This paper addresses recent examples of militant atheism. It considers the theistic reply that describes atheism as deriving from a “God-shaped hole” in the human soul. The paper will argue that American pragmatism offers a middle path that avoids militant atheism without suffering from this problem. The paper describes this middle path and considers the problem that is seen in Rorty’s recent work: how the pragmatist can remain critical of religious fundamentalism without succumbing to a militant (...) version of atheism. The solution proposed is tolerant acceptance of religion along with melioristic criticism developed within shared norms of inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter offers a description of what all classical and contemporary pragmatists have in common and in virtue of which we call them pragmatists. It also describes the ways in which classical and contemporary pragmatists differ on important epistemological issues, such as knowledge and truth. After then examining and rejecting longstanding criticisms of pragmatism, this chapter compares pragmatists on the questions of atheism, theism, and the status of religious sentiment without belief in the personal God of the omni‐predicates. (...) Peirce offered an argument (he called it a Neglected Argument) for belief in God. William James felt strongly that religious belief was well worth taking seriously as a positive moral force in the world, but in the end he was quite reluctant to accept the personal God of the omni‐predicates. Unlike Bertrand Russell, however, he did not believe that all religion was harmful and basically irrational. Dewey was a hard‐core materialist and hence an unabashed atheist. In the end, it seems fair to say that with regard to the existence of the traditional personal God of the omni‐predicates, there is no uniquely clear and generally accepted position among pragmatists in general. (shrink)

Most objections to atheism focus on the evidence that we have to be theists or on the purported effect that atheism has on our moral behaviour. Could it be in our own interests to believe in God and, if so, do the prudential reasons we have for believing in God constitute a different kind of objection to atheism? In this chapter, I focus on this question. I argue that in order for prudential objections to atheism to (...) get off the ground, we must believe that we can have prudential reasons for and against believing things. I argue that a modest version of this view is more plausible than it may initially seem. I consider two kinds of prudential reasons for belief: personal benefits like consolation, health, and community; and Pascal's contention that we are more likely to experience an infinitely good afterlife if we believe in God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 282-284 [Access article in PDF] Bruce Kuklick. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 326. Cloth, $30.00. Scott L. Pratt. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 316. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $21.95. In his earlier works Bruce Kuklick has studied major figures (...) and episodes in the evolution of American thought, most famously the Golden Age of Harvard. In the present book he proposes to tell the whole story. Beginning, as it must, with Jonathan Edwards, Part I traces the long and difficult process by which philosophy gradually distinguishes itself from theology. Part II deals magisterially with the age of pragmatism, from Darwin to Dewey, and Part III with professional philosophy in the twentieth century. Kuklick's account of this latest development, briefly adumbrated in his previous books, is the freshest and (to this retired professional) most engaging part of the narrative. Once philosophy had loosened the bonds that tied it to theology, once sciences like psychology, originally parts of philosophy, had declared independence and set out on their own, and once philosophy's role as counselor to private morals and public policy had been taken over by psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and political science, philosophers had to discover a new identity for themselves. Inspired by logical positivism and the linguistic ruminations of the late Wittgenstein, professional philosophy came to mean, very largely, a preoccupation with problems of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and epistemology. The result was that, apart from undergraduate lectures and occasional ventures into the popular media, what philosophers said and wrote, intelligible only to other philosophers, became irrelevant to just about everything of personal and public interest, and even to the traditional concerns of philosophy itself with the nature of reality and the conduct of life.The eventual arrival in the American academy of phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction, in spite of their apparent engagement with "real life" and their appeal to undergraduates, only bred another species of professionals and precipitated the familiar antagonism between analytic and continental philosophy. Late in the last century Richard Rorty, a preeminent analytic philosopher, broke ranks, discovered first Heidegger and Derrida, then William James and John Dewey, and declared himself a pragmatist. He characterized philosophy as a single voice in the conversation of the West, which also included literature, literary criticism, the arts, and all the sciences both natural and humane. But he remains a philosopher of language. The pragmatism of the nineteenth century was a low-mimetic [End Page 282] form of the high-mimetic idealism from which it emerged: from Royce to James. Rorty's pragmatism not only takes for granted the (often implicit) materialism and atheism of analytic philosophy, but is itself a new way of understanding and using language. It has been called, inverting James, an old name for a new way of thinking.But I need to correct this overly simple account. As Kuklick is aware, philosophy in America, though it did succeed in detaching itself from theology, has never wholly dissolved its ties to religion. Royce and James in the nineteenth century and Dewey in the twentieth continued to be preoccupied with religious questions, especially with the apparent conflict of religion and science suggested by Darwin's theory. Religious interests survive, barely, in "critical realism." And even though analytic philosophy would seem to be most comfortable with atheism, more than a few thinkers trained in analysis have combined analytic logic and religious faith. Witness the Society of Christian Philosophers. On the whole, however, professional philosophy has been devoid of religious, socio-political, or existential interest. This should not be surprising. All genuine professions serve an end beyond themselves—as medicine serves health, law justice, and theology salvation. But when philosophy becomes a "profession," it has no end but self-preservation, i.e., creating more philosophers and finding jobs for them.One slightly disconcerting feature of Kuklick's... (shrink)

This article explores the conflict between those who find value in religious commitment and others who recommend the complete abandonment of religion. It examines John Dewey's reflections on religion in order to assess its possible resources for addressing this specific conflict. Dewey's discussion highlights deep human impulses that a secular perspective should address. But this should be accomplished not through his proposed broadening of religious life, but by promoting these impulses and the community life that responds to them as shared (...) human needs and ideals that go beyond religious commitment. (shrink)

philosophers have always been attracted to disagreements, perhaps because they almost immediately lead to philosophically exciting questions about how to distinguish positions, theories, and so forth, that are right from those that are mistaken. Philosophy of religion is certainly no exception, and, here, focus has often been on disagreements over belief in the existence of the God of classical theism as manifested in the great Abrahamic traditions, on the one hand, and atheism, on the other—though disagreements between religious traditions (...) have also attracted attention. Particularly in Anglo-American philosophy of religion, these disagreements have generally been conceptualized in epistemological terms: Which (if.. (shrink)

I propose we discuss pluralistic humanism as an alternative to both atheism and traditional theism in an effort to establish a democratic faith to which we, despite our differences, can bind ourselves. I draw on the thought of American pragmatists to articulate a constructive criticism of new atheists. This criticism primarily focuses on the unacknowledged affinities between religion and scientific atheism – namely, a naive realism and a conversion experience – with the hope of using such common ground (...) as a starting point for not only shared experience but for self-examination. I conclude with the proposal that we take up a Deweyan conception of democracy as a common faith aimed at effecting religious or spiritual experiences despite the traditional oppression of institutional religion. (shrink)

Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious -- ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. (...) This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism and hermeneutics but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism. In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's work _Belief_ and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages." The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world. (shrink)

Though coming from different and distinct intellectual traditions, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo are united in their criticism of the metaphysical tradition. The challenges they put forward extend beyond philosophy and entail a reconsideration of the foundations of belief in God and the religious life. They urge that the rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of religion; instead it opens new ways of imagining what it is to be religious -- ways that emphasize charity, solidarity, and irony. (...) This unique collaboration, which includes a dialogue between the two philosophers, is notable not only for its fusion of pragmatism and hermeneutics but also for its recognition of the limits of both traditional religious belief and modern secularism. In "Anticlericalism and Atheism" Rorty discusses Vattimo's work _Belief_ and argues that the end of metaphysics paves the way for an anti-essentialist religion. Rorty's conception of religion, determined by private motives, is designed to produce the gospel's promise that henceforth God will not consider humanity as a servant but as a friend. In "The Age of Interpretation," Vattimo, who is both a devout Catholic and a frequent critic of the church, explores the surprising congruence between Christianity and hermeneutics in light of the dissolution of metaphysical truth. As in hermeneutics, interpretation is central to Christianity, which introduced the world to the principle of interiority, dissolving the experience of objective reality into "listening to and interpreting messages." The lively dialogue that concludes this volume, moderated and edited by Santiago Zabala, analyzes the future of religion together with the political, social, and historical aspects that characterize our contemporary postmodern, postmetaphysical, and post-Christian world. (shrink)

This book asks whether there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates, and if there are, by whom they are to be identified. Its starting point is the work of Richard Rorty, whose pragmatic pluralism leads him to argue for a politically motivated anticlericalism rather than an epistemologically driven atheism. Rather than defend Rorty’s position directly, Gascoigne argues for an epistemological stance he calls ‘Pragmatist Fideism’. The starting point for this exercise (...) in what Rorty calls ‘Cultural Politics’ is an acknowledgement that one must appeal to both secularists and those with religious commitments. In recent years ‘reformed’ epistemologists have aimed to establish a parity of epistemic esteem between religious and perceptual beliefs by exploiting an analogy in respect of their mutual vulnerability to sceptical challenges. Through an examination of this analogy, and in light of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, this book argues that understood correctly the ‘parity’ argument in fact lends epistemological support to the argument that religious considerations should not be raised in public debate. The political price paid—paying the price of politics—is worth it: the religious thinker is provided with a good reason for maintaining that their practices and beliefs are not undermined by other forms of religious life. (shrink)

Names, descriptions, and demonstratives raise well-known logical, ontological, and epistemological problems. Perhaps less well known, amongst philosophers at least, are the ways in which some of these problems not only recur with pronouns but also cross-cut further problems exposed by the study in generative linguistics of morpho-syntactic constraints on interpretation. These problems will be my primary concern here, but I want to address them within a general picture of interpretation that is required if wires are not to be crossed. That (...) picture will be sketched in sections 3 and 4; subsequent sections will focus on pronouns and binding, drawing heavily on what has preceded. (shrink)

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C. I. Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions. In doing so, he sheds new light on Sellars’s influential arguments concerning the ‘Myth of the Given’ and shows how we can build a productive discourse between American pragmatism, (...) analytical philosophy and European phenomenology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James and Waismann on Temperament in PhilosophyJohn Cappsfor william james, philosophyis inextricably linked to what he calls temperament. In the first of his Pragmatismlectures, he claims that "the history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments" ( Pragmatism11), while conceding that this will strike many philosophers as "undignified." In a similar vein, he elsewhere writes that philosophy seeks "by hard reasoning (...) for results emotionally valuable" ( Some Problems of Philosophy11). It's not hard to see a connection between these two claims: whether a philosophical conclusion is "emotionally valuable" will presumably depend, at least in part, on the reader's temperament. A philosophical work will leave some readers cold while resonating with others; some philosophy will engage one's interest and energy, while other philosophy will seem not so much mistaken as alien, remote from what one might ever find useful, interesting, or enlightening.James's meta-philosophical claim—his philosophy of philosophy—has received surprisingly little attention. Much of the literature has focused instead on what he meant by "temperament" in the context of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of psychology and brain science. Much less attention has been paid to whether he is right and what the consequences would be if he is right. 1I aim to address this gap by first raising some fundamental issues with James's position. To see better what he should have said, I will then turn to some later but surprisingly similar remarks by the Anglo-Austrian philosopher and mathematician Friedrich Waismann, before turning to a more recent account of philosophical methodology defended by Timothy Williamson.1. James on Philosophy and TemperamentHilary and Ruth Anna Putnam have written that "perhaps the most shocking claim that James makes—the claim that is the centerpiece of the very first of the Lectures on Pragmatism—is that the decision we make on any metaphysical [End Page 46]question … is and ought to be a matter of 'temperament'" (227). While the Putnams do not explain what makes this his "most shocking" claim, it is likely because James accuses philosophers of being either systematically dishonest or self-deluded. Here is what James writes:Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries when philosophizing to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making for a more sentimental or a more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trustshis temperament…. Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned.( Pragmatism11)According to James, then, one's "temperament" plays an important role in determining the sorts of philosophical positions one finds congenial—and yet professional philosophers are either in denial that temperament plays this role or are actively committed to concealing this fact. Nor does James limit his claim, as the Putnams suggest, to only metaphysical questions: while he tends to focus on more large-scale alternatives (empiricism vs. rationalism, atheism vs. theism—perhaps because the lectures were delivered before a popular audience), the same point should hold across the board. So whether it is the choice between consequentialism vs. deontological ethical theories, or procedural vs. substantive accounts of justice, or functionalist vs. behaviorist philosophies of mind, James would argue that temperament plays a crucial role. 2I will refer to this as his "temperament thesis" (TT): TT: One's philosophical commitments are, in part, a function of one's temperament. A few points of clarification are in order. First, while James describes temperament as providing the "potentest" support for philosophical claims, he does not claim that it is decisive or that it swamps all other considerations. Temperament "loads the evidence" but can apparently be overridden when sufficient evidence or compelling... (shrink)

This paper connects two ideas. The first is that some common responses to ethical views are responses to their degrees of pragmatism, where a view’s degree of pragmatism is its sensitivity to ethically relevant changes in the actor’s circumstances. I claim that we feel the pull of opposing pro-pragmatic and antipragmatic intuitions in certain cases. This suggests a project, of searching for an ethical view capable of doing justice to these opposing intuitions in some way. The second central (...) idea is that a theory of pattern-based reasons looks more promising than the obvious alternatives to fulfil this role, amongst Teleological theories at least. Pattern-based reasons are reasons to perform some action because of the goodness or rightness of a larger pattern of action—such as a pattern that a group could perform or that the actor could perform over an extended period—of which the immediate action is a mere part. Existing theories of such reasons share two features that prevent them explaining the intuitions we wish to explain: they consider only one pattern at a time (they are monist), and they treat patterns as eligible only if the agents concerned are willing to realise them (they accept the Willingness Requirement). But we need not accept these doctrines. Moreover, a theory of patternbased reasons without them is able to explain the pro- and anti-pragmatic intuitions in an elegant way, and has other attractive features. (shrink)

According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.

I present a persistent religious moral theory, known as divine command theory, which conflicts with liberal political thought. John Rawls's notion of public reason offers a framework for thinking about this conflict, but it has been criticized for demanding great restrictions on religious considerations in public deliberation. I argue that although Paul Kurtz is critical of organized religion, his epistemological suggestions and ethical theory offer a feasible way to build common moral ground between atheists, secularists, and theists, so long as (...) each maintains the important democratic value of toleration in the form of either fallibilism or skepticism. (shrink)

How should one define “atheism”? The first response to such a question might be: “look it up in the dictionary”. The dictionary in question is, as Rosamund Moon has cleverly put it, the “Unidentifi...

Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Jerusalem may be considered exponents of a homegrown European version of pragmatism. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the strongly social orientation Jerusalem gave to his. Particular attention will be paid to some of his predecessors to exhibit the relevance of a pioneering but largely forgotten type of social science for the development of his version of European pragmatism. Broadly speaking, considerations from Völkerpsychologie played the role for the development of Jerusalem’s views (...) that considerations from the history of science played for the views of Mach. Of particular interest to us here is how these broadly sociological ideas fed into Jerusalem’s philosophy and his understanding and appreciation of pragmatism. (shrink)

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking (...) their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics. (shrink)

The present paper has two main aims. The first one is philosophical and is related to the general topic of this volume (Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism): I would like to draw attention to the fact that the issue of classical scientific determinism, despite being ‘metaphysical’ and thereby ‘nonsensical’ according to the Vienna Circle's ‘scientific world conception’, bothered philosophers, like William James and Charles Peirce, who were deeply involved in scientific practice. At the end of the paper I shall raise (...) the question of why it was so and what this fact may suggest about the relationship between science and metaphysics. The second main aim of this paper is historico-philosophical: in the time span between the late 1870s and by the turn of 1900 James (1842–1910) and Peirce (1839–1914) contributed repeatedly to the ongoing discussions about scientific determinism. In this paper I give a general overview of their positions based mainly on primary sources and I embed them into the broader context of the history of the concept of scientific determinism, dedicating special attention to their relationship with a particular French anti-deterministic tradition (Renouvier, Poincaré, Boutroux and Bergson). (shrink)

The patterns of ecological devastation that mark the present unexpectedly enable an ancient and many-storied question to resurface with renewed force: the question of the arts of living — that is, of learning how to live and die well with others on a precarious Earth. Modernity has all but forgotten this question, which has long been buried under the dreams of progress and infinite growth, colonial projects, and the enthroning of technoscience. But what might it mean to reclaim the question (...) of the arts of living today? In this article Martin Savransky reclaims the connection between pragmatism, education, and the arts of living by proposing both that (1) William James's pragmatist philosophy can be read as an ongoing and unfinished experiment in weaving a certain art of living, and (2) James's pragmatism might provide us with uniquely generative elements to begin to experiment with the profoundly educational and ecological challenge of learning to inhabit the Earth otherwise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pragmatic Aspects of Kantian TheismSami PihlströmI. IntroductionIs there a god? What do we, and what should we, mean by this question? How, if at all, might the question, given that its meaning(s) can be clarified, be settled or even rationally discussed? Is there any chance for a reasonable, scientifically minded person to believe in the reality of God, or is atheism the only intellectually responsible option for us (...) today? Is theism inevitably committed to the pseudoscientific absurdities of creationism, the "intelligent design theory," and other unfortunately increasingly influential fundamentalisms?The purpose of this article is not to solve these issues in the philosophy of religion. Nor will I engage in the science vs. religion controversy in any detail. I do, however, hope to illuminate the traditional issue of theism1 from a specific philosophical perspective. The kind of questions listed above help to describe the problem framework we are entering, as well as the sidetracks to be avoided in serious philosophy of religion (e.g., the debate between creationism and Darwinism, which is hardly scientifically interesting).2 Furthermore, my remarks will not be restricted to the opposition between theism and atheism3 as such. The metalevel contrast between evidentialism and fideism opens up another basic dispute in the modern debate over theism, perhaps even more important philosophically than the theism vs. atheism dispute itself, as it concerns the criteria in terms of which the latter dispute is to be adjudicated, and the kind of reasons that may be invoked to support (or attack) theism.4 It seems to me, for reasons that will properly emerge in due course, that there is a desperate need for a middle ground or synthesis between these two extremes in contemporary philosophy of religion, and the [End Page 110] present article will go some way toward providing such a synthesis by redescribing the problem of theism in Kantian (and to some extent pragmatist) terms. In short, evidentialism is, in most cases, inadequate as an interpretation of religious people's views on God, because religious faith needs no rational (religiously neutral) evidence, and can be neither defended nor criticized in terms of such "scientific" evidence. Religion, in short, is a human practice quite different from science, and though it may be related to science in various ways-that is, it is not completely "autonomous" and self-standing-it cannot be adequately evaluated by means of criteria internal to scientific practices. Fideism, in turn, is highly problematic, because it tends to lead to relativist and irrational views by sharply distinguishing between faith and reason and advancing the view that reason has no role at all to play in religious issues. Fideism sees science and religion as too autonomous from each other, while the evidentialist's error is the opposite one.5The proposal I will explore and (with some reservations) defend in the following inquiry is a reconceptualization of the theism vs. atheism and evidentialism vs. fideism issues in an explicitly ethical manner-though obviously only some selected perspectives on such an enormous task can be taken up in a single article. Indeed, both evidentialism and fideism, arguably, turn out to be insufficiently ethical responses to the problem of theism vs. atheism. The traditional alternatives themselves-that is, theism and atheism, when characterized as opposed metaphysical standpoints regarding the question of God's existence-suffer from the same insufficiency. Philosophical debates over these matters have unfortunately often ignored the ethical, hence pragmatic, aspects of the problem of God's existence; or, more precisely, philosophers of religion have traditionally been interested only in the ethical implications theism (or atheism) might have, instead of considering whether theism (or atheism) might itself be grounded in ethical premises, or whether such metaphysical issues might in the end be inevitably entangled with ethical ones. It is to these ethical issues at the heart of the theism debate that I suggest we should turn our attention. This suggestion, as we will see, amounts to a Kantian-and pragmatist-rearticulation of what the question is ultimately about. However, while Immanuel Kant's doctrine of the "postulates of practical reason" and William James's pragmatist defense of the legitimacy of... (shrink)

Pragmatism and Justice is an interdisciplinary volume of new and seminal essays by political philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of pragmatism which provides a comprehensive introduction and lasting resource for scholars of pragmatist thought and questions of justice.

This article explores and critically assesses the metaxological account of a philosophy of God professed by William Desmond. Postmodern reflection on the philosophy of God has a tendency to focus on the 'signs' of God and urges for a passive acceptance of these signs. Desmond argues, contrary to this tendency, for a mindful togetherness of philosophical activity and religious passivity. After exploring Desmond's thought on this topic, I move to assess his 'metaxological yes' to God as the agapeic origin from (...) an existential point of view. Initially it seems that his 'yes' is somewhat strained as it burdens itself with an excessive task of having faith into something that is beyond determination. I illustrate this insight by referring to Friedrich Nietzsche’s 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' Nietzsche's existential 'No' toward transcendence is a consequence of a mindful confrontation with the excesses as play. (shrink)

Richard Rorty is well known as a propagandist of pragmatism and of a "post-philosophical" culture in which many traditional philosophical debates are dismissed as outrightly fruitless. The paper is mainly concerned with Rorty's dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate. The shift from argument to propaganda which is typical of much of Rorty's reasoning is critically investigated from different perspectives. In particular, it is argued that Rorty cannot convincingly establish a pragmatist position beyond realism and antirealism, and that pragmatism seems (...) to be inadequate with respect to scientific practice. Finally, the fruitfulness of the realism-antirealism debate is defended. (shrink)

This chapter examines the distinction among observers, participants, and agents from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. It first examines an exemplary discourse on the nonscientific theme of “beauty” using the evil stepmother in “Snow White” as an example. It discusses this theme from the perspective of interactive constructivism and interprets it as a problem between universalist and anti-universalist approaches. The chapter then demonstrates numerous connections between constructivism and Dewey's Pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey, for example, had (...) already distinguished spectators, agents, and participants, even though he did not articulate those distinctions in a systematic way. This chapter follows upon Dewey's insights, suggesting ways in which a constructivist theory of observation can enrich contemporary Pragmatist arguments. (shrink)

This paper explicates and defends Morton White’s holistic pragmatism, the view that descriptive and normative statements form a “seamless web” which must be tested as a “unified whole”. This position, originally formulated as a methodological and epistemic principle, can be extended into a more general philosophy of culture, as White himself has shown in his book, A Philosophy of Culture (2002). On the basis of holistic pragmatism, the paper also offers a pragmatist conception of metaphilosophy and defends the (...) need for interdisciplinary inquiry. (shrink)

God was dead to Kevin Vost for most of his adult life. Baptized, confirmed, and raised Catholic, at age 17 Vost left it all behind as he immersed himself in atheism for a period that lasted over two decades. Paralleling a successful career as a psychologist and professor, Vost allowed his clinical perspective to drive his faith perspective as well, falling into a common trap for many Catholics. This timely book's unique approach gives credit where credit is due, as (...) Vost describes the good elements in the thinking of several famous atheists. But then, from experience and logic, he shows how each of these thinkers falls short. From there, Vost opens the doors to the philosophers and psychologists whose work, implicitly or explicitly, has paved the way toward belief in God, and even in Jesus Christ. And finally, from the perspective of a clinical psychologist, Vost unveils how theologians, popes, and Catholic philosophers persuaded him to abandon this atheism and embrace faith in Christ and the Church. Each chapter ends with a "Truth Box" that spotlights a chink in atheism's armor, adds a cautionary perspective, or highlights an important argument foundational to faith. With patience and perspective, Vost will lead you on a journey that reveals how reason, science, and faith work together to find the truth. (shrink)

This collection brings together the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the rich tradition of American pragmatist thought, taking seriously the commitment to pluralism at the heart of both. Contributors explore in novel ways Deleuze’s explicit references to pragmatism, and examine the philosophical significance of a number of points at which Deleuze’s philosophy converges with, or diverges from, the work of leading pragmatists. The papers of the first part of the volume take as their focus Deleuze’s philosophical relationship to classical (...) pragmatism and the work of Peirce, James and Dewey. Particular areas of focus include theories of signs, metaphysics, perspectivism, experience, the transcendental and democracy. The papers comprising the second half of the volume are concerned with developing critical encounters between Deleuze’s work and the work of contemporary pragmatists such as Rorty, Brandom, Price, Shusterman and others. Issues addressed include antirepresentationalism, constructivism, politics, objectivity, naturalism, affect, human finitude and the nature and value of philosophy itself. With contributions by internationally recognized specialists in both poststructuralist and pragmatist thought, the collection is certain to enrich Deleuze scholarship, enliven discussion in pragmatist circles, and contribute in significant ways to contemporary philosophical debate. (shrink)

“…in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved”By all accounts, William James was having an astonishing year in 1898. Robert D. Richardson describes him as “a man of unlimited energy” teaching a full load amid his crowded schedule of public lecturing. His writing was in full force; the Will to Believe had just appeared in print, and his Talks to Teachers series which was drawing appreciative audiences wherever he gave them were in preparation for (...) publication as well.1 An astonishing Walpurgisnacht encounter with the infinite while camping in the Adirondacks that July added stimulus to his preparation for the upcoming Gifford Lectures. Most importantly for... (shrink)

This article focuses on the intimate relationship between German aesthetic theory, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schiller, and the pragmatic tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that many aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory – his development of reflective judgement, genius, and common sense – are reflected in the thinking of C. S. Peirce. I conclude, however, that such a comparison risks selling short the way that German idealism influenced American thinkers and instead suggest that it (...) is more fruitful to concentrate on ‘aesthetic experience’. I argue that attending to the aesthetic dimensions of experience might re-orient contemporary approaches to pragmatism that continue to focus on the way that pragmatism might intervene in debates in epistemology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

“Orthodox theism” is “the cognitive core” of mainstream religious belief in the Abrahamic tradition, according to which God is the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good designer, creator, and sustainer of the world, who made us so that we might develop into morally mature agents capable of choosing freely to love God, on the basis of which we will be judged and our eternal destinies determined. O’Connor aims to pose a problem for this view, namely, that given the “standard assumption” governing (...) discussion of God and evil since Hume, a certain fact about natural evil that results solely from natural processes constitutes good reason to think that OT is false. The standard assumption is that we can compare by way of thought experiment how things are with how they would be if there were a God and with how they would be if there were no God, and thereby, we can, in principle, ground a justified verdict about whether God exists. The fact in question is that it seems that, necessarily, NERNP is gratuitous. Since God and gratuitous evil are incompatible, it follows that we have fairly strong prima facie reason to think that there is NERNP that is incompatible with God, and consequently that OT is false. (shrink)

This book (edited by Jonathan Y. Tsou, Jamie Shaw, and Carla Fehr) offers eighteen original historical and philosophical essays focused on values in science, scientific pluralism, and pragmatism. These themes have been central in the work of Matthew J. Brown, and the book frames these topics through an engagement with Brown’s broadly ranging work on values in science. The themes of this book are integrated and unified in the pragmatic and value-laden ideal of science defended by Professor Brown in (...) his fascinating 2020 book, Science and Moral Imagination. Brown's ideal of moral imagination prescribes that scientists should recognize the contingencies in their work as unforced choices, examine morally salient aspects of these decisions, recognize the various interests of relevant stakeholders, explore and construct alternative options, and exercise fair and warranted value judgments to guide those decisions. The interdisciplinary essays in this volume engage with different aspects of Brown's philosophical research on scientific values as well as his historical research on figures such as John Dewey and Paul K. Feyerabend. The international contributors to this volume include distinguished and familiar voices from the values in science literature (e.g., Kevin Elliott, Janet Kourany, and Don Howard) as well as newer voices. The resulting book showcases some of the latest innovative research being done on values, pluralism, and pragmatism, and it will be an important resource for researchers working on values in science. Specific topics addressed in the book include: moral imagination, inductive risk, epistemic priority, the value free ideal of science, values in the contexts of artificial intelligence and medicine, varieties of pluralism (e.g., epistemic, ethical, and cultural), and the structure of scientific communities. The book also features novel historical research on important figures in the traditions of pragmatism, pluralism, and values in science, such as John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, Paul Feyerabend, W. V. O. Quine, Ludwig Fleck, among others. The contributions to the volume represent a broad range of contemporary history and philosophy of science perspectives, which have guided Brown's own work, including socially relevant philosophy of science (SRPoiSE), history of philosophy of science (HOPOS), feminist philosophy of science, and philosophy of science in practice (SPSP). The book will be of interest to a broad audience of researchers working in philosophy of science, philosophy of medicine, history and philosophy of science, and science and technology studies. (shrink)

“Orthodox theism” is “the cognitive core” of mainstream religious belief in the Abrahamic tradition, according to which God is the omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good designer, creator, and sustainer of the world, who made us so that we might develop into morally mature agents capable of choosing freely to love God, on the basis of which we will be judged and our eternal destinies determined. O’Connor aims to pose a problem for this view, namely, that given the “standard assumption” governing (...) discussion of God and evil since Hume, a certain fact about natural evil that results solely from natural processes constitutes good reason to think that OT is false. The standard assumption is that we can compare by way of thought experiment how things are with how they would be if there were a God and with how they would be if there were no God, and thereby, we can, in principle, ground a justified verdict about whether God exists. The fact in question is that it seems that, necessarily, NERNP is gratuitous. Since God and gratuitous evil are incompatible, it follows that we have fairly strong prima facie reason to think that there is NERNP that is incompatible with God, and consequently that OT is false. (shrink)

This article explores the theme of moral rationality by examining two distinct philosophical approaches, those of perfectionism and pragmatism broadly construed. It does this by comparing Cora Diamond's reading of J. M. Coetzee's novel The Lives of Animals with an imaginary reading of the same novel tuned to a moral sensibility closer to Deweyan pragmatism. By comparing a real account with an imaginary one, the article intends to press Diamond's perfectionist understanding of problematic moral experience into confrontation with (...) a pragmatist account of the same phenomenon. This reading becomes the starting point for a broader confrontation between two larger philosophical conceptions: perfectionism and pragmatism. By this comparison, the article means to extend a dialogue begun more than a century ago, showing in particular that integrating both perspectives within a common moral epistemology provides new insights into our understanding of moral experience. The general claim is that their differences notwithstanding, perfectionism and pragmatism share a common moral sensibility, although they part ways on some decisive issues that the article makes explicit. (shrink)

Engineering is a practice that must function in an environment of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. This environment has become even more difficult in an increasingly complex world. Engineering ethics has to be framed and taught in a way that addresses these realities. This paper proposes a combination of the philosophy of pragmatism and the ethic of care as a possible framework for the practice of engineering ethics that can provide flexibility and openness to address engineering ethics problems more realistically (...) within the ethos and culture of engineering. Embedding values into practice, pragmatism and care provide a broad, reflective, and corrective framework for engineering ethics that can accommodate the realities in which engineering operates. It is shown that these two approaches are more consonant with design methodologies and have a natural fit with design thinking, so they mesh well with what engineers do and with the complexities of their work today. As humans more and more try to alter the socio-techno-natural world, e.g., the earth’s climate, the combination of pragmatism and care will allow enhanced ethical behavior. Alterations to complex adaptive systems will produce highly uncertain results that require engineers to have a mindset that allows them to act with humility in the face of significant uncertainty and potential catastrophic failures. (shrink)

This paper proposes a re-evaluation of the theism vs. atheism controversy from a Kantian transcendental perspective, connected with Jamesian pragmatism. Insofar as there is a morally vital human need to postulate the reality of God, and insofar as this theistic postulation can be regarded as rational or legitimate from the perspective of “practical reason”, metaphysical and ethical aspects of the theism issue turn out to be deeply entangled with each other. A Kantian-cum-pragmatist philosophy of religion will inevitably approach (...) the question of God’s existence from a standpoint that thoroughly synthesizes ethics and metaphysics – just as Kant’s defense of theism as a postulate of practical reason did. (shrink)

There are various background issues that need to be discussed whenever the topic of conversation turns to religion and atheism. In particular, there are questions about how these terms are to be used in the course of the conversation. While it is sometimes the case that all parties to a conversation about religion and atheism have agreed what they mean by ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’, it is often enough the case that such conversations go poorly because the parties (...) mean different things by ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. In this paper, I discuss a range of questions about the meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’ that should be taken into account when we are asking global questions about ‘religion’ and ‘atheism’. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of “atheism” as it arises in Hume’s _Dialogues_. It argues that the concept of “atheism” involves several signficiant ambiguities that are indicative of philosophical and interpretive disagreements of a more substantial nature. It defends the view that Philo’s general sceptical orientation accurately represents Hume’s own “irreligious” and “atheistic” commitments, both in the _Dialogues_ and in his other (“earlier”) writings. While Hume was plainly a “speculative atheist”, his “practical atheism” was targeted more narrowly (...) against “superstition” - as opposed to deism or religion of a more “philosophical” kind. (shrink)

Romanticism and Pragmatism offers a new and original perspective by elucidating how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are linked and is the first monograph to offer a detailed discussion of Richard Rorty's idea of a literary or poeticized culture. It argues that pragmatism's use of Romanticism is an integral part of a modern antifoundationalist story of progress, and that it can help us appreciate the significance of Romanticism in the twenty-first century. It also analyses the relation between (...) pragmatism and race (and cosmopolitanism), and approaches the question of a pragmatist literary ethics. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social (...) problems, broadly conceived. In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

in peirce and religion: Knowledge, Transformation, and the Reality of God, Roger Ward argues that the founder of American pragmatism was a rather traditional Trinitarian Christian throughout his entire life. Such an argument is notable because scholarship on Peirce often underplays the philosopher’s comments about religion while emphasizing his work on logic, mathematics, and other non-religious philosophical topics. Those who take his views on religion seriously tend to interpret Peirce more radically than Ward, placing Peirce’s philosophy of religion and (...) personal theological beliefs in line with modern trends that are critical of traditional forms of Christianity. The argument in Ward’s book stands out against... (shrink)