Pragmatism As Transition

Download or read book Pragmatism as Transition written by Colin Koopman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Poetics of Transition written by Jonathan Levin and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 written by James Livingston and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The New Pragmatist Sociology written by Neil L. Gross and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-05 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Pragmatism as Transition written by Colin Koopman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon written by Allen Mendenhall and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-14 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Pragmatism in Philosophical Inquiry written by Nicholas Rescher and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy. It does this not only by describing its mode of operation and explaining its legitimating rationale, but also by substantiating its claims by a series of instructive case studies. The unifying insight of this approach is that the natural criterion of merit within any goal-oriented enterprise—be its orientation practical or cognitive—pivots on its contribution to the effective and efficient realization of the aims at issue. The aim of this volume is to describe and illustrate this broadened conception of pragmatism as a far-reaching and many-sided approach to philosophical inquiry. Theoretical considering apart, it offers a variety of case studies to illustrate the range and fertility of this approach. Nicholas Rescher has published extensively on the history and theory of pragmatism and on its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy over the last 30 years.