Abstract

Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition offers a new insight into how to understand pragmatism, particularly by connecting pragmatism’s melioristic approach to problems with a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the very problems that pragmatism hope to solve. Peculiarly absent from Koopman’s presentation is a consideration of Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism, which itself combined the melioristic problem-solving of pragmatism and the Foucauldian analysis proposed by Koopman. This absence is not malicious, of course, but it does bring to mind how West’s prophetic pragmatism has been generally disregarded by mainstream pragmatism scholarship.