Leon J. Goldstein critically examines the philosophical role of concepts and concept formation in the social sciences. The book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at four critical terms in anthropology , politics , and sociology.

Abstract:Rorty in private exchanges and public discourse occasionally gave me remarkably bad advice (e.g., in teaching pragmatism, especially to undergrads, it is better to focus on James and Dewey to the exclusion of Peirce). He however was far better than this. As a philosopher preoccupied with meta-philosophy and intimately linked to this with issues of justification, he displayed reflexive finesse unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries. As someone who identified with James and Dewey even more than Marx, Freud, Foucault, and (...) Derrida, he was animated by a pragmatic imagination oriented to the ongoing task of reconstructing the democratic ethos of our daily lives. Chris Voparil has made a painstaking and responsible case for taking the thought of Rorty to be continuous with that of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams. It is far from clear that the path forward requires us to go through, rather than ‘round, Rorty; but it is one possible route. Moreover, even if Voparil in the end offers a “weak misreading” of a “strong misreader,” he offers an engaging, erudite, and illuminating portrait of a controversial figure. (shrink)

The author argues that Peirce, James, and Dewey propose a version of emotional cognitivism. He goes on to highlight certain features of human emotions, conceived in this light, above all emotional reflexivity. Given the highly fallible character of our emotional judgments, the reference to the “I,” in addition to that to the object, can hardly be overlooked. Deliberative agents are wise to confess, “I am angry,” without eliminating what James identifies as “the intensely objective reference” of such feelings as fear, (...) anger, and rapture. (shrink)

This essay seeks a philosophical understanding of the nature of kairos that, in turn, discloses the nature of philosophizing. This essay claims that the kairos of philosophy is dialogue, and that dialogue is kairological in two ways: (1) Dialogue is not just a phenomenon that occurs in chronological time but, rather, imposes its own time in order to see how life (or being) itself is disclosed to us; (2) dialogue is kairological because it denotes a moment in which we are (...) pushed into the open, which demands our receptivity and response. Section I explains kairos as “circumstance” in Aristotle, as a required point of view in Heidegger, and as related to the beginning of creation in Schelling. Section II understands dialogue, as the kairos of philosophy, as a crisis—a breaking away from an ordinary understanding of and experience in the world. This destabilizing experience resonates with the untimeliness of philosophizing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of a deeply engrained tendency to narrate the story of American pragmatism exclusively or primarily in terms of modern European philosophy. While it suggests alternative stories, it is principally a metanarrative, an intentionally polemical story about our entrenched habits of philosophical storytelling. Indeed, the pragmatics of storytelling merits, especially in reference to historical accounts of American pragmatism, critical attention. The seemingly simple question, “What are we doing when we tell the story of this movement (...) in this manner rather than that?” is a truly important one. It is also an avowedly pragmatic question. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of a deeply engrained tendency to narrate the story of American pragmatism exclusively or primarily in terms of modern European philosophy. While it suggests alternative stories, it is principally a metanarrative, an intentionally polemical story about our entrenched habits of philosophical storytelling. Indeed, the pragmatics of storytelling merits, especially in reference to historical accounts of American pragmatism, critical attention. The seemingly simple question, “What are we doing when we tell the story of this movement (...) in this manner rather than that?” is a truly important one. It is also an avowedly pragmatic question. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article elaborates a deceptively simple suggestion made by Hegel. It relates Hegel's suggestion above all to Dewey's stress on looking back, looking around, and looking ahead. In this endeavor the article touches upon two seemingly contradictory facets of philosophical thought—the autonomy and heteronomy of such thought. To a greater extent, however, the article focuses on the dramatic character of philosophical efforts to think things over, once again. The drive to think things over is frequently rooted in historical crises, (...) in experiential conflicts. The actuality of philosophy cannot be adequately understood apart from such dramas and conflicts, ones taking place far outside the studies and classrooms of thinkers. (shrink)

There are various reasons for taking a second look at anything at all. One reason is to discern aspects which have been overlooked; another frequently related reason is to reappraise the value or relevance of whatever is being reconsidered. A thing might be deemed worthless or negligible because some feature or set of features has been overlooked. And this way of conceiving the thing might become so familiar, so entrenched, that it powerfully, because subtly, works against alternative conceptions. In certain (...) intellectual circles, for example, the critiques of religion have become so familiar that the religious hypothesis is not a “living option.” As John Dewey noted, familiarity is more likely to breed credulity than contempt: We take the familiar conception, containing its implicit evaluation, as worthy of our belief, simply because it is familiar. Thus, a second look undertaken from a fresh perspective is ordinarily most promising; for it is most likely to bring into focus overlooked facets and unsuspected relevancies of familiar topics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Philosopher and Scientist Scientific Intelligence and Theoretical Knowledge Philosophy Within the Limits of Experience Alone The Conduct of Inquiry Clarifying Meaning The Theory of Signs Absolute Chance, Brute Reaction, and Evolving Law.

C. S. Peirce’s writings are instructive in a number of ways, not least of all for how they, in part despite themselves, assist us in conceiving what he was so strongly disposed to disparage, literary discourse. He possessed greater linguistic facility and deeper literary sensibility than he appreciated, though a militantly polemical identity helped to insure he left this facility undeveloped and this sensibility unacknowledged.2 For this and other reasons, a study of Peirce as a writer is worthwhile. It is (...) likely to prove more fruitful than he would have expected. The present essay is only a preliminary study of what would need much... (shrink)

The author argues for an alternative understanding of adequation to the traditional one as an illuminating gloss on part of what truth might mean. He does so in reference to a cultural context in which the very idea of truth has been in some circles rejected. Moreover, he explores this topic in conjunction with several feelings typically accompanying our responses to mendacity and simply to inadequate linguistic formulations or definitions.

This collection of original essays explores the connections between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and the classical American pragmatists.

This volume grew out of a conference held in 2016 at the Claremont School of Theology, while the conference itself grew out of "innovative conversations between philosophers, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, and process philosophers, Roland Faber and Michael Halewood". Its title in effect conjoins a Whiteheadian conception of propositions and a Jamesian understanding of "things.". As such, a proposition is set forth on behalf of "a collectivity...

: While the work of such expositors as Max H. Fisch, James J. Liszka, Lucia Santaella, Anne Friedman, and Mats Bergman has helped bring into sharp focus why Peirce took the third branch of semiotic (speculative rhetoric) to be "the highest and most living branch of logic," more needs to be done to show the extent to which the least developed branch of his theory of signs is, at once, its potentially most fruitful and important. The author of this paper (...) thus begins to trace out even more fully than these scholars have done the unfinished trajectory of Peirce's eventual realization of the importance of speculative rhetoric. In doing so, he is arguing for a shift from the formalist and taxonomic emphasis of so many commentators to a more thoroughly pragmaticist and "rhetorical" approach to interpreting Peirce's theory of signs. (shrink)

While the work of such expositors as Max H. Fisch, James J. Liszka, Lucia Santaella, Anne Friedman, and Mats Bergman has helped bring into sharp focus why Peirce took the third branch of semiotic (speculative rhetoric) to be "the highest and most living branch of logic," more needs to be done to show the extent to which the least developed branch of his theory of signs is, at once, its potentially most fruitful and important. The author of this paper thus (...) begins to trace out even more fully than these scholars have done the unfinished trajectory of Peirce's eventual realization of the importance of speculative rhetoric. In doing so, he is arguing for a shift from the formalist and taxonomic emphasis of so many commentators to a more thoroughly pragmaticist and "rhetorical" approach to interpreting Peirce's theory of signs. (shrink)

The author of this paper explores a central strand in the complex relationship between Peirce and Kant. He argues, against Kant (especially as reconstructed by Christine Korsgaard), that the practical identity of the self-critical agent who undertakes a Critic of reason (as Peirce insisted upon translating this expression) needs to be conceived in substantive, not purely formal, terms. Thus, insofar as there is a reflexive turn in Peirce, it is quite far from the transcendental turn taken by Immanuel Kant. The (...) identity of the being devoted to redefining the bounds of reason (for the drawing of such bounds is always a historically situated and motivated undertaking) is not that of a disembodied, rational will giving laws to itself. Nor is it that of a being whose passions and especially sentiments are heteronomous determinations of the deliberative agency in question. Rather the identity of this being is that of a somatic, social, and historical agent whose very autonomy not only traces its origin to heteronomy but also ineluctably involves an identification with what, time and again, emerges as other than this agent. A strong claim is made regarding human identity being practical identity (practical identity being understood here as the singular shape acquired by a human being in the complex course of its practical involvements, its participation in the array of practices in and through which such a being carries out its life). An equally strong claim is made regarding the upshot of Peirce's decisive movement beyond Kant's transcendental project: this movement unquestionably drives toward a compelling account of human agency. (shrink)

: The author of this paper explores a central strand in the complex relationship between Peirce and Kant. He argues, against Kant (especially as reconstructed by Christine Korsgaard), that the practical identity of the self-critical agent who undertakes a Critic of reason (as Peirce insisted upon translating this expression) needs to be conceived in substantive, not purely formal, terms. Thus, insofar as there is a reflexive turn in Peirce, it is quite far from the transcendental turn taken by Immanuel Kant. (...) The identity of the being devoted to redefining the bounds of reason (for the drawing of such bounds is always a historically situated and motivated undertaking) is not that of a disembodied, rational will giving laws to itself. Nor is it that of a being whose passions and especially sentiments are heteronomous determinations of the deliberative agency in question. Rather the identity of this being is that of a somatic, social, and historical agent whose very autonomy not only traces its origin to heteronomy but also ineluctably involves an identification with what, time and again, emerges as other than this agent. A strong claim is made regarding human identity being practical identity (practical identity being understood here as the singular shape acquired by a human being in the complex course of its practical involvements, its participation in the array of practices in and through which such a being carries out its life). An equally strong claim is made regarding the upshot of Peirce's decisive movement beyond Kant's transcendental project: this movement unquestionably drives toward a compelling account of human agency. (shrink)