John J. Kaag – författare

With the help of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, motherhood can be conceived as an immigrant identity: both involve a culturally and internally disruptive transition.Using Peirce’s idea that memory constructs a semiotic picture of “the self,” Aisha Raees provides an exegesis of Peirce’s work and builds a picture of how perception and the active constitution of thought deliver a sense of identity dependent on memory as well as on the value and power of hope. In the semiotic movement of our minds, we find evidence of influences from previous events, histories, and arguments. Trauma, too, plays a role in the creation of self as process of memory. Just as immigrant identities are built through a rupture between past and future, motherhood too evolves in a culturally and internally disruptive transition that we can parse out using Peirce’s semiotic “self.” In both, memory forms the backdrop for abduction that requires hope toward a future world and self.In developing an empowering conception of the ontological condition of motherhood, this book draws out how self can negotiate duality within identity in circumstances where belonging is not tied to physical place and how it unfolds both in the new community and in the ones left behind. In doing so, Raees clarifies the role for memory in Peirce’s philosophy, provides an account of how perception and the active constitution of thought deliver a sense of identity, and goes beyond Peirce to apply the metaphor of migration to the selfhood developed in motherhood.

Against the background of selected themes in contemporary philosophy, this book argues that Richard Shusterman's somaesthetics is not only an aesthetics but, first of all, it is a philosophy.The book schematically outlines the philosophical background of pragmatism and of Shusterman's views, which are both popular and relevant to contemporary humanist thought. Linking Shusterman’s biography with themes from his work, Kremer suggests that Richard Shusterman is first and foremost a philosopher, not merely an aesthete.With origins in pragmatism, the somaesthetics presented by Shusterman lays the groundwork for everyday aesthetics as a new field of pragmatist aesthetics. Alexander Kremer demonstrates that this somaesthetics--the critical meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning--has a serious philosophical background and is not confined to aesthetics. Kremer specifically explores the relation between Shusterman's somaesthetics and everyday aesthetics, a general theory of understanding and Shusterman's theory of interpretation, and the meaning of life.Philosophy always tries to understand and interpret the world and man in it by means of the most general concepts. This book takes the reader on a philosophical adventure, exploring the philosophical background of the field of beauty and of the fine arts.

In an exploration of the little-told legacy of early feminist pragmatists who pioneered social rights in America, Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights delves into the transformative efforts of trailblazing figures, including Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Emily Greene Balch, Molly Dewson, and Frances Perkins. As Judy D. Whipps reveals, these women created and led organizations that were prototypes for later federal programs. Their relentless advocacy reshaped U.S. politics and culture, from grassroots organizations to federal legislation, paving the way for constitutional recognition of social rights decades before the United Nation’s International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This book is the first to cast the philosophy behind these women’s political and judicial activism as feminist pragmatism. Each chapter illuminates their struggles and triumphs, from combating child labor to advancing women’s rights, and after their research gathered popular support for reform, they continued that work by writing drafts of legislation and legal briefs. This book not only chronicles a pivotal fifty-year movement but also serves as a poignant reminder of their enduring impact.

To understand the role Kant’s critical idealism has played in the development of American philosophies, one must understand why the classical American pragmatists, different realists, and other anti-ideal theorists reject Kant’s critical project, no less than how idealism has been evolving in transcendental linguistics, in philosophies of history and of technology, and in ethics. This book reconstructs the little-known system of twentieth-century American philosopher John William Miller (1895–1978), who contributed to the reinvention of critical idealism in ways that might have been too radical for his own moment, but which bear importance for ours. American philosophies tend to first fix their positions by the lodestar of Kantianism, even if their goal is to move away from it. The book tracks encounters with critical idealism among the classical American pragmatists, and in more recent expressions of anti-ideal theory and object-oriented ontology. It assesses Sellars’ transcendental linguistics and Korsgaard’s philosophy of agency as well as pragmatist feminist reconsiderations of the source of normative commitments. Along the way, the work finds the critical project to be evolving still, albeit in ways not anticipated by Kant.