sphere of democracy beyond governmental procedures and institutions and transformed it into a life practice based on acting in concert and being together. (shrink)

This work presents a post-positivist research framework for explaining any surprising or anomalous fact in the evolutionary path of a complex, dynamic, and contingent social process. Firstly, it elaborates on the reconciliation betweenthe ontological and epistemological assumptions of Critical Realism with the principles of American Pragmatism. Next, the research method is presented: theoretical propositions about a social structure are translated into a set of grammar rules that acknowledge patterns of sequences of events, either involving individual action or interaction between actors (...) within a real social system. The result is a discrete mathematical model for a concrete category of social process based on these rules. Finally, data-grounded refinement of the theory is possible through comparison between cases belonging to the same category, but differing in some contingent pattern of sequences of event outcomes. Consequently, their grammars differ in some pairs of context-sensitive rules that explain this surprising fact, and the derivation of this alternative historical trajectory of event outcomes becomes an extension to the early category of social process. In this sense, the proposed framework suggests a hierarchy of classes of grammars for middle-range explanations based on the ontological assumption of the generative nature of social reality. (shrink)

Cambridge University Press has recently published a new paperback edition of Habits. Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory, edited by Fausto Caruana and Italo Testa, making this volume available to a wider readership. This is good news, given the important contribution which this volume makes to the current debate on recent trends in cognitive science, social theory, and pragmatism, as well as the high quality of the papers it includes. The editors’ amb...

Una de las observaciones más agudas de la Lógica se encuentra escondida en una breve nota a pie de página, cuando Dewey señala el efecto pernicioso de “la literatura y los hábitos literarios” para una correcta comprensión de la relación entre las ideas o el lenguaje y la actividad práctica (LW.12: 55, nota 2). Pocas líneas antes, ha recordado el hecho obvio – pero olvidado con frecuencia por tantos filósofos del lenguaje – de que la comunicación lingüística fue durante milenios (...) únicamente ora... (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the recognition of Jane Addams' aesthetic reflections. Her reflections extended pragmatism by anticipating some themes of Dewey’s aesthetics and some of its current aesthetic derivations. Addams broke down the barriers that separated art and life with the practices at Hull House in which immigrants of different ethnicities and women had an active and leading part. She thus expanded the social meaning of some of the avant-garde art movements that influenced her, such as the Art (...) and Crafts Movement, by trying to make aesthetic sensibility a part of the everyday life of Hull House’s neighbors. In this way, she anticipated current everyday aesthetics, but without diluting the artistic specificity. Art transfigures events through poetics, allowing us to transform our lives through the values that are the common heritage of humanity. In Addams, we find a social aesthetic that sheds light on some of the problems of contemporary theories, expands the considerations of the artistic movements of her time, and contributes to reflections on the vital importance of aesthetics. (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein has left us on July 4, 2022. Tributes and events celebrating his life and thought continue a year on. Dick, as he encouraged people to address him, was a most humble, gifted, and generous scholar, and his teachings illuminated the minds of many generations. His civil passion as well as his love for life pervaded his writings, within and without philosophy. His need for understanding and intellectual curiosity were never an arid self-serving exercise, but rather the expres...

Pocas dudas hay hoy en día sobre la importancia de contar con buenas traducciones y ediciones de textos filosóficos relevantes. Más si se trata de textos clásicos, y más aún cuando las propuestas filosóficas que contienen no manifiestan el punto de vista hegemónico sobre el tema en cuestión. Estas son, precisamente, las circunstancias que acompañan a la reciente traducción al español realizada por Ángel Manuel Faerna de Lógica: La Teoría de la Investigación de John Dewey. No es la primera tra...

Welby’s correspondence with Peirce began with his review of What is Meaning? (1903), a contribution not only to spreading Peirce’s later thinking, but also to reproposing Welby’s “significs.” This is encounter between the pragmatist Peirce’s approach to semiotic and Welby’s significs oriented by mother-sense. A dialogue between two conceptions of meaning which, notwithstanding differences, meet in a participative contribution to constructing the sign sciences – from Peirce to semiotics, from Welby to significs. Their focus does not only concern signs but (...) also values which are inextricably interconnected. In this encounter, significs doubtlessly exerts a non-negligible influence on semiotics. If with (Peirce’s) “play of musement” we are endowed to imagine different worlds from the present, a male-dominated world, to resist the world as-it-is and construct new worlds presupposes what Welby calls mother-sense. In human signifying processes the epistemological dimension is clearly not separable from the axiological, aesthetic or ideological-political. (shrink)

La Lógica: La Teoría de la Investigación es un texto relativamente desconocido de John Dewey en el mundo hispanohablante, a pesar de que se trata de un texto fundamental en la obra del autor. Hasta ahora sólo disponíamos de la traducción realizada por Eugenio Imaz y publicada por el Fondo de Cultura Económica en 1950, la cual era difícilmente accesible y adolecía de algunas limitaciones que hacían necesaria la aparición de una nueva traducción. Por ello, presentamos con gran satisfacción las...

Careful reading of John Dewey’s The Public and its Problems reveals a weak point at the stage when a given public became self-aware and proceeded to seek representation in the institutions of the state. Aside from a general emphasis on art and science, Dewey’s political theory offered no concrete discussion of the means suitable for this phase of the democratic process. Furthermore, the dichotomy between violence and the peaceful means of art and science left no space for the affirmation of (...) nonviolence – the method most capable of amplifying democracy during the decade following Dewey’s death. Accordingly, the article hypothesizes a novel rendition of nonviolence from the standpoint of Dewey’s understanding of art as social inquiry, compares it with Martin Luther King Jr.’s theory and practice of nonviolent dramatization, and ends by presenting a Deweyan reading of the civil rights movement in terms of the framework contained in The Public and its Problems. (shrink)

The book under review tackles one of the most puzzling aspects of Charles S. Peirce’s philosophy, namely his conception of the relationship between psychology and logic. As Jean-Marie Chevalier notes from the very first pages of the introduction to his book, Peirce’s entire work is traversed by two strands of thought that apparently contradict each other. On the one hand, Peirce repeatedly insisted upon the autonomy of logic from psychology. Viewed from this angle, he was one of the most sign...

Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and second-generation Hull House activist Grace Abbott were at the forefront of a reconstruction of early twentieth-century American democracy. They worked to reframe U.S. political democracy, expanding its focus beyond individual rights to caring for the social community. The movement away from laissez-faire government toward state and federal legislation protecting children, women, and workers was often halting, sometimes stymied by public opposition, and other times blocked by Supreme Court decisions. Grace Abbott’s social and political philosophy demonstrated (...) her training in law and political science and was influenced by her direct engagement with her Hull House neighbors. Abbott was a skilled social science researcher who saw public research as a way of crossing and blurring epistemological class boundaries, creating pathways for the general population to understand the burdens others faced. Through her leadership of the Immigrants’ Protective League and the Children’s Bureau, Abbott argued that the democratic state should be responsible for extending legislative protections into the social and industrial realms to protect vulnerable and dependent populations. Her work was essential to the continuing evolving supportive structures of governmental programs and social safety nets that are taken for granted by many Americans today. (shrink)