Abstract

With the publication of Jay Schulkin’s Naturalism and Pragmatism, pragmatist philosophers and theologians have been done a great service. A neuroscientist by training, Schulkin brings robust scientific data to bear on pragmatism’s naturalistic theory of inquiry, often charged as superficially concerned with practical expediency—that is, with “what works” apart from considerations of meaning and value that befit what Ernest Sosa influentially called “serious philosophy.”1 To serious-minded pragmatists, it is frustrating that facile readings of pragmatism—namely, that it is simply a disguised form of antirealism and/or relativism—remain a century after Dewey dutifully clarified what practicality means for ..