Pragmatism as Transition

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

Get Book Here

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 Transition

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

Get Book Here

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.

The Poetics of Transition

The Poetics of Transition PDF Author: Jonathan Levin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Considers the work of American pragmatists and of three major literary modernists, and reveals how their work foregrounds William James's concept of transitional consciousness.

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940

Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 PDF Author: James Livingston
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
The rise of corporate capitalism was a cultural revolution as well as an economic event, according to James Livingston. That revolution resides, he argues, in the fundamental reconstruction of selfhood, or subjectivity, that attends the advent of an 'age of surplus' under corporate auspices. From this standpoint, consumer culture represents a transition to a society in which identities as well as incomes are not necessarily derived from the possession of productive labor or property. From the same standpoint, pragmatism and literary naturalism become ways of accommodating the new forms of solidarity and subjectivity enabled by the emergence of corporate capitalism. So conceived, they become ways of articulating alternatives to modern, possessive individualism. Livingston argues accordingly that the flight from pragmatism led by Lewis Mumford was an attempt to refurbish a romantic version of modern, possessive individualism. This attempt still shapes our reading of pragmatism, Livingston claims, and will continue to do so until we understand that William James was not merely a well-meaning middleman between Charles Peirce and John Dewey and that James's pragmatism was both a working model of postmodern subjectivity and a novel critique of capitalism.

The New Pragmatist Sociology

The New Pragmatist Sociology PDF Author: Neil L. Gross
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555237
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 793

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today. In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism. Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.

Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy

Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy PDF Author: Gabriele Gava
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317648315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philosophers working within the pragmatist tradition have pictured their relation to Kant and Kantianism in very diverse terms: some have presented their work as an appropriation and development of Kantian ideas, some have argued that pragmatism is an approach in complete opposition to Kant. This collection investigates the relationship between pragmatism, Kant, and current Kantian approaches to transcendental arguments in a detailed and original way. Chapters highlight pragmatist aspects of Kant’s thought and trace the influence of Kant on the work of pragmatists and neo-pragmatists, engaging with the work of Peirce, James, Lewis, Sellars, Rorty, and Brandom, among others. They also consider to what extent contemporary approaches to transcendental arguments are compatible with a pragmatist standpoint. The book includes contributions from renowned authors working on Kant, pragmatism and contemporary Kantian approaches to philosophy, and provides an authoritative and original perspective on the relationship between pragmatism and Kantianism.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon PDF Author: Allen Mendenhall
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611487927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., helps us see the law through an Emersonian lens by the way in which he wrote his judicial dissents. Holmes’s literary style mimics and enacts two characteristics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought: “superfluity” and the “poetics of transition,” concepts ascribed to Emerson and developed by literary critic Richard Poirier. Using this aesthetic style borrowed from Emerson and carried out by later pragmatists, Holmes not only made it more likely that his dissents would remain alive for future judges or justices (because how they were written was itself memorable, whatever the value of their content), but also shaped our understanding of dissents and, in this, our understanding of law. By opening constitutional precedent to potential change, Holmes’s dissents made room for future thought, moving our understanding of legal concepts in a more pragmatic direction and away from formalistic understandings of law. Included in this new understanding is the idea that the “canon” of judicial cases involves oppositional positions that must be sustained if the law is to serve pragmatic purposes. This process of precedent-making in a common-law system resembles the construction of the literary canon as it is conceived by Harold Bloom and Richard Posner.

Revolutionary Totalitarianism, Pragmatic Socialism, Transition

Revolutionary Totalitarianism, Pragmatic Socialism, Transition PDF Author: Gorana Ognjenović
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137597437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book, the first of two volumes, challenges decades of superficial and selective rhetoric about Tito’s Yugoslavia. The essays explore some of the gaps in the existing descriptions of the country that have existed for decades. Contributors cover a range of topics including the abolition of the multi-party system, nonalignment, and the 1968 reinforcing position among others.

Reconstructing Individualism

Reconstructing Individualism PDF Author: James M. Albrecht
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823242110
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Get Book Here

Book Description
America has a love–hate relationship with individualism. In Reconstructing Individualism, James Albrecht argues that our conceptions of individualism have remained trapped within the assumptions of classic liberalism. He traces an alternative genealogy of individualist ethics in four major American thinkers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, John Dewey, and Ralph Ellison. These writers’ shared commitments to pluralism (metaphysical and cultural), experimentalism, and a melioristic stance toward value and reform led them to describe the self as inherently relational. Accordingly, they articulate models of selfhood that are socially engaged and ethically responsible, and they argue that a reconceived—or, in Dewey’s term, “reconstructed”—individualism is not merely compatible with but necessary to democratic community. Conceiving selfhood and community as interrelated processes, they call for an ongoing reform of social conditions so as to educate and liberate individuality, and, conversely, they affirm the essential role individuality plays in vitalizing communal efforts at reform.

Open Science: the Very Idea

Open Science: the Very Idea PDF Author: Frank Miedema
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9402421157
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
This open access book provides a broad context for the understanding of current problems of science and of the different movements aiming to improve the societal impact of science and research. The author offers insights with regard to ideas, old and new, about science, and their historical origins in philosophy and sociology of science, which is of interest to a broad readership. The book shows that scientifically grounded knowledge is required and helpful in understanding intellectual and political positions in various discussions on the grand challenges of our time and how science makes impact on society. The book reveals why interventions that look good or even obvious, are often met with resistance and are hard to realize in practice. Based on a thorough analysis, as well as personal experiences in aids research, university administration and as a science observer, the author provides - while being totally open regarding science's limitations- a realistic narrative about how research is conducted, and how reliable ‘objective’ knowledge is produced. His idea of science, which draws heavily on American pragmatism, fits in with the global Open Science movement. It is argued that Open Science is a truly and historically unique movement in that it translates the analysis of the problems of science into major institutional actions of system change in order to improve academic culture and the impact of science, engaging all actors in the field of science and academia.

Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism

Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism PDF Author: Mark David Wood
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252025785
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Wood evaluates the political consequences of a shift in West's position from an earlier, revolutionary socialist stance to a later, progressive reformist one. Wood shows how West's subsequent reworking of Marxism supports his transition from a socialist to a progressivist politics."--BOOK JACKET.