Abstract

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "pragmatists" have gone "beyond realism and idealism," and turned away from traditional solutions to the traditional problems of what objects are, where they are located , and how they are represented in the minds that have true knowledge of them. They have done this by turning away from the traditional problems themselves: they more-or-less ceased worrying about "objects," and offered instead a new way of accounting for truth and knowledge in terms of the usefulness of holding various beliefs. ;Realists accuse pragmatists of idealism: "usefulness" seems to them a hopelessly subjective thing on which to base an understanding of truth. Idealists and phenomenalists recognize that it might be "useful" to suppose the existence of things beyond our experience and knowledge, and they therefore think of pragmatism as having at least some undigested realistic parts. However, William James does in fact succeed in avoiding both realism and idealism in much the same ways that both Friedrich Nietzsche and the ancient skeptic Sextus Empiricus do: he refuses to commit himself either to the reality or the ideality of the things around him, and he asserts that the really important philosophical questions can be addressed without any such theoretical commitments. According to Nietzsche, Sextus, and James, the really important problems are practical in nature--they basically amount to the questions, "What beliefs ought I to adopt?" and "How should I decide this?"--and they can be solved without any theory of what or where things are. Moreover, these practical questions are answered by Nietzsche, Sextus, and James in much the same way, with reference to what seems to be the case and what actions we should take when things seem a certain way. This similarity is obscured by James's insistence that he, unlike the skeptic, believes in truth, or believes that there is a final, humanly attainable truth; nevertheless, James's beliefs and his conception of final truth are compatible with Sextus's global skepticism. ;James's view bears on political questions, and can in fact be understood as the philosophical analogue of what is known in politics as "realism" or "pragmatism;" but James's pragmatism is not a political foundationalism, and in fact is an antidote to such views