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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper, I defend the claim that a philosophical anthropology inspired by the Classical Pragmatists, while being explicitly naturalistic, can avoid biological reductionism and environmental determinism, as well as dogmatic forms of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, insofar as it offers a picture of human nature as historical and contingent, dynamically constituted through interactions with a natural, naturally social, and enculturated environment. Cultural naturalism, I suggest, provides the theoretical framework for a pragmatist anthropology that includes at least two pivotal claims. (...) The first is the idea that continuity is not linear but circular: it implies a kind of feedback action of new organizations of resources and energies on pre-existing forms of organic-environmental interaction. A second claim regards an anti-transcendental stance, emphasizing that the transformation of animal environments into a highly social, habitualized, and enlanguaged environment is entirely contingent, albeit irreversible, and makes a capital difference within the continuity of animal life. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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...

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)

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...

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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...

Drawing on the recent recognition of Du Bois by contemporary anthropologists, this article highlights the anthropological work that Du Bois conducted on Black people and communities in Philadelphia and Atlanta. It also argues that when reading Du Bois with an eye for his anthropological pragmatism, contemporary scholars should not stop at reading Du Bois’ work on Black people. We also should read his analyses of whiteness and white people as components of a critical anthropology of race. Those components include participant (...) observation of white people, interviews of white people, and historical research about white people. Finally, Du Bois’ anthropological pragmatism underscores the centrality of unconscious habits in the operation of racial prejudice, especially unconscious beliefs and practices that assume that whiteness is the rightful measure of humanity. (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...

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)

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)

Philosophie des expériences radicales est un ouvrage riche et ambitieux à de nombreux points de vue. Stéphane Madelrieux montre dans quelle mesure l’expérience constitue l’une des catégories majeures de la philosophie française contemporaine, bien qu’elle ait du mal à être reconnue comme telle, soit du fait de la variété des penseurs l’ayant discutée, soit en raison de sa moindre visibilité par rapport aux catégories qui sont “calquées sur le nom des courants manifestes (vie, existence, struc...

Peirce and Dewey were generally more concerned with the process of scientific activity than purely mathematical work. However, their accounts of knowledge production afford some insights into the epistemology of mathematical postulates, especially definition and axioms. Their rejection of rationalist metaphysics and their emphasis on continuity in inquiry provides the pretext for the pragmatic a priori – hypothetical and operational assumptions whose justification relies on their fruitfulness in the long run. This paper focuses on the application of this idea to (...) the epistemology of definitions and an account of progress in mathematics, although it has broader implications for the study of conceptual change and the function and basis of presuppositions in the sciences. (shrink)

Stéphane Madelrieux nous livre un ouvrage à la fois d’une rare intensité et d’une extrême clarté, agréable à lire et pourtant exigeant, complexe, profond, un ouvrage qui donne à penser. Comme le souhaite l’auteur, son écrit peut être compris comme une perspective interprétative inédite sur la philosophie française du siècle dernier: une lecture qui met en jeu les positions de Bergson, Wahl et Deleuze, et les entremêle, tantôt en les opposant, tantôt en les assimilant, à celles de Bataille, Bl...

Are the humanities harder to know than the sciences? Last year, the historian of science Lorraine Daston wondered why it is that there is “no epistemology of the humanities that is even remotely comparable to the epistemology of the sciences.” Why don’t we have more fleshed-out accounts of the “refined ways of knowing” that define humanistic inquiry? Given that for centuries the practices now grouped together as “the humanities” set the agenda for “what knowledge was worth having” and “how to...

1. Je souhaiterais aborder un certain aspect de Philosophie des expériences radicales pour suggérer un autre point de vue de lecture possible venant compléter la perspective critique qui structure l’ensemble de l’ouvrage de Stéphane Madelrieux, celle d’une remise en cause de l’“empirisme métaphysique” au nom d’un empirisme naturaliste “et non matérialiste” (Madelrieux 2022: 372). Il peut être utile de revenir à la question de la délimitation du contexte français de réception de certains aspec...

This paper examines the relationship between Arthur Fine’s “Natural Ontological Attitude” and the work of neo-pragmatists, particularly Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. I argue that many of the problems that face Fine’s account can be seen as a direct result of his failure to employ certain key pragmatist insights concerning the nature and status of the realism-antirealism issue. Consequently, I suggest that we should cease to think of Fine as representative of mainstream attempts to dispense with the realism-antirealism issue and (...) instead view NOA as an unfortunate mixture of opposed philosophical traditions. (shrink)

This paper explores Thomas Kuhn’s mature conception of incommensurable theories as collective structured lexicons that are not mutually translatable. As will be argued, his view on this issue can profitably be approached in the light of the broad pragmatist attitude that one finds at the core of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language, which can also consistently be ascribed to Kuhn.

Pragmatism was born and has grown up in the shadow of the extraordinary success of modern science, and has had an ambivalent relationship with it since its origin. Each of the major founding pragmatists (Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey) was at some time during their career directly engaged with experimental science. All three wrote about the nature of scientific inquiry and the status of scientific theories, and reflected on the ways in which the methods of science differ from (...) or... (shrink)

This article is part of a broader study dedicated to Pragmatism in Bulgaria and researches the relationship between science, pragmatism and religion as it is presented in the works of three Bulgarian authors in the period 1902-1932, during the early introduction of pragmatism. The first one of them, Georgi Minev, unleashes an emotional critique against science, fully supports James’s notions on religion and presents pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine destined to make the world a better place for everybody (1910). Asen (...) Zlatarov, a chemist, biologist, philosopher and a true defender of science, acknowledges the value of pragmatism but also sees in some of its ideas a direct threat towards the scientific foundations of the contemporary world (1930). Ivan Sarailiev, the author of “Pragmatism. A contribution towards history of contemporary philosophy,” delivers a public lecture on the overcoming of the conflict between science and religion (1931). (shrink)

Any attempt to understand the meaning of Charles Sanders Peirce’s philosophy must necessarily involve the study of his maxim of pragmatism, first formulated in 1878. The maxim is the basis for Peirce’s pragmatism, and its development is a fundamental thread that allows the overall meaning of his system to be grasped. Furthermore, the maxim cannot be separated from the entire body of Peirce’s speculations. In his 2020 paper, Jon Alan Schmidt compiled a rich chronological list of passages that show how (...) Peirce reworked the maxim. We intend to supplement Schmidt’s paper with an analysis that examines the various stages of the maxim’s theoretical development in a chronological order. Furthermore, we will propose a contextualisation of the intrinsic meaning of the maxim and its use within Peirce’s philosophical system. (shrink)

Je voudrais commencer par exprimer ma reconnaissance envers Rossella Fabbrichesi, Claude Gautier et Philippe Sabot. Non seulement ils ont pris le temps et la peine de lire et commenter mon livre, mais, chacun à leur manière, ils ont compté dans le parcours intellectuel qui y a mené. Claude Gautier m’a généreusement accompagné depuis quinze ans dans toutes mes aventures pragmatistes, jusque dans cette exploration exotique de la philosophie française d’un point de vue états-unien. Tout pragmati...

I am deeply grateful to Roberto Gronda, the organizer of this book symposium, and Nicholas Gaskill, Kathleen Wallace, and Tullio Viola – the three reviewers of my book, Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (Pihlström 2022) – for their highly perceptive comments, which I can only inadequately address in these responses. All three seem to generally sympathize with my project while making a number of truly important critical remarks. I will, of course, focus on the latter, trying to...

On connaît le travail important consacré depuis plusieurs années par Stéphane Madelrieux à la tradition de pensée relevant du pragmatisme. Spécialiste reconnu de James et de Dewey, il a contribué par ses traductions, ses éditions critiques et un grand nombre de ses publications, à les imposer comme des ressources majeures de la réflexion philosophique contemporaine, y compris en France où la pensée pragmatiste anglo-saxonne a pu avoir du mal à bénéficier d’une reconnaissance à la hauteur de s...

The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual map of Rorty’s post-philosophical endeavor. This endeavor serves the purpose of reevaluating and rethinking the West as a project specific to philosophy, enabling a view of the West from a different perspective – as a non-philosophical project through which an open liberal and post-philosophical culture are developed. Part one of the paper focuses on the problem of truth in traditional philosophy and shows how Rorty observes the challenges that philosophy faces (...) as it falls into the trap of searching for the truth. Rorty asserts that he and the pragmatists simply do not offer any “theory of truth”; instead, he employs the formulation “theory about truth.” Furthermore, the paper will examine the rhetorical strategies and the anti-essentialist redescription of liberalism. Instead of a conclusion, the paper focuses on universal irony in the light of post-philosophical laughter, which is often oversimplified as a callous reaction of cynical mirth, which can be swiftly repudiated when considering its broad context of the meaning that irony and laughter would hold in Rorty’s liberal society. (shrink)

Charles Peirce is widely credited as the originator of semiotics, or the general theory of signs, and recognized as the founder of American pragmatism, albeit in that peculiar kind Peirce himself went on to distinguish as “pragmaticism.” The semiotic and pragmatist strands in Peirce’s thought come together in an appraisal of scientific diagrammatic representations. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim entails that the consequences of a sign inform our entire conception of the sign, while his most considered semiotic system entails that a complex (...) sign partakes of iconic, indexical, and symbolic aspects. We illustrate Peirce’s insights by means of the celebrated Feynman Diagrams in Quantum Electrodynamics. We argue that Peirce’s late, post-1903, semiotics provides an adequate characterization of such “hypoicons,” and his pragmatic maxim explains how they can motivate and drive inquiry. We conclude that Peirce’s pragmatic approach to scientific diagrams remains a viable position that skillfully avoids dogmatic scientism and nihilistic skepticism alike. (shrink)

This paper offers a pragmatist interpretation of Ian Hacking’s version of entity realism, and shows that such an interpretation enables the view to withstand a number of objections. Specifically, the paper shows Hacking’s rejection of a representationalist epistemology, which realist critics unjustifiably attribute to him, and shows his endorsement of a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology instead. If the interpretation is correct, the objections (a) that entity manipulation is theory-laden, (b) that the concept of home truths cannot do the work Hacking envisioned, (...) (c) that entity realism is a form of inference to the best explanation (IBE), (d) that some real entities aren’t manipulable, and (e) that some non-real entities are manipulable, lose much of their force. Objections (a), (b), and (c) rest on a metaepistemological misunderstanding, while objections (d) and (e) are addressed with (pragmatist) clarifications. This paper also offers a novel pragmatist argument for entity realism: the argument from technology. The argument from technology maintains that the reality of the entities that constitute our technologies is a precondition for those technologies’ meaningful use. In this case, entity realism remains a more viable perspective on science than is commonly acknowledged. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. (...) In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

We articulate a conception of resilience via allostasis and the free energy principle to augment Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s conception of antifragility. Creative resilience is resilience 3.0, after robustness (1.0) and antifragility (2.0), because creative resilience is the deliberate effort to construct ecological niches toward a more caring and thus more viable world for more people – what Dewey proffered as the moral ideal of creative democracy. Viability is understood as the healthy tension between stability and precarity. Viability is related to (...) regulatory mechanisms of homeostasis and allostasis. Along with discussion of the free energy principle, we situate these processes of the internal milieu within the external milieu. Ecological niche construction and ecological psychological affordances are related to human practices as means of generating culture. Culture is both a product and producer of the process of valuation, which originates in evolution but is further developed by the free energy principle and social allostasis. The collective languishing exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic can be ameliorated through creative resilience so conceived as social allostasis writ large. (shrink)

Sami Pihlström’s latest book (Pihlström 2022) deserves praise for directing our attention to a long-neglected field of study. In laying out the foundations of a new philosophy of the humanities, he rekindles a discussion that had its finest hour in the early twentieth century, particularly within neo-Kantian and hermeneutic philosophy. In doing so from a pragmatist angle, he embraces the spirit of John Dewey’s writings on culture and criticism, along with the more recent contributions of Mort...

In Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (Pihlström 2022) Sami Pihlström argues that the humanities are truth-aiming and knowledge-producing. Reductive ontological and narrow epistemological views, and “post-truth” views in the humanities, have devalued their cognitive contributions as knowledge-producing research programs. Pihlström argues that a pragmatic approach to knowledge in a Peircean vein suggests a broader ontological and epistemological framework that avoids the Scylla a...

Brandom, in his recent Spirit of Trust, develops a novel reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a theory of objective idealism. In this paper, I aim to defend this interesting blend of concept realism and idealism against some potential objections by revising Brandom’s account of conceptuality based on Hegel’s logical concept of life as constitutive of objective determinations. In the first section, I briefly reconstruct the main tenets of Brandom’s objective idealism and recount its achievements. In the second section, (...) I point out some major potential issues. First, Brandom’s commitment to a semantic holism in the context of scientific laws is likely to have reductionist or scientifically untenable implications. Second, Brandom seems to ignore Hegel’s own definition of objective idealism based on the concept of life – the culmination of his theory of conceptuality in his logic. I claim that Hegel not only has a strong emergentist commitment to the concept of life, but also argues that life is the ground of logical determinations. The last section suggests that a revision of Brandom’s framework based on a constitutive category of life can solve the problems outlined in section two. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. (...) In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)