In response to challenges to moral philosophy presented by other disciplines and facing a diversity of approaches to the foundation and focus of morality, this paper argues for a pluralist meta-ethics that is methodologically hierarchical and guided by the principle of subsidiarity. Inspired by Deweyan pragmatism, this novel and original application of the subsidiarity principle and the related methodological

John Dewey relates ethics in general with the mode of inquiry. Against the mainstream ethics and moral theories, Dewey reconstructed morality in light of empirical science, providing the necessary steps of pragmatic ethical investigations. In this study, I have revisited Dewey’s ethical inquiry and recent developments of the methods of pragmatist bioethics. Using this approach in ethics, I have examined

This article addresses the need for adaptive ethical analysis within machine learning that accounts for emerging problems concerning social bias and generative adversarial networks (gan s). I use John Dewey’s criticisms of the reflex arc concept in psychology as a basis for understanding how these problems stem from human-gan interaction. By combining Dewey’s criticisms with Donna Haraway’s idea of

This essay responds to John McDermott’s diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: “[B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language.” I present a new celebratory language by reading William James’s description of saintliness in Varieties of Religious Experience. James gives me the resources to naturalize

Rorty holds that it is possible to defend a liberal democratic policy without having to substantiate it according to universal criteria linked to corresponding notions of truth, instead, he affirms that this democratic policy can be founded on a notion of truth narrowly linked to justification. Following this idea one would expect Rorty to take a position committed to pluralism understood in a strong

Charles Sanders Peirce offers a number of arguments against the rational application of theory to morality, suggesting instead that morality should be grounded in instinct. Peirce maintains that we currently lack the scientific knowledge that would justify a rational structuring of morality. This being the case, philosophically generated moralities cannot be otherwise than dogmatic and dangerous. In

In John Dewey’s logical theory, qualities or qualitative relations account for the capacity to distinguish and associate the objects of reflective thought; they are antecedent to reflective analysis and necessary for coherent processes of inquiry. In Dewey’s writings that are specifically “metaphysical” in orientation, he is much more vague about the function of qualities, but does call them “generic

Mental episodes are typically associated with subjective ownership and first-person authority. My belief that an apple is red is had by me; it is mine and I’m in a privileged position to know it. Your experience of red is had by you; it is yours and you are in a privileged position to know it. The two assumptions are that mental events are had by individuals to whom they occur, and that owners are

The article highlights George Herbert Mead’s and Wilfrid Sellars’ reliance on a behaviourally-grounded conception of meaning as strictly related to the possibility of distinguishing mental from non-mental phenomena as both related to the semantic dimension. Mead’s position is in fact akin to Wilfrid Sellars’ argument that the concepts of ‘inner events’ are essentially inter-subjective. Thoughts are

In this article, I suggest that the recently emerged perspective of environmental pragmatism encompasses self-contradicting principles. For many years, it was deemed impossible for environmental ethics to formulate justified environmental policy. Environmental pragmatism, and its primary scholar Bryan G. Norton, has promoted a new outlook in that debate by proposing an ideal methodology based upon

The paper focuses on the pragmatist image of humanity based on a re-reading of the philosophical “manifesto” of Wilfrid in which he became entangled in the dichotomy between “scientific” and “manifest” images. The key to solving this problem, according to the author, is the new pragmatist understanding of science as a cultural practice, which provide us with a new framework for transcending this dichotomy

This article draws on the past and present work of the Society of Philosophers in America, Inc. (sophia) to consider eight challenges for growing communities of philosophical conversation in ways that pragmatism encourages and calls for, in terms of engaged public philosophy. The essay then proposes ways of addressing the eight challenges with solutions or outlooks for overcoming or diminishing obstacles

This article introduces the conflictual theory of law as a new way of understanding laws as struggles over meaning, in which actors create and circulate social knowledge to justify their interpretation of rights. The theory addresses law-production processes and underlying knowledge/power constructs, for example, in legislative deliberations and interactions between politicians and the media. It shares

This article explores the significance of Hegel’s aesthetic lectures for Dewey’s approach to the arts. Although over the last two decades some brilliant studies have been published on the “permanent deposit” of Hegel in Dewey’s mature thought, the aesthetic dimension of Dewey’s engagement with Hegel’s heritage has not yet been investigated. This inquiry will be developed on a theoretical level as well

Arguments from knowability have largely been concerned with cases for and against realism, or truth as an epistemic vs. non-epistemic concept. This article proposes bringing Peirce’s pragmaticism, called here ‘action-first’ epistemology, to bear on the issue. It is shown that a notion weaker than knowability, namely conjecturability, is epistemologically a better-suited notion to describe an essential

A pragmatist philosopher of history asks what practical difference it makes for this or that historical “fact” to be taken as “useful and meaningful,” and then consider that the principal motivation behind what is recorded, what continues to circulate, and to what extent, in the annals of historical texts. Part of the methodology of pragmatism is derived from history, since usefulness is attested over

In this essay, I will respond to the several charges laid at my feet by Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin engaged in their response entitled “Pragmatism and ‘Existential’ Pluralism: A Response to Hackett” (2018) about my article that also appeared in Contemporary Pragmatism entitled “Why James Can Be an Existential Pluralist” (2017). At the heart of my response lies a concern with what I call the principle

This essay isolates and critically assesses the motivation behind the current backlash against the broadly culturalist and historicist paradigm that has structured research in the interpretative humanities since the 1980s. That motivation, it argues, has less to do with the noble desire to rescue the humanities from the alleged absurdities of the postmodernists than it has with a reluctance to face

Humanism is charged with fostering a harmful anthropocentrism that has led to the exploitation of non-human beings and the environment. Posthumanist and transhumanist ideas prominently aim at rethinking our self-understanding and human-nature relations. Yet these approaches turn out to be flawed when it comes to addressing the challenges of the “age of the humanity”, the Anthropocene. Whereas posthumanism

William James’ “The Will to Believe” (1896/1979) continues to attract scholarly attention. This might seem surprising since James’ central claim—that one may justifiably believe p despite having inconclusive evidence for p—seems both very clear and also very wrong. I argue that many of the interpretive and substantive challenges of this essay can be overcome by framing James’ thesis in terms of what

In this paper I argue that Kant would have agreed with Clifford’s famous principle, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” I begin by confronting (and trying to explain away) the strongest evidence against my thesis: Kant’s argument for the practical postulates. I then introduce what I take to be strong evidence in favor of my thesis: Kant’s views

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics is a method of intersubjective argumentation conceived to test the validity of moral norms on the basis of their universalizability. As some scholars have argued, Habermas’s proposal is problematic in that the process of argumentation is always affected by the circumstances of inequality and unfairness that pervade communal life and, therefore, it cannot be as inclusive

In his Pragmatist Egalitarianism, David Rondel proposes a “pluralist egalitarianism” as a pragmatist resolution to longstanding debates over egalitarian justice. On Rondel’s view, egalitarianism has three distinct and irreducible variables. In this comment, I argue that pluralist views generally do not reconcile anything, but instead posit sites of normative conflict that are in principle invulnerable

This article re-visits the critiques of anthropocentricism levied against John Dewey by his contemporaries and offers a reading of this critique through the lens of nonhuman agency using the theoretical work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, particularly the latter’s coverage of Dewey’s theory of democracy. This work culminates into an argument for envisioning Dewey’s publics as constituted by human

Disagreement in philosophy is all-pervasive and irresolvable. There is almost no thesis in philosophy about which philosophers agree. In contrast to most contemporary accounts of philosophical disagreement, I argue that a significant proportion of philosophical disagreements are rooted in differences regarding values. A second thesis that I shall defend in this paper is that disagreements regarding

David Rondel’s Pragmatism Egalitarianism offers valuable contributions to both contemporary pragmatist scholarship and contemporary political philosophy. The book was the focus of a discussion at the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meeting in April of 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. That discussion forms the basis for the four essays gathered here: three critical responses

In this response to David Rondel’s Pragmatist Egalitarianism, I suggest that the disagreement between vertical egalitarians and horizontal egalitarians has deeper roots than Rondel acknowledges. Using feminist egalitarianism as my example, I suggest that this is because Rondel fails to note that horizontal egalitarians do not merely offer an alternative account of the sites of and remedies for inequality

The current global wave of nationalism threatens the process of shared critical reflection, driving many of us back to reading Hannah Arendt. These “dark times” are especially challenging from a Deweyan pragmatist perspective because critical and cooperative inquiry requires a free community of thinkers. Having lived in a near-fascist religious group for fifteen years, this essay brings personal experiences

Economist Amartya Sen’s and philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach to economic development enjoys global attention, and there has been considerable interest in connections between it and pragmatism. This paper argues, first, that there are indeed strong, productive affinities between Sen’s and Nussbaum’s understanding of ‘capabilities’ in rethinking how economies are to be developed and

John Dewey’s role as a “public philosopher” is well-documented; his political activism, however, has not received much attention from philosophers. While Dewey is well remembered as a philosopher who escaped the walls of the academy to speak to and write for general audiences, he also lent his name, status, and intellectual energy to political organizations and movements in American politics. In the

Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of their role in contemporary politics. In this article, I focus on the emergence of a performative understanding of rights, which conceptualises rights claims as reiterative acts that remake the protections and privileges marked out by rights. This promising reconstruction of rights requires a rethinking of the ethical justification

This paper will explore how John Dewey’s and Gilles Deleuze’s mutual emphasis upon affect and rhythm can illuminate under-appreciated political consequences of Occupy Wall Street. It suggests what I call the sensed “rhythms of resistance” that are produced when activists move through the micro-geography of the encampment and play an important role in the collective becoming and critical dereification

The “right to belong” is a human right in two ways. First, there is the right to belong in a limited sense, i.e., to the extent necessary for individuals to secure all other human rights, such as those recognized by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, there is a deeper aspect of the right to belong, that which is necessary to flourish as a human being. To establish, first

The analysis and defence of democracy on the grounds of its epistemic powers is now a well-established, if contentious, area of theoretical and empirical research. This article reconstructs a distinctive and systematic epistemic account of democracy from Dewey's writings. Running like a thread through this account is a critical analysis of the distortion of hierarchy and class division on social knowledge

This article addresses the problem of intentionality in Analytic philosophy. It begins with an assessment of post-Sellarsian scholarship, with primary attention to the work of Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell. I argue that contemporary Analytic discourse on intentionality not only needs, but internally warrants, a pragmatist metaphysics in order to adequately and accurately

In this review essay, I offer a summary of Brian E. Butler’s The Democratic Constitution: Experimentalism and Interpretation. Butler’s democratic experimentalism offers the thesis that democracy needs to be protected democratically rather than by relying on the judicial supremacy over constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court. Butler illustrates what democratic experimentalism looks like through

This article explores John Dewey’s conceptualization of the public as polity in his lecture notes from 1928. Dewey’s conceptualization suggests an account of the democratic legitimacy of public regulation of economic activities by focusing on polity members’ mutual interest. Contextualized through Dewey’s involvement in practical politics the article specifies the conceptualization by a policy focus

Philosophers and intellectual historians generally recognize pragmatism as a philosophy of progress. For many commentators, pragmatism is tied to a notion of progress through its embrace of meliorism – a forward-looking philosophy that places hope in the future as a site of possibility and improvement. I complicate the progressive image of hope generally attributed to pragmatism by outlining an alternative

The paper employs a pragmatist perspective on ethics to address the problem of empathy bias, an empirically documented phenomenon in which one’s ability to empathize with another is diminished simply because of that other’s membership in a perceived out-group. I first argue that the philosophical commitments that I take to be distinctive of pragmatism, specifically fallibilism, anti-absolutism, and

I argue that a fruitful approach to exploring the significance of the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman’s body of work, understood as as an attempt to “paint the sublime,” is by appeal to Peircian phenomenology and the conception of “originativity” that it entails. By attending, in particular, to Peirce’s conception of “the firstness of thirdness,” I show how this “reasonable feeling” both signifies

In this article I discuss the advantages of a theory of political representation for a pragmatist theory of (global) democracy. I first outline Dewey’s disregard for political representation by analyzing the political, epistemological and aesthetic underpinnings of his criticism of the Enlightenment ideal of democracy and its trust in the power of the detached gaze. I then show that a theory of political

John Dewey conceived democracy as a cooperative problem-solving practice in which actors try out provisional solutions by means of social communication. His notion of experimental democracy as a specific form of life and an ethical enterprise rather than simply a form of government implies the constitution of a polity as a practical and complex process of exchanging and sharing experiences. The aim

Seth Vannatta argues that there can be a fruitful synthesis of pragmatism and classical conservatism. In doing this, he focuses the methodological commitments of pragmatism and conservatism. However, I will demonstrate with a reading of Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action that other commitments might prevent this synthesis—at least a synthesis between the thought of John Dewey and Edmund Burke. My

In Conservatism and Pragmatism, Seth Vannatta posits and explores several major conceptual and practical affinities between classical (especially Peircean) pragmatism and conservatism. Characterizing both as essentially methods rather than ideologies, he argues that the two ought to be understood as mutually supportive and corrective, and that they conjointly supply an especially robust set of intellectual

Oliver Wendell Holmes jr was a survivor of the Civil War. Wounded three times and left for dead once, he survived endless pain and death for a war for which he believed more in the beginning of the virtues of the war than he did at the end. But it was this important experience that pervades his long life. And we now know how to think about how trauma turns to memory sculptured onto the brain. Holmes’

In this reply to J. Edward Hackett’s “Why James Can Be an Existential Pluralist,” we show that Hackett’s argument against our 2005 thesis that pragmatism and pluralism are inconsistent fails. First, his rejection of our distinction between epistemic and metaphysical forms of pluralism does not affect our original argument’s soundness. Second, his proposed existential pluralism is a form of monism,

This paper focuses on interpreting Rorty’s defense of the public-private distinction. Traditionally, scholarship has been divided regarding how to interpret the distinction oscillating between ‘strict-divide’ and ‘loose-divide’ interpretations. The paper concludes that Rorty intended the loose interpretation and strives to explain how such an interpretation functions within his overall philosophical

Seth Vannatta identifies the common law as a central feature of the jurisprudence of former United States Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes treated the common law as if it were an epistemology or a reliable mode for knowledge transmission over successive generations. Against the grand notion that the common law reflected a priori principles consistent with the natural law, Holmes

Scholars have recently identified resemblances between pragmatist thought and contemporary trends in cognitive science in the area of ‘embodied cognition’ or ‘4E cognition.’ In this article I explore these resemblances in the account of religious belief provided by the classical pragmatist philosopher William James. Although James’s psychology does not always parallel the commitments of embodied cognition

What explains the context sensitivity of some (apparent) beliefs? Why, for example, do religious beliefs appear to control behaviour in some contexts but not others? Cases like this are heterogeneous, and we may require a matching heterogeneity of explanations, ranging over their contents, the attitudes of agents and features of the environment. In this paper, I put forward a hypothesis of the last

This paper argues for thinking about religious commitments as different in kind from everyday ordinary understandings of the world. It argues against the straightforward assertion from the cognitive science of religion that belief in the supernatural is easy. That is, there is a way in which intuitions of invisible presence come very easily to people. Yet to sustain that belief commitment is hard,

Associative theories of cognitive representation begin with an ontology of two kinds of entities: concepts and associations. According to most social cognitive theories of attitudes, attitudes are object-evaluation associations of varying strength, where strength is defined in terms of accessibility. This paper proposes a cognitive account of belief such that beliefs are object-attribute associations

The question of how religion ought to be defined has occupied social scientists for well over a century, arguably beginning with reactions against E.B. Tylor’s (1871) “minimal definition” of religion as the belief in spiritual beings. Social scientists of religion are all too familiar with the debates over emic and etic approaches to defining religion, as well as the pros and cons of substantive versus

This paper explains a fallacy that often arises in theorizing about human minds. I call it the Factual Belief Fallacy. The Fallacy, roughly, involves drawing conclusions about human psychology that improperly ignore the large background of mostly accurate factual beliefs people have. The Factual Belief Fallacy has led to significant mistakes in both philosophy of mind and cognitive science of religion

Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Despite the great variation in theories a number of common features can be distilled and most theories can be situated in the cognitivist and modular paradigm. In this paper, I investigate how cognitive science of religion (CSR) can be made better by insights from John Dewey

This paper reconsiders the meaning of political action by way of a dialogue between Dewey, Thoreau, and Cavell. These philosophers demonstrate possibilities of political engagement and participation. Especially in response to the psychological and emotional dimensions of political crisis today, I shall claim that American philosophy can demonstrate something beyond problem-solving as conventionally

Too often, hope is described in individualist terms and in ways that do not help us understand contemporary democracy or offer ways to improve it. Instead, I develop an account of hope situated within pragmatist philosophy that is rooted in the experiences of individuals and grows out of real life circumstances, yet cannot be disconnected from social and political life. This account can help us to

This paper revisits some of the arguments in Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country , twenty years after the book first appeared. Not only are many of Rorty’s diagnoses and predictions eerily prescient in the wake of the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency, but there is also perceptive political advice in Rorty’s book that I argue the contemporary American Left would do well to heed. While many

This essay critically examines contemporary discussions of pragmatism in history. First of all, as for the ‘practice before knowledge’ argument, I point out that historical inquiry cannot be properly explained by the argument whose validity is grounded in the instinct nature of practice because historical research is a contingent, intellectual behavior. About the ‘self-correcting’ argument, I maintain

Philosophers have traditionally described themselves as “intuitive scientists”: people seeking the most justified theories about distinctive aspects of the world. Relying on insights from philosophers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Williams James, I argue that philosophers should be described instead as “intuitive lawyers” who defend a point of view largely by appealing to non-cognitive reasons.