American Pragmatism

In this paper, I show how a pragmatist stance may address the problem of the resolvability of moral conflicts. Pragmatism challenges skeptical and relativist views by arguing that moral conflict resolution is possible via inquiry and exchange of reasons. From a normative standpoint, pragmatism also differs from utilitarian and deontological views, according to which a specific moral theory is correct in every context. From a pragmatist point of view, both utilitarian and deontological responses can be justified, depending on contextual conditions (...) and reasons, on the people to whom reasons are offered, and on constraints of inclusivity, publicity, empirical accuracy, and coherence. Pragmatism’s empiricist method for solving conflicts and making normative adjustments can be seen as a form of reflective equilibrium, where moral beliefs and commitments are adjusted in light of new non-moral knowledge, such as evidence about the reliability of decision processes. Recent empirical research also supports pragmatism’s pluralist and flexible approach more than monistic and generalist normative views like deontology and utilitarianism. (shrink)

We lost a giant of philosophy when we lost John on 14 November. Perhaps you’ve encountered one or more of those audio productions in the Giants of Philosophy series John edited beginning in the 1980s. He was an ideal choice to chair the American Philosophical Association’s centennial committee, tasked to “create a broader public awareness for philosophy by calling attention to its personal value and social usefulness.” That’s exactly what John did, always, throughout his long career (from which he formally (...) retired only a couple of years ago at age 87).When, for instance, my department at Middle Tennessee faced its existential crisis in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008, John came and delivered a timely... Read More. (shrink)

I’m so very proud to have studied with John Lachs and grateful to him for being a member of my dissertation committee. A year before my defense, in the Spring semester of 1990, as I recall, I took a graduate course on aesthetics with Dr. Lachs. In the first class of the semester, he came into the seminar room and stood at the end of a long oak table, around which we students sat. He carried with him a slick magazine—Vogue (...) or GQ or Glamour. He opened it to an advertisement for perfume or clothing or luggage and slid the magazine skillfully from one end of the seminar table all the way to the other end. He then put his hand on his bald pate and said, in his inimitable accent and unique way, “Eees dat aurrt?” So... Read More. (shrink)

John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Vanderbilt University, passed away on 14 November 2023. Notably, he ends his book In Love with Life with a quote from George Santayana: “The time will doubtless come for each of us, if not for the universe at large, to cease from care; but our passage through life will have added a marvelous episode to the tale of things” (Lachs, In Love with Life 125). John’s life indeed was a marvelous episode. He was (...) born in Budapest, Hungary, on 17 July 1934, living through World War II as a child. In 1951, his family fled Hungary because of the communist occupation and settled in Canada. John received his BA (1956) and MA (1957) from McGill University, and his PhD (1961)... Read More. (shrink)

From American Empire to América Cósmica through Philosophy: Prospero’s Reflection is the culmination of MacMullan’s research on a broader conception of American Philosophy. The expanded notion of “American” Philosophy not only makes sense, but it is one of the most promising present ventures in dealing with the lives and problems of people across the Americas. The book opens an important dialogue between the American pragmatist traditions and Latin American philosophers who have been ignored, such as Vaz Ferreira, Pedro Albizu Campos, (...) and Risieri Frondizi. More importantly, it introduces the perspective of these philosophers on both the virtues and the vices of the United States. This is the much-needed critical... Read More. (shrink)

John Dewey and the prominent contemporary public philosopher Peter Singer both give naturalistic consequentialist accounts calling for actionable steps within present contexts. In the following pages, I put Dewey and Singer in conversation, focusing on commonalities and differences in their moral approaches, and in particular their diverging conceptions of how individuals can be understood within moral problems. My motivations for this writing stem from a sympathy for the ideals put forward by the effective altruism movement, an influential approach inspired largely (...) by Singer. Effective altruism (EA) has been particularly influential in the contemporary animal protection movement, a community that I count myself... Read More. (shrink)

I sometimes ask my students if they would be willing to raise their hand and pledge the following:There’s a single basis of moral life, and it determines the right way to proceed. I have access to this supreme basis. When others don’t agree with me, it’s because they have the wrong faith commitments, they aren’t analyzing things properly, or they aren’t letting conscience be their guide. Agreement with me is a prerequisite to solving our problems. Consequently, I have nothing to (...) learn about these matters from those who disagree with me. Their participation is, at best, an irrelevant distraction and, at worst, an evil to be defeated. My diagnosis of the issue has precisely captured all that is morally relevant. It’s... Read More. (shrink)

zine magubane provides a thorough and cogent critique of Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Theory-inspired sociology of race from a Marxist perspective. Magubane explains that Critical Race Theory and sociology of race posit a deeply ingrained racial structure at the base of American society and its institutions and collective concepts. This racial structure is argued to be a permanent fixture of American history that undergirds a variety of projects of oppression, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and (...) the War on Drugs. Magubane’s contention, in brief, is that, by placing racial structure and discrimination at the center of their analyses, these areas of scholarship occlude important elements of... Read More. (shrink)

don d. roberts and beverley e. kent departed life eleven days apart. Don died on 4 March; Beverley on 15 March. They had married late in life and lived together for over twenty-five years in retirement in a house they had designed and built on Vancouver Island near Victoria, British Columbia.Don was born in Des Moines, Iowa, but grew up in Chicago and attended Roosevelt University. In 1958, he received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Illinois with (...) a thesis on Kierkegaard’s dialectic of communication, and in 1963, he received his PhD with a dissertation on Peirce’s existential graphs. At Illinois, Max Fisch became Don’s mentor. Don was a member of a small group, led by Max, which spent months at... Read More. (shrink)

tonight we honor vincent m. colapietro for his distinguished and decades-long contribution to the understanding, cultivation, and development of American Philosophy. Since his encounter, as a boy not yet in high school, with Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, Vincent has been imbued with the Socratic spirit of philosophy—perhaps he was born a philosopher. The philosophical spirit that animates him was early on enchanted by poetic and literary muses under the influence of such figures as Shelley, Keats, Frost, Cummings, Hemingway, Faulkner, (...) Salinger, Updike, and Vonnegut, with the consequence that Vincent’s philosophical writings have an aesthetic quality that few philosophers achieve. Young Vincent was also... Read More. (shrink)

In this philosophical response to Terrance MacMullan’s From American Empire to América Cósmica through Philosophy: Prospero’s Reflection (2023), I engage with his ambitious and timely project of inter-American philosophy and critique of U.S. imperialism. While analyzing and praising MacMullan's engagement with philosophers like Pedro Albizu Campos and Gloria Anzaldúa, I also reflect on our shared positionality as white scholars raised in Spanish-speaking regions of the USA. Finally, I draw upon Anzaldúa's "Geographies of Selves" concept to suggest that more "autohistoria" or (...) self-disclosure would enhance the existential depth and power of MacMullan's project of haciendo una América Cósmica through philosophy. (shrink)

“Of Ghosts and Ghostwriters” strikes me as a particularly ambitious and perhaps rebellious project. In it, Dr. Magubane engages in battles both external and internal, regarding the history of sociology, its relation to critical race theory (CRT), and the recent attacks on these scholarly fields from the political right. She argues that, in addition to being conflated and attacked by the far right, sociology of race and critical race theory share some misguided base assumptions: namely, that the US system of (...) power is primarily a racial system, wherein racial groups are the primary, enduring units. She spends most of her paper grounding these limiting assumptions in a genealogy of sociology—and therefore CRT—rooted... Read More. (shrink)

my response to dr. zine magubane’s thought-provoking Coss Dialogue lecture will consist of two sections. In the first section, I will make sense of her class-based criticism of Booker T. Washington’s racial accommodationism, critical race theory (CRT), and dominant theories of US-centric sociology of race by situating them in her larger sociological thought. In the second and closing section, I will raise three concerns I have about her criticism of CRT and sociology of race.Magubane criticizes Washington’s racial accommodationism, CRT (especially (...) Derrick Bell’s version of CRT), and sociology of race throughout her lecture. She criticizes Washington’s racial accommodationism for being against working-class... Read More. (shrink)

In the eyes of many conservatives, sociology and critical race theory are virtually indistinguishable. As a result, sociology has become a lightning rod in the culture wars. In January 2024, the state of Florida eliminated sociology as a core course at its universities. In his defense of the decision, Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr., wrote: “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists and no longer serves its intended purpose as a general knowledge course for students. Under Governor DeSantis, Florida’s (...) higher education system will focus on preparing students for high-demand, high-wage jobs, not woke ideology” (Hartocollis). In invoking the term “woke ideology,” he gestured approvingly to the... Read More. (shrink)

dr. robert m. ruehl (1974–2023), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John Fisher University, will be dearly missed and fondly remembered by those whose lives he touched. A caring and transformative educator, a supportive colleague, loyal friend, and a loving partner, Rob made a lasting impact on everyone he encountered.Many in our SAAP community will recall meeting Rob at the 2019 Feminist-Pragmatist Colloquium in Rochester, New York. Rob's creative vision and unwavering dedication helped to shape a welcoming and inclusive environment (...) for all attendees. His warm smile and compassionate nature endeared him to all who crossed his path.Drawn to the work of Henry David Thoreau, Rob was particularly inspired by the concept of “preservative care” and its connection to the idea of “gifts.” He believed in nurturing our individual talents and character traits, while also championing the recognition and cultivation of these gifts in others. Rob's reflections on preservative care and gifts extended to his contemplation of death. He emphasized the importance of honoring the gifts of the departed and further cultivating our own gifts as a way to improve the conditions of life for all.As we mourn the loss of Dr. Robert Ruehl, we take solace in the enduring legacy of his many gifts and work to cultivate our own. Rest in peace, Rob. (shrink)

i went to my first meeting of this Society in Seattle in 1984, just forty years ago. Joe Grassi and Morris Grossman from Fairfield University picked up a group of us at the airport and headed to Seattle University. After going around the same block four or five times, Morris, who was riding shotgun, said to his colleague, “Joe, we’re lost.” Being an Italian American male (Baldwin 166–69), Joe emphatically denied this. We nonetheless pulled over, not knowing where we were (...) (some of us knew we did not know our location; one person apparently did not), and Morris and Joe continued their argument about our whereabouts. During the course of what was anything but a Socratic dialogue, two individuals in uniform came up to... Read More. (shrink)

Gregory Pappas faced a difficult task in offering a critical response to this book, as he is not only the current philosopher who is most cited in the book, but the book frequently acknowledges his work as being the single greatest intellectual bridge between the various filosofías vivas (living philosophies) of the Americas. I am humbled by Goyo's (Pappas's) kind words and thankful for his critiques.Pappas's most significant critique concerns Part II of the book, the part that investigates the danger (...) that inter-American philosophy might function, intentionally or not, as a form of US propaganda. Pappas suggests that this section descends into an oversimplified kind of cultural Manichaeanism, where all of Latin America's problems are explained as being due to yanqui colonialism and the peoples of Latin American countries are all virtuous, long-suffering victims with no agency or accountability themselves. Worse yet, Pappas raises the possibility that I have foolishly set out on a Quest for Purity (fighting words to be sure since he knows how much I dig Dewey's Quest for Certainty!) where I make it my mission to imagine an American philosophical discourse disinfected of all North American colonialism. Pappas's critique is fair and insightful. I am most concerned that in my effort to take seriously the linkages between American pragmatism and American colonialism that Rodó, Vasconcelos, and others allege exist, I have painted an oversimplified and crude picture that, most troublingly, elides the moral agency of the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America. Please let me offer a few responses to his critique that the book lacked subtlety in its analysis of colonialism as it relates to inter-American philosophy and North American Pragmatism.First, Pappas is undoubtedly correct that the United States is not to blame for all the problems that beset the peoples of Latin America, and that every country has its own, homegrown problems of corruption and vice. However, a philosophy centered on the problems of life recognizes our contexts and various situated positions. Therefore, as a gringo (even a gringo Boricua who was raised in Puerto Rico), I contend it is not my place to remove the mote of moral failures from those living within a colonial system while the beam of white colonialism still blinds most white Americans (including me) from properly seeing ourselves in this system. Pappas is, of course, correct when he says that the “other side also needs some correction.” However, as a white US citizen who has benefitted from these colonial systems, I think it is most productive and appropriate for me, for reasons of pragmatist fallibilism if nothing else, to attend to my side in the problem, which is the history and present of US colonialism in the Americas. While I accept that my analysis lacked balance and subtlety, as Pappas rightly notes, the reason was that I was trying to write consistently from my position as a yanqui who wanted to thematize the role of US colonialism within Latin America, not to strive for purity, but instead a full reckoning of a system that my privilege encourages me to ignore.This leads to a second valence of my response to Dr. Pappas's critique, one that regards how my affinities impact my epistemology. If some readers find the critique of American Pragmatism in Part II to be too vociferous (though, I am sure many others will find the critiques too tame), it was because I was intentionally trying to write with my off-hand, as it were. The chapters of Part II strive to charitably consider and make room for the charge that was suggested by Frondizi and strenuously argued by Vasconcelos, Rodó, and Albizu, that philosophies of the Global North, including Pragmatism, facilitate systems of oppression in the Global South. I did so to try to correct for the fact that my starting point is one of great admiration and even love for American Philosophy, including many English-language North American pragmatists like Dewey, James, and Addams. One of the premises of this book is that the academic discourse of inter-American philosophy is ready to grow past the initial stage of development, which has heretofore focused on delineating points of affinity between the intellectual traditions of the Americas, and to start to contend with points of discord and contention. So while I was (and truthfully still am not) convinced by José Vasconcelos's depiction of John Dewey as the High Priest of the American Empire, I also know that since Dewey is one of my greatest influences, my personal affinity might lead me to exculpate him even if a critique is valid. Therefore, I argue that it is appropriate and necessary to offer a charitable summary of these critiques so that other scholars with different perspectives and starting points might weigh in on these and other critiques. The purpose of this book was less to argue a position about many of these issues, than it was to invite and foster a broader, truly inter-American community of inquiry to engage with these questions to have a full and complex assessment of the questions. Somewhat ironically, I dedicated a third of this book to making charitable room for critiques of North American Pragmatism for good pragmatist reasons. One of the most significant values of philosophical Pragmatism is its prioritization of a particular method of inquiry that is democratic and sincere above any particular claim. In this case, that means it is more important to have an inter-American philosophical dialogue that makes room for and charitably considers all claims (including claims that are profoundly distrustful of Pragmatism by thinkers like Rodó and Vasconcelos) than it is for me, as one voice speaking at what I think is still an early stage of the conversation, to defend or refute particular claims about philosophers. A full scholarly discourse developed by an inter-American community of philosophical inquiry will yield the sort of subtle and nuanced historical understanding Pappas calls for. The intent was to move this discourse toward the more contentious points of inter-American philosophical exchange and precisely because I believe that fostering a broader, truly American philosophical discourse is a legitimate aspiration. The Deweyan in me believes that this kind of community of engaged inquirers is the best group to encourage the sort of ground-up change that Alexis Massol and others call us to make.Finally, the most personally authentic response to Pappas's critique is that the parts of the book that sought parallels between the horrific crimes and injustices of American imperialism and American Pragmatism were my attempt to heed Anzaldúa's imperative from Borderlands/La Frontera to accept the doppelganger in our psyches, to acknowledge and correct the “negative” parts of ourselves that we have pushed onto mexicanos and other latine peoples for centuries (Anzaldúa 86). Since I take to heart her claim that the tendency of white Americans is to displace our problems onto others, it is essential for me to fully know myself and my cultures in the context of colonialism. While Pappas is, of course, right to say the problems are not entirely due to yanqui colonialism, it is also certainly the case that white Americans are still casting their faults onto people they frame as Others and scapegoating Latin American immigrants as the source of their woes. So, as with the responses above, it felt right to me to air out these more critical perspectives on not just US foreign policy but also the philosophies of the United States, in order to work against the tendency that Anzaldúa sees in white folk to let ourselves off the hook and the push our faults onto others.As with Pappas above, I am greatly honored that Alexander Stehn would write such a thoughtful and nuanced critique that demonstrates such a careful reading of the book. I am heartened that a scholar as well versed as Alex would say that he learned from the book. If that is so, I am sure that it is because this book's primary value is ostensive: it hopefully functions as a signpost directing the reader to dig deeply into the works of thinkers like Pedro Albizu Campos, Fernando Zalamea, and Henríquez Ureña, who are still little-read in English-language settings. I am excited for Stehn's students to get to read Albizu's political philosophy alongside works by Socrates, King, and Zea! Still, Stehn is too gracious by directing the first part of his comments to developing insights that are largely praiseworthy of the book.However, I have long noticed that whenever a philosopher starts a critique with kind and thoughtful comments of praise, they will follow with a shot to the heart. Stehn's third point, which is well-warranted and framed very gently, is that I fail to give the reader enough access to my inner life. Stehn is correct to note that this is a significant failing on my part since I specifically frame the book in part as my effort at an Anzaldúan autohistoria that strives to draw insights by blending personal introspection with traditional approaches to history and theoretical analysis. My friend and colleague Alex is correct that the moments of self-reflection are too few and certainly less brave and self-revelatory than those of first-order writers in this genre, like Anzaldúa, Lugones, and Mariana Alessandri.1Therefore, my first response to Stehn's critique is to simply cop to the fact that I am less skilled and less brave than these and other authors that I emulate and hold up as guides. For what it's worth, that was me, as someone from an Irish-Italian Catholic family who learned to repress and conceal all problems at an early age, trying to be self-revelatory! However, Stehn is correct that the book certainly would have been stronger had I delved more deeply into the truths of my life being brought up as a gringo in Puerto Rico. A more authentic autohistoria would have done a more thorough job of reclaiming my own doppelganger and illustrating what it might mean to be a white, straight guy who sincerely strives to adopt his version of the mestiza consciousness that Anzaldúa argued we all need to develop. In particular, I should have connected the dots more explicitly between the colonial laws and policies that enabled my parents and me to move to Puerto Rico in the 1970s and the colonial and white supremacist ideas and habits that I learned from my family and perpetuated myself that often put me out-of-sorts with the people I was lucky to be raised with.Stehn asks what experiences still haunt me about my childhood that I did not address in the book. There are lots and too many to talk about today, but I will say the most difficult ones center around my mom, Joan, who passed away a few weeks before our panel in Boston. She was born into crushing poverty in New York City during the Great Depression and learned early-on to be ashamed of her poverty as well as her Italian heritage, which she learned to associate with poverty. She spent most of her life working hard to care for her five kids and to make sure we were well-prepared to “succeed in life,” which to her meant to make the most of white privilege by doing well financially and getting as far as possible from the rough Bronx upbringing she had. She therefore found it a cruel and mirthless joke to have worked her way all the way to the comfort and status of the white-flight New Jersey suburbs only to find herself back in an apartment in a crowded city. She also manifested and conveyed to me the logic of a white supremacist ideology that sorted people according to the same racial taxonomy that she learned as a kid, the one that made her suspicious to my dad's Irish father, but nonetheless just barely inside the lines of whiteness. If I were a braver writer, I would have perhaps written about the wounds within mi propia alma (my own soul) born of being taught by the person who loved me best in the world that I should be terrified of “the Puerto Ricans” and then to have to go make friends and live in Puerto Rico.There is, perhaps, a mitigating factor to Stehn's critique that I do not bring myself sufficiently to account in my work, and I offer this not by way of self-defense, but to hopefully illuminate a significant point. As with my response to Pappas's critique above, I strove through this work to eschew any pretense of a view sub specie aeternitatis in favor of a work that was mindful of my context and situatedness. So while Stehn is right that the work would have been more valuable were I braver in my self-analysis, I think that, as a person situated in a context of great lived privilege, it is proper for me to balance out a tendency toward taking up more space than is fair. To make the point simply, I did not want the work to be about me, but instead about how I might open an important discussion on how to develop an inter-American philosophical community capable of addressing the legacy of US colonialism across the Americas. Therefore, perhaps autohistoria should look different for me than it did for Anzaldúa. If I am lucky enough to have my gig as a professor long enough to write another book (my university just announced we were moving to a “polytechnic” model that emphasizes STEM and professional fields even more than they already are, so perhaps I will yet become another over-educated Irish-American bartender after all!), I will continue to find the right balance between being forthright about my own efforts to reclaim my doppelganger and heal the splits in my heart and being humble and quiet in the self-awareness that people like me have spoken too much already, and that sometimes the wisest thing for me to do is to stop talking. (shrink)

please allow me to first express how joyful and honored I am to share this moment with the assembled scholars kind enough to attend this session and especially two outstanding scholars who were not only great influences on this book, but are also friends and excellent collaborators. As a scholar, I am, of course, very happy to bring a longtime project to fruition, but as a person whose well of hope for democratic community runs nearly dry sometimes, I am especially (...) grateful to have the opportunity to replenish it with meaningful conversation and reflection during our present precarious moment. The comments of my fellow panelists and friends are charitable and well-received, and I am humbled that they not only read... Read More. (shrink)

In this paper, I will demonstrate how Jane Addams’s account of peaceweaving can be applied to rural contexts in order to address structural issues contributing to poverty and vulnerability to extremist and populist agendas. In the first section, I examine the problem of rural poverty. In the second section, I explain Addams’s account of peaceweaving. In the third section, I apply Addams’s account of peaceweaving to the rural context. In so doing, I argue that schools can be loci for peaceweaving, (...) and in the final section, I address two concerns regarding its applicability.Since US poverty rates were first recorded in the 1960s, rural communities have been shown to have higher, more persistent levels of poverty... Read More. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Logic and Colonization in North AmericaScott L. Prattin 1672, The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof was published at the first North American press housed at Harvard College, where several of the printers were also members of local tribes. The book was written in English and Wôpanâak, the Native language (...) spoken in the area of Boston and the Plymouth Colony, by the famed New England missionary John Eliot, with considerable assistance from Native interpreters including a number of Native preachers (mostly trained by Eliot) (Cogley 124–35). This volume represented one of the first uses of logic as an instrument of colonization in North America. Alongside disease and guns, logic served the larger mission of removing North American Indigenous people and replacing them with European people and culture—an effort that continues to the present day. Eliot’s primer is a key example because it illustrates both the means of conveying the dominant logic to a non-European world and the complexity of the borders where Indigenous and European worlds meet.The subject matter, logic, is normally viewed as either the rules or laws of mind or reason, or a formalizable system to be studied on its own. Theorists holding the first view are often accused of psychologizing logic, while theorists of the second sort are accused of considering the subject matter without recognizing how it works in human life. I approach this study from a third perspective proposed by pragmatist logician Josiah Royce: logic as the science of order (Royce 312). The subject matter of logic is what is invariant across diverse systems of order. From this perspective, formal systems of logic, the methods of science, living social orders, and the experience of individuals are diverse orders that share structures that make them what they are. Psychologized, formal, and informal logics are examples of ordering systems and, on this account, are the product of a history and the preservation and advancement of those orders. Eliot’s Logick Primer was an effort to study [End Page 17] and cultivate a system of order comparable to modern efforts to understand inference and teach students critical thinking. It turns out that the system of order studied and promoted by Eliot’s logic and the system of order present in classical modern logic are similar and potentially produce similar results.The principles at work in modern logic are not “natural” a priori givens but are habits whose development was conditioned by the success of their users, and modified over time to adapt to change, preserve the advantages the system supports, and promote the expansion of those advantages. Andrea Nye, in Words of Power, makes a related argument from a feminist perspective showing how logic developed in a way that reinforced the exclusion of women from having a voice in public matters, intellectual and otherwise. The results of this history can be found everywhere from education to the operation of the economy, from law and social norms to the structure of machine learning and AI. Examining the history of this system for its origins, the turns of its development, and the ways it has held on to its advantages can provide a different and potentially more effective critical lens on the system as it is now and as it can be used to develop alternative futures. In the balance of this paper, I will examine what Eliot’s primer conveyed to its students and why it was embraced by at least some Indigenous people.The Logick Primer was intended to be widely distributed, especially in the so-called “Praying Towns”—communities of both Native and English residents organized around a parish church and school. The text was an elementary presentation of the logic adopted by Puritan philosophers and theologians based on the work of Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century convert to Protestantism, who was killed in Paris in 1572 during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants. Ramus’s work, particularly as presented through English interpreters Alexander Richardson and William Ames,1 also informed Eliot’s groundbreaking books A... (shrink)

This text should have been written by John Deely (1942–2017). But we all pass from this coil with our life’s work left unfinished—leaving thereby to others the choice of whether or not that work is continued. During our last conversation, knowing that his time in this life was limited, John expressed to me a wonder and a trepidation whether the human soul really is immortal. I repeated to him, in paraphrase, words he had once said in class: “It is an (...) experiment we all make, but only once.” He chuckled and said that’s true. -/- Reflecting at the distance of nearly seven years and having since oft-read C.S. Peirce’s brief essay, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, it occurs to me that the immortality of the individual soul is the wrong question, if we understand it strictly as materially individuated: for we are all of us sustained more by relationality than substantiality, by our common and shared intentionality, and though we may not know with certitude his final resting place, we do here—I hope—sustain something of the soul that belonged to John Deely. -/- I hope this doesn’t “go off the rails”. -/- All the contents are fully attributable to the author, Doctor Brian Kemple. Should you wish to get this text republished, get in touch with the author or the editorial committee of the Studia Poinsotiana. Insofar as possible, we will be happy to broker your contact. -/- Studia Poinsotiana The first-ever peer-reviewed scholarly publishing venue offering an encyclopedic web of understanding concentrating on John of St. Thomas (Poinsot). (shrink)

Although modern modal logic came about largely after Peirce’s death, he anticipated some of its key aspects, including strict implication and possible worlds semantics. He developed the Gamma part of Existential Graphs with broken cuts signifying possible falsity, but later identified the need for a Delta part without ever spelling out exactly what he had in mind. An entry in his personal Logic Notebook is a plausible candidate, with heavy lines representing possible states of things where propositions denoted by attached (...) letters would be true, rather than individual subjects to which predicates denoted by attached names are attributed as in the Beta part. New transformation rules implement various commonly employed formal systems of modal logic, which are readily interpreted by defining a possible world as one in which all the relevant laws for the actual world are facts, each world being partially but accurately and adequately described by a closed and consistent model set of propositions. In accordance with pragmaticism, the relevant laws for the actual world are represented as strict implications with real possibilities as their antecedents and conditional necessities as their consequents, corresponding to material implications in every possible world. (shrink)

Many pragmatist and non-representational approaches to cognition, such as the enactivist, have focused on the relations between actions, affectivity, and habits from an intersubjective perspective. For those adopting such approaches, all these aspects are inextricably connected; however, many questions remain open regarding the dynamics by which they unfold and shape each other over time. This paper addresses a specific topic that has not received much attention: the impact on future behavior of not fulfilling possibilities for social interaction even though their (...) fulfillment is desirable within a given context. Inspired by Gibson’s theory of affordances and Dewey’s account of habits, these situations will be characterized as events where an agent does not act upon an inviting affordance for social interaction due to a conflict which he or she experiences between given concerns, needs, and social norms. This conflict leads to a sense of unfulfillment that may eventually bring about a crisis and revision of habits. Through specific examples, this work presents the potential impact of the connection between affordances, habits, and affectivity on everyday situations. It therefore represents an exploration of the common ground between pragmatism and enactivism and an attempt to contribute to a process-based approach to social interaction. (shrink)

Reconciling the many “faces” of Peirce – the Scientist, Philosopher, and Metaphysician - helps to make sense of the open-endedness and versatility of semiotics. Semiosis, for Peirce, knows no rigid hermeneutic or disciplinary bounds. It thus forces us to be open to interdisciplinary and holistic inquiries. The pragmatic maxim sets limits on metaphysical speculation, but it also legitimates the extension of the experimentalist method into cosmological, metaphysical, and even religious domains. Although Peirce's religious speculations are ultimately unsatisfactory, understanding why Peirce (...) expanded his thinking to such domains reveals the expansionist logic of Peircean semiotics beyond the mere idiosyncracies of the man. The triadic, dynamic logic of pragmatist inquiry seeks to expand to all social processes of fixing belief and forming habits, however quixotic; but it remains dubious whether such expansion can fully comport to the scientific, experimentalist method that Peirce preferred. (shrink)

Early American pragmatism was an attempt to question the philosophical conceptions of the human being inherited from modern European philosophy. This revision of the philosophical canon was deeply tied to the social, cultural, technological, and political changes that shook the structures of modern societies in the 19th century, disclosing unforeseen potentialities, unregulated powers, as well as social feelings of alienation, anonymity, and repressed social power (Bernstein 1971, 2010; Misak...

Anna Boncompagni’s Wittgenstein on Forms of Life, written for the Cambridge Elements of The Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, is an excellent overview of the topic and does exactly what such an Elements book should do. Most importantly, it provides a map of the leading philosophical interpretations of Wittgenstein’s use of the phrase “form of life,” and so debates of how it is best to be understood. The map consists of three interpretive axes of dispute: natural vs. cultural, one vs. many, (...) a... (shrink)

Let me start by expressing my deepest gratitude to the authors who contributed to this book symposium with insightful comments and thoughts, and to the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy for hosting this discussion. I feel honored that my Cambridge Element was chosen as a suitable subject for a book symposium and I will do my best to respond to the many perceptive, farseeing, and stimulating comments that Lars Hertzberg, Luigi Perissinotto, Elena Valeri, and Meredith Willi...

The idea of self-realization is one of the most significant points of intersection between ethics and philosophical anthropology, the disciplines that study, respectively, human conduct and human nature. An examination of this idea, therefore, allows us to shed light on these two fields and their entanglement. In this article I present two possible accounts of self-realization: the Essentialist Account, which understands it as the actualization of an intrinsic potential, and the Interactionist Account, which conceives it as the successful interaction between (...) an individual and her environment. My goal is to argue for the Interactionist Account, in the comprehensive version developed by John Dewey. To do so, I proceed as follows: I introduce the Essentialist Account; I present Dewey’s alternative, by examining first the "Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics" and then some major later works, thereby showing the continuity (and discontinuity) of his conception of self-realization, or growth, throughout his career; after a closer comparison between the Interactionist Account and the Essentialist Account, I finally clarify the relevance of Dewey’s view for understanding the entanglement between ethics and anthropology. (shrink)

The Mead Renaissance, as announced by Guido Baggio (2017: 2) has yet taken a new turn. For a long time, Mead’s posthumous editions – including the most discussed Mind, Self and Society, and the less considered The Philosophy of the Present (Huebner 2014a) – were the only way for researchers to gain an insight into his thought. These texts have since been the subject of commentaries, critical re-editions and in-depth analyses like the work of Hans Joas (1980/1997), Gary A. Cook (...) (1993) and more... (shrink)

Women in Pragmatism investigates the entanglements and resonances between pragmatism and the issues, struggles, and voices of women and feminist thought. As well as describing the theme and contents of the volume, Women in Pragmatism also describes the posture of women who wrote the essays holding together their being women and pragmatists and making the two approaches interact with respect to their own specific disciplines and fields of research. Far from being a collection of individual pap...

Advertised by Cornel West as “the best philosophical treatment of the great William James in this generation,” Alexis Dianda’s The Varieties of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn meets the reader with high expectations, which it indeed fulfills. Her volume is a seminal contribution to Jamesian scholarship in its defense of some of the most puzzling aspects of James’s conception(s) of experience for us readers past the linguistic turn. The task has been attempted before, with...

The persistent occurrence of a locution that turns out to be far from trivially used, and the translation hurdles related to it are the core elements of this contribution. The term in question is subject-matter, which is used by John Dewey in many of his writings and of which he provides an explicit conceptualization in Art as Experience. Focusing on this term and its hyphenation allows to emphasize and shed new light on important aspects of Dewey’s thought, in that: it (...) is increasingly technicalized in Dewey’s writings; it holds “antecedence” or “primacy”; in its double-barreled employment it keeps together the twofold meaning of “inherent matter” and “addressed matter”; and finally it epitomizes a number of traits shared by the notion of Lebenswelt, hence affording a programmatic and experimental comparison between the two. (shrink)

This paper fills a gap in the literature concerning the importance of the categories of potentiality and actuality in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. Peirce and Dewey derived their positions by revising Aristotle. Their revisions are surprisingly similar in many aspects and different in at least one significant feature – haecceity. Peirce and Dewey’s pragmatic reconstruction of actuality and potentiality is perhaps the most important advance since the Scholastics. The goal is to recover the categories of (...) potentiality and actuality for the future development of pragmatism. (shrink)

This paper begins by contrasting two familiar approaches to truth and justification: realist and anti-realist, in order to indicate, firstly, two important, but diametrically opposed, intuitions they each capture about these notions, and secondly, the epistemological problems they each give rise to: radical scepticism and relativism respectively. It then introduces a third, fallibilist-pragmatist account, which captures each of the important insights of the other two accounts while avoiding their problems. The paper concludes by showcasing how the fallibilist-pragmatist approach differs from (...) both relativism and radical scepticism, and in doing so fares better than they do in navigating the issue of academic freedom and “cancel culture” on college campuses. (shrink)

Anna Boncompagni’s book Wittgenstein on Forms of Life (2022) – published in the CUP series “Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein” – can be divided into two main parts: the first part, consisting of the Introduction and Sections 2 and 3, has a primarily critical-exegetical purpose; the second part coincides with Section 4, in which the author elaborates and briefly defends her own interpretative proposal on Wittgenstein’s use of the notion of forms of life, the pars destruens of w...

This slim volume by Anna Boncompagni (part of the Cambridge University Press “Elements” series) is certainly (and primarily) a very useful tool for anyone, scholar or student, who wants to engage with the Wittgensteinian notion of form (or forms) of life and the ways in which it has been understood and interpreted over the decades. Here I would like to propose some thoughts that were stimulated by reading Anna’s book, without trying to give them an orderly or even systematic form. (...) They are li... (shrink)

1. Anna Boncompagni has written a thorough, lucid and persuasive account of Wittgenstein’s use of the expression “form of life,” of its historical background and of the debate surrounding the concept. I am very largely in agreement with her argument, in particular I think her central contention that the concept of a form of life has a methodological rather than a substantive role in Wittgenstein’s thinking is insightful and important. I also think she is right in the connected claim that (...) Witt... (shrink)

Ringrazio molto Guido Baggio e Maria Regina Brioschi per aver voluto organizzare e curare questo simposio sulla raccolta di saggi da poco pubblicata dalla casa editrice Carabba, che ha generosamente accolto il progetto del volume. A Michela Bella, Giovanni Maddalena e Marco Stango va la mia sincera gratitudine per l’attenzione puntuale e la cura con cui hanno letto i miei scritti, per i commenti e le questioni sicuramente importanti che hanno presentato e che continueranno ad alimentare le mi...

Il ricco testo di Rosa Maria Calcaterra (2024) ha, tra i molti altri, il pregio di esprimere nel titolo l’interpretazione complessiva che si ritrova poi dettagliata nel corso delle sue quasi quattrocento pagine: “Il progetto comune dei pragmatisti.” Come è noto agli studiosi, che il pragmatismo possa essere considerato o meno un’impresa unitaria è sempre stato tema di disputa sin da quando il nome “pragmatismo” è stato introdotto. Tra gli scettici che rispondono con un no risoluto e i dogmati...

Il percorso di Rosa Calcaterra all’interno della filosofia pragmatista è segnato da un’intuizione principale e originale: nonostante tutte le differenze, il progetto pragmatista è unitario. Gli articoli della raccolta Il progetto comune dei pragmatisti mostrano questa unitarietà, che Calcaterra persegue con tecnica sofisticata, facendo emergere non solo ciò che la parola dice, ma anche ciò che essa tradisce. Prima di immergersi nelle pagine del libro e rivolgere all’autrice alcune domande che...

Nel leggere il recentissimo lavoro di Rosa Calcaterra, una selezione di saggi pubblicati tra il 2003 e il 2016, rivisti o integrati in vista di questa nuova pubblicazione, emerge a chiare note la forza della sua interpretazione dell’unità programmatica dei pragmatisti vecchi e nuovi, o meglio del pragmatismo in quanto “stile di pensiero calibrato su precisi obiettivi teoretico-metodo-logici” (Calcaterra 2024: 7). Anticipatrice rispetto al mainstream odierno che il suo lavoro ha senza dubbio...

Il progetto comune dei pragmatisti (Calcaterra 2024) raccoglie una selezione di saggi del periodo di produzione di Rosa Calcaterra che va dal 2003 al 2016, rivisti o integrati in vista di questa nuova edizione. Il volume offre uno sguardo d’insieme del percorso teoretico di Calcaterra, focalizzandosi sugli autori pragmatisti che più hanno segnato il suo pensiero, segnatamente C.S. Peirce, W. James, J. Dewey, G.H. Mead, C.I. Lewis, H. Putnam e R. Rorty. Come hanno notato Michela Bella, Giovann...

The ontological turn is one of the most debated issues in contemporary anthropology, but what it means for anthropology to become ontological is rarely made clear. Bruno Latour’s suggestion that anthropology should revolve around “modes of existence” is arguably the most robust proposal to date, but the connection between modes of existence and properly anthropological concerns remains obscure. This paper argues that William James is a key figure for getting a better understanding of what ontology and modes of existence mean, (...) and that in particular “The Perception of Reality” – chapter XXI of the second volume of the Principles of Psychology – offers many possibilities for linking a framework centered on human being-in-the-world, such as anthropology, with properly metaphysical concerns. In this paper, the content of “The Perception of Reality” is summarized, and James’s proposal to ground modes of existence on belief is discussed, to show how, once we are clear about what we mean by “ontology,” anthropology can (and should) engage in metaphysical debates in order to make its stakes explicit. The conclusion suggests that James’s grounding of modes of existence on individual belief can compensate for ontological anthropology’s tendency to erase the internal differences of a collective in order to speak of a supposedly unified and homogeneous “cosmology.”. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the “dynamic functionalism” of Dewey’s evolutionary approach to ethics – moral norms emerge to address specific problems but must be constantly readjusted to changing contexts – had its roots in the comparative jurisprudence of Sir Henry Sumner Maine and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. First, I will discuss the rise of the comparative sciences in the nineteenth century, part of the backdrop for the work of Maine and various evolutionary anthropologists. Next, I will examine Maine’s (...) Ancient Law (1861), Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871), and Holmes’s The Common Law (1881), three related books that set up a dichotomy between existing custom and historical progress. Finally, I will show how this dichotomy was reflected in Dewey’s writing and teaching at the University of Michigan in the early 1890s, including “Anthropology and Law” (1893) and several courses in political philosophy. (shrink)

Focusing on early twentieth-century American anthropological discourse, this paper examines diverse epistemological approaches to integrating culture within a naturalistic framework. Leslie Alvin White’s materialistic and energy-based “culturology” will be contrasted with Louis Kroeber’s emergentist perspective. Through a detailed examination of some key epistemic stances, I will illustrate how American cultural anthropology grappled with the dual pressures of scientific naturalism and the epistemic autonomy of the cultural world. The conclusion argues for distinguishing between “naturalized culture” and “naturalization of culture,” suggesting that (...) within this distinction, naturalism reveals not merely as a philosophical stance, but as a historically contingent phenomenon. (shrink)

This article presents a reconstruction of Dewey’s anthropology of interests. In particular, it aims to show the originality of Dewey's choice to place the concept of interest at the center of his understanding of human beings. This is manifested in three distinctive moves made by Dewey: (1) the critique of the reduction of human interests to self-interest; (2) the rejection of the concept of disinterestedness; and (3) the central role of both interests and values in understanding the nature of human (...) action and experience. In the final part of the article, I will identify some problems that the Deweyan theory of interests and values fails to resolve, leaving them open for further discussion. (shrink)

Dans cet article je présente et discute l'ouvrage de Roberta Dreon, Human Landscapes: Contributions to a Pragmatic Anthropology (Suny Press, 2022). Je le fais à partir de deux questions. La première concerne les avantages d'une anthropologie pragmatiste par rapport à des tentatives similaires, inspirées soit de la phénoménologie post-husserlienne (notamment les recherches actuelles sur le caractère incarné de l'esprit et de la cognition), soit de l'herméneutique philosophique. La seconde question porte sur la contribution possible d'une anthropologie philosophique à une critique (...) culturelle, c'est-à-dire à la critique d’erreurs, de confusions, et d’illusions existant dans notre manière moderne de penser, dans les idéaux que nous nous sommes donnés, dans nos habitudes collectives et dans nos “imaginaires sociaux.”. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the origins of Charles W. Morris’ semiotic anthropology through an analysis of his “symbolism,” a theory of mind wherein the latter is completely identified with the production and use of symbols. Developed in the late 1920s, this theory consists in transforming the behaviorist approach by means of a semantic or referential emphasis, i.e. by underlining the importance of the symbol’s object rather than studying only the responses that it elicits. Considering, however, that the experience of (...) reference is of a private or “self-inclusive” nature, Morris’ conception of the symbol entails a number of significant consequences, not only with respect to classical behaviorist views, but also to Mead’s. By founding his conception of the symbol on a self-inclusive basis, Morris questioned the linguistic and social criteria that governed the outlook of his mentor in Mind, Self, and Society. This critical reading thus implies a rehabilitation of animal symbolism, against a number of remarks by Mead indicating his refusal of the existence of symbolization, and so of mind, in the non-human world. Insofar as Morris’ line of thought was heavily influenced by contemporary research in comparative psychology, it is possible to consider that he anticipated recent discussions of Mead’s alleged “anthropocentrism,” and suggested an evolutionary and continuous view of mind through a generalized symbolism that refuses any difference of nature between human and animal mentalities. (shrink)

Pragmatism can be understood as a position that conceives of epistemic and moral claims in the terms of a realization within the framework of our collective forms of activity. In this respect, it on the one hand proves to be compatible with current discussions in anthropology, which take Aristotle and German Idealism as their starting point. At the same time however, the two seem to be in tension with regard to the concept of form presupposed in the neo-Aristotelian debates which (...) seems to block a practice-theoretical reading. This article argues for a reconciliation of the two concepts: The human form of life is realized in collective practices that further define the concept of this form of life. For such a reconcilement, both pragmatist as well as neo-Aristotelian accounts however must partially be re-engineered. (shrink)