In this comprehensive and critical study of James’s pragmatism, Ellen Kappy Suckiel analyzes his theories and establishes their value as a technical and systematic philosophy. Examining in detail James’s philosophical methodology and psychology, and his theories of meaning, truth, and reality, she demonstrates both the subtleties and limitations of his pragmatic philosophy. With extensive use of both primary and secondary sources throughout, she concludes her study with an analysis of James’s ethical theory and his controversial proposals concerning (...) “the will to believe.”. (shrink)

Taking the pragmatic insistence on the primacy of practice seriously, this book argues for the fruitfulness of a pragmatic philosophy of religion by bringing it to bear on a number of classical topics within the philosophy of religion: miracles, religious diversity, and what it is to be religiously mistaken.

This book is about meaning - not the meaning of certain concepts such as the meaning of life or the meaning of freedom but about what it means for linguistic expressions to mean something. It is also a book about meaning for humans. The qualification 'human meaning' is not yet common in linguistics book titles but it is increasingly important to add it. We are already experiencing fundamental differences in how, and what kind of, meaning is approached in computational linguistics (...) and computer science in general on the one hand, and in philosophy of language or sociopragmatics on the other. (shrink)

This is an anthology with a thesis. For Mrs. Rorty is not only concerned to present us with selections from the "classical" American pragmatists, but to show us how pragmatic themes pervade many aspects of contemporary philosophy. Part One contains ample selections from Peirce, James and Dewey. Part Two consists of some of the criticisms of pragmatism by Russell, Moore and Lovejoy. Part Three is the most interesting and original section. By judiciously selecting papers from a variety of (...) contemporary philosophers, many of whom would probably not think of themselves as pragmatists she shows us how alive pragmatic philosophy is today. There is an excellent bibliography and fine short introductions. Altogether the anthology presents an imaginative perspective on pragmatic philosophy.—R. J. B. (shrink)

Since the Collected Papers of C S Peirce have been published at Harvard, the constructive originality of this major American philosopher is being unravelled from the disjointed threads of his mainly logical papers. The elusive roots of his metaphysic lie in his insistence upon the empirical origin and pragmatic application in purposive action of the content of ideas and also in the attempt to deduce their supreme categories in strict logical system. Professor Thompson’s penetrating study of 1953 claims to (...) expound the essential propaedeutic to the determination of Peirce’s place in the history of thought and clearly shows that ‘quite apart from the question of influence, Peirce’s meaning at many points is most easily elucidated by comparison with Kant’. (shrink)

In this book the author presents a development of James's philosophy as a unified world view. The opening chapter portrays James's teleological conception of human nature and his methodological commitment to the principle of experience as the main pillars of his pragmatism, and sketches the way his pragmatism informs various aspects of his philosophy. The succeeding chapters develop these basic features in some detail and examine in turn each of the aspects of James's position which they are held (...) to inform. (shrink)

Should philosophy have public import? Most of us would like to think that it does or should? But what exactly does that mean. What form should the public import of philosophy take? Andrew Light gives us his own account of what it is for philosophy to have pragmatic value in areas such as environmental ethics. He compares and contrasts his views with those of others and elaborates on what it is for a philosophy to be (...) pragmatic and have a public face, as he discusses some of the current debates in environmental ethics and several ideas of the key players in the fi eld. Light argues that there is a connection between environmental ethics and serving the public interest in one’s community. This public role can take the form of making policy recommendations, serving on boards, and participation in public service. Light then gives us a map of plausible steps to take in motivating the pragmatic or public aspects of one’s philosophy. (shrink)

This is the second of two voumes designed to document a trend in Norwegian philosophy away from the empirical semantics represented by Arne Naess towards a more pragmatic and transcendental perspective. A number of the contributed essays examine the controversy between Wittgenstein and the philosophies of Habermas and Apel.

An epistemology mainly oriented at a philosophical discussion of natural sciences and technology is sketched out on the basis of the author’s “methodological scheme-interpretationism” combining a realistic and a perspectival pragmatic approach. - In the main part, 12 characteristic features of the New Technologies are presented and discussed as, e.g., operationalization, computerization, models and modularity, virtuality and artificiality, interdisciplinary interaction, comprehensive and complex systems, telematization and remote control, robotics and AI technology and automatization as well as “socio-eco-techno-systems”, technology-driven globalization (...) and the respective problems of individual and social responsibility. - Also, actual trends are listed and future tasks for the international ecological cooperation of states, UN and UNESCO bodies under urgent guidelines of humanitarian values and “practical/concrete humanity” are recommended. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the practical question of how the ideas of John Dewey can contribute to improved intercultural communication theory and practice, especially to training. The question is answered in four parts. The first part refers to the presumed superiority of sensitivity to difference as opposed to similarity in intercultural communication. The second part suggests that Dewey’s duality of potentiality and interaction can be carried over to the duality of competence and performance. The third part highlights the use of (...) the generic concepts of pattern and habit to better understand culture as a practical experience. The final part advocates a closer look at the idea and experience of rhythm as an epistemological alternative to subject vs object. The author relies on his experience as a trainer and a teacher of Intercultural Communication and proceeds down an interdisciplinary path, especially attempting to set up a dialogue with biology, systems and the arts. (shrink)

Perhaps the best way to understand this book is to see it as the first installment on a larger project. Woell’s ultimate goal is to write a pragmatic philosophy of religion, but this work is not it. This preliminary project attempts to clear the way for the larger project by reclaiming pragmatism in such a way that it can provide an adequate framework for doing the philosophy of religion. In other words, this is a book about pragmatism (...) that serves as a “prolegomena to a pragmatic philosophy of religion”. In this sense, the title is somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, it is meticulously argued and stands independently as an important contribution to our understanding of pragmatism. Why a.. (shrink)

Recovers classical pragmatism from recent deconstructive interpretations.

Is pragmatism, as focused on a future considered producible by our finite actions, ill equipped to analyze religion (or “Erlösungswissen”, as Max Scheler said); is it unable, as Stanley Cavell writes, to sufficiently explore “skepticism” and negativity? This paper argues that William James succeeds in pragmatically re-thematizing “Erlösungswissen”, and that Josiah Royce—who develops a post-pragmatic, pragmaticist concept of; religion—carefully re-investigates “negativity”, in a Peirce-inspired mode, by focusing on the “mission of sorrow”.

Hasok Chang’s latest book is pragmatist in its focus on practice, but also in linking evaluation of science and its practices to the aims of those practices. Al.

A fully semiotic perspective on living and learning draws on poststructuralism in seeing meaning and learning as deferred, and avoids mind-body substance dualism by means of collapsing the signal-sign distinction. This article explores the potential for, and constraints on the 'sign' as a meaningful unit of analysis for universal application among the human sciences. It compares and contrasts this fully semiotic approach with the educational philosophy of John Dewey, concluding that if Dewey had problematized the signal-sign distinction, his legacy (...) for education might have significantly different. (shrink)

This paper analyzes some issues derived from the social turn in the philosophy of science. The point of departure is the transformation of science into technoscience. If technoscience is conceived of as a system of human actions, then it requires the consideration of both epistemological and methodological parameters and the analysis of ethical, political, economic, and social aspects. This involves the necessity of assessing these parameters as a whole, by using a broad notion of value, namely, a pragmatic (...) notion of value. Accordingly, value will henceforth be a "pattern-guideline of solving problems." It leads to considering the philosophy of science as an axiology of technoscience. The following issues are developed: i) science as a value-laden enterprise; ii) value assessment as a task in the philosophy of science, which means justifying some special methodologies of assessment; iii) the proposal of specific criteria for establishing social policies of science and technology. (shrink)

_Grounds of Pragmatic Realism_ shows Hegel is a major epistemologist, who disentangled Kant’s critique of judgment, across the Critical corpus, from transcendental idealism, and augmented its enormous evaluative and justificatory significance for commonsense knowledge, the natural sciences and freedom of action.

None of Peirce's most recent interpreters fall clearly into only one of these classes. All are expositors, critics, and innovators. Yet their emphases differ, and the classification serves to highlight them. W. B. Gallie, for instance, is mainly interested in introducing the general reader to the broadest line of Peirce's thought on pragmatism. He does this appreciatively, with skillful fluency. Yet he also advances a critical thesis about the meanings Peirce gave to "pragmatism," and he tests the compatibility of Peirce's (...) metaphysical and logical writings with suggestive results. Manley Thompson's book has, on the other hand, a more formal cast throughout. It is "offered as an essential propaedeutic to the determination of Peirce's place in the history of ideas". With closest care it traces the development of Peirce's pragmatic philosophy, setting out an ordered, definitive statement of what Peirce said, driving finally to a brief evaluation of the whole philosophy in which the pragmatic maxim is a principle. Lastly, the Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce contains essays of all three emphases: there are biographical, historical, and elucidating essays; there are critical ones that quibble to distraction and critical ones that excite to construction; and finally, there are a few that go through Peirce to continue inquiry on topics in ethics, logic, and metaphysics. (shrink)

This volume deals with the relation between pragmatics and the philosophy of mind.

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest (...) of philosophers. Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)