Pragmatism and Vagueness

Pragmatism and Vagueness PDF Author: Claudine Tiercelin
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869772349
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
For most early pragmatists, including the founder C. S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

Pragmatism and Vagueness

Pragmatism and Vagueness PDF Author: Claudine Tiercelin
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869772349
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
For most early pragmatists, including the founder C. S. Peirce and L. Wittgenstein, vagueness was a real and universal principle and not a mere defect of our knowledge or thought. This volume begins by exploring this pragmatist notion of vagueness and the way it was tied to their basic opposition to various kinds of reductionism and nominalism. It then develops towards an analysis of Peirce’s original and wide views on vagueness, as seen through the angles of logic, semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics. In the final part of this book, the reader is presented with a case for the contemporary relevance of such a realistic pragmaticism for the ongoing debate on semantic, epistemic and ontic vagueness.

What Pragmatism Was

What Pragmatism Was PDF Author: F. Thomas Burke
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009545
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
F. Thomas Burke examines the writings of William James and Charles S. Peirce to determine how the original "maxim of pragmatism" was understood differently by these two earliest pragmatists. Burke reconciles these differences by casting pragmatism as a philosophical stance that endorses distinctive conceptions of belief and meaning. In particular, a pragmatist conception of meaning should be understood as both inferentialist and operationalist in character. Burke unravels a complex early history of this philosophical tradition, discusses contemporary conceptions of pragmatism found in current US political discourse, and explores what this quintessentially American philosophy means today.

Performance/Art

Performance/Art PDF Author: Shaun Gallagher
Publisher: Mimesis
ISBN: 8869773817
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Performance/Art explores the phenomenology of skilled performance, ranging from athletics to the performing arts, including music, dance and acting. Gallagher reviews a variety of studies concerning different degrees of mindful awareness operative in performance, and builds on the concept of a meshed architecture, suggesting ways to make it more complex and dynamic. He draws on ideas from enactivist embodied cognition about how different types of movement can be meaningful and intelligent and can scaffold learning and problem solving. He also explicates the notion of an empathic mindfulness in performance and develops the idea of a double attunement to explain aesthetic experience in performance, distinguishing the latter from aesthetic experience in the observer/audience perspective.

Cambridge Pragmatism

Cambridge Pragmatism PDF Author: Cheryl Misak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191020044
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more (Peirce) and less (James) objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James's theory, and that pragmatism has never fully recovered. An alternative, and underappreciated, story is told here. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid-1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with that position, Ramsey would not have like what he saw.

Poetry and Pragmatism

Poetry and Pragmatism PDF Author: Richard Poirier
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674679900
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Richard Poirier, one of America's most eminent critics, reveals in this book the creative but mostly hidden alliance between American pragmatism and American poetry. He brilliantly traces pragmatism as a philosophical and literary practice grounded in a linguistic skepticism that runs from Emerson and William James to the work of Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, and on to the cultural debates of today. More powerfully than ever before, Poirier shows that pragmatism had its start in Emerson, the great example to all his successors of how it is possible to redeem even as you set out to change the literature of the past. Poirier demonstrates that Emerson--and later William James--were essentially philosophers of language, and that it is language that embodies our cultural past, an inheritance to be struggled with, and transformed, before being handed on to future generations. He maintains that in Emersonian pragmatist writing, any loss--personal or cultural--gives way to a quest for what he calls "superfluousness," a kind of rhetorical excess by which powerfully creative individuals try to elude deprivation and stasis. In a wide-ranging meditation on what James called "the vague," Poirier extols the authentic voice of individualism, which, he argues, is tentative and casual rather than aggressive and dogmatic. The concluding chapters describe the possibilities for criticism created by this radically different understanding of reading and writing, which are nothing less than a reinvention of literary tradition itself. Poirier's discovery of this tradition illuminates the work of many of the most important figures in American philosophy and poetry. His reanimation of pragmatism also calls for a redirection of contemporary criticism, so that readers inside as well as outside the academy can begin to respond to poetic language as the source of meaning, not to meaning as the source of language.

Pragmatism as Transition

Pragmatism as Transition PDF Author: Colin Koopman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231520190
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools.

Pragmatism as a Way of Life

Pragmatism as a Way of Life PDF Author: Hilary Putnam
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979222
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Throughout his diverse and highly influential career, Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. As a pragmatist he treated philosophical “positions” as experiments in deliberate living. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality. In this new collection, he and Ruth Anna Putnam argue that key elements of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey provide a framework for the most progressive and forward-looking forms of philosophy in contemporary thought. The Putnams present a compelling defense of the radical originality of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey and their usefulness in confronting the urgent social, political, and moral problems of the twenty-first century. Pragmatism as a Way of Life brings together almost all of the Putnams’ pragmatist writings—essays they wrote as individuals and as coauthors. The pragmatism they endorse, though respectful of the sciences, is an open experience-based philosophy of our everyday lives that trenchantly criticizes the fact/value dualism running through contemporary culture. Hilary Putnam argues that all facts are dependent on cognitive values, while Ruth Anna Putnam turns the problem around, illuminating the factual basis of moral principles. Together, they offer a shared vision which, in Hilary’s words, “could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond.”

Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking PDF Author: William James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pragmatism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description


Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking

Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking PDF Author: William James
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is a philosophical work by William James. James argues for the usefulness of practical, pragmatic approaches to problems rather than relying solely on theoretical or abstract ideas, suggesting that truth is constantly evolving and is determined by practical consequences rather than abstract reasoning.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism PDF Author: William James
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Over the course of eight lectures originally delivered during the winter of 1906 and 1907 William James describes and defends the theory of pragmatism. Expanding on the earlier works of John Dewey and F. C. S. Schiller, James begins by presenting two competing views of the universe. The “rational” view treats everything as being derived from an absolute truth. Typically this view is based on religious grounds, and the theories need not bear any relation to the imperfect world in which we live. James contends that this is not a useful world view, as it is not applicable to our everyday lives. On the other hand, the “empirical” view considers as admissible only facts that have been materially verified. This view, while practical and useful, neglects anything that cannot be measured. It is fatalistic, and often pessimistic, reducing mankind to nothing more than an advanced animal. James describes pragmatism as a middle-ground between these two views. Under a pragmatic approach, statements are evaluated based on their practical effects. Based on this criterion, empirical facts are valuable, as they have obvious connections to everyday concerns. However, religion, or other more abstract principles, can also be useful, as they can be applied to guide decision-making in the common case where material evidence or direct knowledge is lacking. After defining pragmatism, James applies it to metaphysical problems, including the concepts of truth, common sense, and free will versus determinism. Pragmatism was and remains an important philosophy. In addition to Schiller and Dewey, who applied a pragmatic approach to education and participatory democracy, many prominent thinkers have been influenced by pragmatism, including the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.