American Philosophy Series – serie

Previous attempts to set up an Ethics based on the writings of Charles S. Peirce have generally begun and ended with the 1898 lecture, Philosophy and the Conduct of Life. It was in that lecture that Peirce famously argued that Theory and Practice should be kept distinct. In Ethical Habits: A Peircean Perspective, Aaron Massecar argues that this lecture opens up a uniquely Peircean Ethics that brings theory into practice through an ethics of intelligently formed habits.

Richard Rorty is perhaps the most famous American philosopher internationally, and his later, neopragmatist philosophy is decidedly one of his most commented upon. Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism proposes different themes in order to delve into the enormous potential that Rorty's later philosophical thought possesses, using the perspective of the axiological and normative dimensions. With reference to philosophers such as Kant, Dewey, Santayana, and Kolakowski, Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski argues that a democratic society is the basic axiological framework and that Rorty’s normative focus is the melioration of democratic society. The novelty of this philosophy is that it pays special attention to discourses, narratives, and story-telling as containing within themselves axiological and normative aspects. This book presents these discourses as a way of constructing and reconstructing social reality, rather than as a means of describing reality from a detached perspective. According to this framework, human activity, well-being, and solidarity with other people should be evoked by us much more than any reference to God, the Truth, or absolute Values. This book is written for anyone with interests in American philosophy, intellectual history, or political philosophy.

The world of moral theory finds no place for the idea of integrity. The natural intellectual home of the idea of integrity is the American pragmatist tradition. Pragmatism makes possible an account of integrity that enables it to become philosophically central in thinking about morality. The idea of integrity enables what Dewey called “a working theory of morality.” Other intellectual traditions, including those most prominent in the academic world of moral philosophy, ignore integrity because of its imprecision and its inability to deliver precise answers to questions about what is right or wrong, good or bad. Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism explains how integrity can and should become central in philosophical thought about morality. Only within the intellectual tradition of American pragmatism may integrity achieve the intellectual stature it deserves as the central idea in ordinary moral thought. The ideas of morally diverse communities are unified to a remarkable extent when seen through the moral lens of integrity. Diverse communities having diverse ways of life share similar understandings of morality; these similarities are important for understanding what morality fundamentally is in the human world. Philosophical efforts to explain “the nature of morality” or “the nature of right action” or “the nature of the good” founder on their ignorance of moral diversity in the real worlds of human history and culture.

Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce’s writings is a distinctive system that, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, combines a thoroughgoing form of empiricism with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality explains this marriage of empiricism with realism by tracing the roots of Peirce’s thought in the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention paid to his predecessors in the empiricist and the common sense traditions. By purging modern empiricism of its nominalistic metaphysics and its Cartesian assumptions about mind and knowledge, and by combining it with insights from sources as diverse as Duns Scotus and Charles Darwin, Peirce reinvents the idea that all our knowledge depends on sense perception while reaffirming the place of philosophy as a foundational field of inquiry.In Peirce’s Empiricism, Aaron Bruce Wilson defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, and develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists. Wilson provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends. This book will be of great value to students and scholars with interests in Peirce, American philosophy more broadly, modern philosophy, and semiotics.

Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy: The Religious Dimension of Experience examines the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and its relationship to key figures in classical American Philosophy, in particular Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hocking, and Henry Bugbee. Few scholars have taken sufficient note of the fact that Gabriel Marcel’s thought is vitally informed by classical American philosophy.Marcel’s essays on Royce offer a window into the soul of Marcel’s recent philosophical development. The idealism of early Marcel stemmed from an omnipresent sense of a “broken world”—an experience of rent or tear within the tissue of experience similar to what John Dewey referred to as an “inward laceration of the spirit.” Furthermore, Marcel’s intuition concerning the primacy of intersubjective experience can help us understand W. E. Hocking’s thought. Finally, Marcel’s notion of l exigence ontologique clarifies his relationship to Henry Bugbee. Marcel and Bugbee explore the contour of experience—the indigenous circuit of associations pertaining to the self as coesse. Through a reflexive act Marcel refers to as “ingatherdness,” the self undergoes increasing degrees of unification by experiencing “an act of faith made explicit only in a dialectical act of participation.”David W. Rodick shows that Marcel’s relationship to these American philosophers is not coincidental, but rather the philosophical expression of his Christian faith. Marcel’s most important legacy is his commitment to unity of Christian philosophizing, a unity derived from both reason and revelation. Its diversity stems from the objective plurality of what is pursued as well as the subjective plurality of those who pursue it. Christian philosophizing seeks a truth that every Christian believes can never be untrue to itself.

Over the course of nearly a decade, Phillip McReynolds conducted a series of interviews with prominent American philosophers including, among others, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Margolis, Richard Bernstein, Bruce Wilshire, John Lachs, Richard Shusterman, and Crispin Sartwell. The American Philosopher: Dialogues on the Meaning of Life and Truth brings these interviews together, bridginga wide variety of topics both personal and professional, and ultimately addressing what it means to be an American philosopher. With interviews that are both philosophical and biographical in nature, this book will be of interest to those who specialize in pragmatism and the history of American philosophy, academics in fields such as comparative literature, history, political science, sociology, and American studies, and to anyone with an interest in “America” as an idea

Death and Finitude offers an examination and defense of a pragmatic transcendental anthropology applicable to the concepts of limit, finitude, and mortality that are constitutive of human life as we know it. Sami Pihlström develops a special kind of philosophical anthropology—a pragmatic yet transcendental examination of the human condition—that interprets what is worth preserving in the tradition of transcendental philosophy in such a manner that this unusual combination will crucially enrich our understanding of a human problem we all share: mortality. In some sense, all serious philosophy inevitably reflects on the human condition and is thus philosophical anthropology, broadly conceived. There can hardly be any more serious problem concerning the human condition than the problem of death. Yet, mainstream analytic contributions to the philosophy of death usually addresses death in general, and it is far from obvious that such contributions are philosophically relevant in the sense of addressing the agony of an individual human being trying to understand their own mortal condition. “Continental” philosophy of death may be frustrating in a different sense, as it often fails to be conceptually as clear and argumentatively as rigorous as the analytic literature. Claiming to address my “being-toward-death”, such contributions may also fail to speak to the mortal individual if they end up in endless pseudo-philosophical jargon. It is against this background of frustration that Death and Finitude contributes to humanity’s on-going reflections on death, dying, and mortality—from a pragmatist yet transcendental perspective, seeking to accommodate these topics within a broader philosophical anthropology.The book is primarily intended for academic philosophers, but the potential readership includes not only scholars but also both graduate students and advanced undergraduates, as well as general educated readers. It is relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. As the book may be said to be an attempt to “philosophize historically,” it is in principle of interest to both systematically and historically oriented philosophers and students.

This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emerson's metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Urbas tells the story of the making of a metaphysician and in so doing breaks with the postmodern, anti-metaphysical readings that have dominated Emerson scholarship since his philosophical rehabilitation began in late 1970s. This is an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also a chapter in the cultural life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself, the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change. Emerson's Metaphysics proposes an account of Emerson's metaphysical thought as it unfolds in his writings, as it informs his philosophy as a whole, and as it reflects the intellectual and religious culture in which he lived and moved and had his being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and students of English, philosophy, and intellectual and religious history who are interested in Emerson and the American Transcendentalist movement.

Aesthetic Transcendentalism is a philosophy endorsing the qualitative and creative aspects of nature. Theoretically it argues for a metaphysical dimension of nature that is aesthetically real, pluralistic, and prolific. It directs our attention to the rich complexity of immediate experience, the possibility of discovering new aesthetic features about the world, and the transformative potential of art as an organic expression. This book presents the philosophy in its relationship to its historical roots in the philosophic and artistic traditions of nineteenth-century North America. In this multidisciplinary study, Nicholas L. Guardiano brings together a philosophic and literary figure in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientifically minded philosopher Charles S. Peirce, and the plastic arts in the form of American landscape painting. Guardiano evaluates this constellation of philosophers and artists in global perspective as it relates to other historical theories of metaphysics and aesthetics, while simultaneously performing a cultural analysis that identifies an essential feature of the American mind. Aesthetic Transcendentalism thus possesses abiding significance for our vital interactions with nature, daily experiences, and contemplations of great works of art.Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting will be of interest to scholars of American philosophy and American art history, especially specialists of Charles S. Peirce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Hudson River School painters. It will also appeal to philosophers working on systematic metaphysical theories of nature.

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein’s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein’s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected here show the continuing relevance of Bernstein’s lifelong focus on democracy, dialogue, pragmatism, fallibilism, and pluralism. Bernstein has always contested the supposed Analytic/Continental divide, insisting on the pluralism of philosophical discourses and styles that contribute to genuine debate and save philosophy from stale academicism. This book enacts Bernstein’s pluralistic spirit by crossing traditions and generating new avenues for ongoing research. A central argument of the book is that thinkers of different backgrounds, using diverse, and even clashing methodologies, contribute to the understanding of a given problem, issue, or theme. This argument lies at the heart of Bernstein’s published works and is central to the fallibilistic pragmatism of his pedagogy. This book therefore does not rest on a single answer to a question or a univocal theme, but shows the differentiation of Bernstein’s scholarship through the extension of pluralism into territory Bernstein himself did not enter. The chapters, individually and collectively, demonstrate the force of Bernstein’s pluralism beyond mere commentary on his works.This book will be of interest to many people: 1) scholars, students and others in American philosophy who have worked on or with Richard J. Bernstein or in the tradition of American Pragmatism widely construed, 2) those interested in the intersections between American and European philosophy or between the Analytic and Continental traditions, 3) professional philosophers, philosophy students, and public intellectuals concerned with the application of theory to contemporary ethical and political problems, and 4) those interested in an introduction to the key concepts animating Bernstein’s work and their relationship to the history of philosophy.

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein’s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein’s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected here show the continuing relevance of Bernstein’s lifelong focus on democracy, dialogue, pragmatism, fallibilism, and pluralism. Bernstein has always contested the supposed Analytic/Continental divide, insisting on the pluralism of philosophical discourses and styles that contribute to genuine debate and save philosophy from stale academicism. This book enacts Bernstein’s pluralistic spirit by crossing traditions and generating new avenues for ongoing research. A central argument of the book is that thinkers of different backgrounds, using diverse, and even clashing methodologies, contribute to the understanding of a given problem, issue, or theme. This argument lies at the heart of Bernstein’s published works and is central to the fallibilistic pragmatism of his pedagogy. This book therefore does not rest on a single answer to a question or a univocal theme, but shows the differentiation of Bernstein’s scholarship through the extension of pluralism into territory Bernstein himself did not enter. The chapters, individually and collectively, demonstrate the force of Bernstein’s pluralism beyond mere commentary on his works.This book will be of interest to many people: 1) scholars, students and others in American philosophy who have worked on or with Richard J. Bernstein or in the tradition of American Pragmatism widely construed, 2) those interested in the intersections between American and European philosophy or between the Analytic and Continental traditions, 3) professional philosophers, philosophy students, and public intellectuals concerned with the application of theory to contemporary ethical and political problems, and 4) those interested in an introduction to the key concepts animating Bernstein’s work and their relationship to the history of philosophy.

Charles Sanders Peirce is one of the most original voices in American philosophy. His scientific career and his goal of proving scientific logic provide rich material for philosophical development. Peirce was also a life-long Christian and member of the Episcopal Church. Roger Ward traces the impact of Peirce’s religion and Christianity on the development of Peirce’s philosophy. Peirce’s religious framework is a key to his development of pragmatism and normative science in terms of knowledge and moral transformation. Peirce’s argument for the reality of God is a culmination of both his religious devotion and his life-long philosophical development.

Charles Sanders Peirce is one of the most original voices in American philosophy. His scientific career and his goal of proving scientific logic provide rich material for philosophical development. Peirce was also a life-long Christian and member of the Episcopal Church. Roger Ward traces the impact of Peirce’s religion and Christianity on the development of Peirce’s philosophy. Peirce’s religious framework is a key to his development of pragmatism and normative science in terms of knowledge and moral transformation. Peirce’s argument for the reality of God is a culmination of both his religious devotion and his life-long philosophical development.

Endurance Sport and the American Philosophical Tradition, edited by Douglas R. Hochstetler, analyzes the relationship between endurance sports—such as running, cycling, and swimming–and themes from the American philosophical tradition. The contributors enter into dialogue with writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Henry David Thoreau, and John Dewey, as well as more recent scholars such as John McDermott and bell hooks. Examining American philosophical themes informs issues in endurance sport, and the experiential nature of endurance sport helps address philosophical issues and explain philosophical themes in American philosophy. The chapters bear witness to the fact that philosophy is not limited to abstract notions such as justice, truth, happiness, and so forth, but intersects with and has a bearing on our human endeavors of work and play. Furthermore, the themes centrally related to the American philosophical tradition align closely with the challenges and experiences present and faced by runners, cyclists, swimmers, and endurance athletes in general.

At once narrative and reflective, Loving Immigrants in America: An Experiential Philosophy of Personal Interaction is a philosophical account of Daniel Campos's experience as a Latin American immigrant to the United States of America. A series of interrelated personal essays together convey this experience of walking or sauntering, going on road trips, reading American literature in the southern United States, playing association football (soccer or fútbol), churchgoing, and Latin dancing in the U.S. This book’s central motif is the caring saunterer, who is understood to be a person who makes him or herself at home anywhere, even as a Latino immigrant in the U.S. The narrative essays convey one immigrant’s experience seeking an affective, social, and intellectual home in a new land. The intertwined philosophical reflections lead to the recommendation of an ethic of love—resilient love—for the day-to-day interactions and long-term relations between immigrants and hosts in this country. The author’s aim is to establish an open and earnest philosophical dialogue with critical readers interested in the problems surrounding immigration in the U.S. today. He writes as an American philosopher—in the continental sense of North, Central, and South America—whose reflections provide an accessible and provocative angle for the development of insight into the experiences of immigrants in the United States. Thus he brings philosophical reflection drawn from experience, in the broad American tradition, to bear on current issues—on the problems of people and not of philosophers, as John Dewey might put it.

While a reconstruction of the whole of William James’s personal library isn’t feasible, there are significant portions of it that reside within the Harvard University Library system and this book is a partial reconstruction of their story. Reconstructing the Personal Library of William James offers a new, comprehensive account of the James collection at Harvard University, bringing together all known Harvard-owned entries into one comprehensive volume. The annotated bibliography contains data on 2,554 entries (2,862 volumes) from James’s personal library, including both the 1923 “Philosophical Library” and all known additional donations by James and his family. . Each entry, when applicable, contains the following data points: Harvard Library location and call number, provenance, bookplate, accession record, autographs, inscriptions, ownership marks, indexical annotations, markings, and marginalia. To orient the reader, Ermine L. Algaier IV supplements the bibliography with essays that examine the history of the James’s library at Harvard, assess the size of the collection and how it came to reside at Harvard, and showcase patterns that emerge from looking at the collection as a whole. Additional essays are devoted to explaining the source lists and archival resources used in reconstructing James’s personal library, as well as outlining steps for continued research on the collection.

Believing that humanity would be better off if it simply dropped its traditional religious and metaphysical beliefs, Richard Rorty proposes an alternative approach, drawn from the American pragmatist tradition, where things get their significance against a background of broad human interests, and knowledge is regarded as part of the active pursuit of a better world. Rorty, Religion, and Metaphysics argues that while Rorty’s case is clearly and robustly made, it is fundamentally challenged by the phenomenon of human recognition, the relationship that arises between people when they talk to one another. John Owens demonstrates that recognition, so central to human life, cannot be accommodated within Rorty’s proposals, given that it precisely attributes a reality to others that goes beyond anything a pragmatist framework can offer. It follows that there is more to human interaction than can be explained by Rorty’s pragmatism.

Ontology after Philosophical Psychology addresses the question of William James’s continuity of consciousness, with a view to its possible actualizations. In particular, Michela Bella critically delineates James's discourse. In the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution at the end of the nineteenth century, James's reflections emerged in the field of physiological psychology, where he developed for the case for a renewed epistemology and a new metaphysical framework to help us understand the most interesting theories and scientific discoveries about the human mind. Bella’s analysis of the theme of continuity makes it possible to appreciate, both historically and theoretically, the importance of James's gradual transition from making observations of experimental psychology on the continuity of thought to developing an epistemological and ontological argument that continuity is a characteristic of experience and reality. This analysis makes it possible both to clarify James's position in relation to his historical context and to highlight the most original results of his work.

This book investigates the extent to which various scholarly labels are appropriate for the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. As Louis Menand wrote, “Holmes has been called a formalist, a positivist, a utilitarian, a realist, a historicist, a pragmatist, (not to mention a nihilist).” Each of the eight chapters investigates one label, analyzes the secondary texts that support the use of the term to characterize Holmes’s philosophy, and takes a stand on whether or not the category is appropriate for Holmes by assessing his judicial and nonjudicial publications, including his books, articles, and posthumously published correspondences. The thrust of the collection as a whole, nevertheless, bends toward the stance that Holmes is a pragmatist in his jurisprudence, ethics, and politics. The final chapter, by Susan Haack, makes that case explicitly.Edited by Seth Vannatta, this book will be of particular interest to students and faculty working in law, jurisprudence, philosophy, intellectual history, American Studies, political science, and constitutional theory.

This book presents a nonstandard approach to epistemology. Where standard epistemology generally focuses on the certain knowledge the Greeks called epistêmê, the present focus is on some less assured modes of information. Its deliberations will focus on such cognitively suboptimal processes as conjecture, guesswork, and plausible supposition. This shift of focus has implications for virtually every sector of information management, and the book’s instigations presented here will explore some of them. Throughout the rule of pragmatic considerations stand in the foreground.As the book’s deliberations set out in detail, the nature of our knowledge of reality is inherently conditioned by the fact of its beings the product of what is, at best and at most, a matter of rational guesswork. And so as regards our knowledge, we had best adopt the pragmatic optimism of expecting—and hoping—that our best is good enough.

Virtue theory, natural law, deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism: these are the basic moral theories taught in “Ethics,” “History of Philosophy,” and “Introduction to Philosophy” courses throughout the United States. When the American philosopher William James (1842 – 1910) find his way into these conversations, there is uncertainty about where his thinking fits. While utilitarianism has become the default position for teaching James’s pragmatism and radical empiricism, this default position fails to address and explain James’s multiple criticisms of John Stuart Mill’s formulaic approach to questions concerning the moral life. Through close readings of James’s writings, the chapters in William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life catalogue the ways in whichJames wants to avoid the following: (a) the hierarchies of Christian natural law theory, (b) the moral calculus of Mill’s utilitarianism, (c) the absolutism and principle-ism of Immanuel Kant’s deontology, and (d) the staticity of the virtues found in Aristotle’s moral theory. Elaborating upon and clarifying James’s differences from these dominant moral theories is a crucial feature of this collection. This collection, is not, however, intended to be wholly negative – that is, only describing to readers what James’s moral theory is not. It seeks to articulate the positive features of James’s ethics and moral reasoning: what does it mean to an ethical life, and how should we theorize about morality?

The essays in Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience offer a survey of the ways that “resilience” is becoming a key concept for understanding our world, as well as providing deeper insight about its specific actual and proposed applications. As a concept with multiple theoretical and practical meanings, “resilience” promises considerable explanatory power. At the same time, current uses of the concept can be diverse and at times inconsistent. The American philosophical tradition provides tools uniquely suited for clarifying, extending, and applying emerging concepts in more effective and suggestive ways. This collection explores the usefulness of theoretical work in American philosophy and pragmatism to practices in ecology, community, rurality, and psychology.

Richard Rorty, perhaps the most important philosopher of the past century, refused to write meaningfully about experience due to his postmodern inclination to associate experience with a belief in objectivity and foundational truths. Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience: A Reconstruction explores the context, reasoning, and consequences of this resistance. While for much of our history experience was valued for its potential to teach us about the world, Rorty and his fellow postmodern thinkers encouraged us to doubt the narrative that we can use experience to make epistemological progress. Rather than pursue universal truths about the world, Rorty suggested that we recognize all of our beliefs about the world as being social constructions. In his project to recover a concept of experience from within the framework Rorty has constructed, Tobias Timm describes how classical pragmatist theories of experience are naïve about the problem of foundationalism. He also explains how the most common phenomenological work lacks an active subject; experience here is simply something that happens to us, rather than something we actively seek to improve. Timm demonstrates that despite Rorty’s insistence that we talk about language instead of experience, there are strong experiential elements in his work. Rorty’s romanticism, and his optimism about the accomplishments of western culture, are remedial to the pessimism of postmodern discussions about experience.

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.

In Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion: Melioristic Case Studies, Ulf Zackariasson argues for the fruitfulness of pragmatic philosophy of religion by bringing it to bear on a number of classical topics within the contemporary philosophy of religion. Zackariasson first outlines a version of pragmatic philosophy of religion that takes the pragmatic insistence on the primacy of practice to heart. Here, he shows that religious traditions and their secular counterparts transmit a number of paradigmatic responses that adherents can draw on in their encounters with human life’s existential contingencies. He further discusses the upshot of this approach for how we think of miracles, religious diversity, and what it is to be religiously mistaken. In each case, Zackariasson shows that a pragmatic approach offers important novel perspectives and insights that contemporary (primarily analytic) philosophy of religion tends to neglect. By relating to debates and well-known positions within the contemporary philosophy of religion, he also makes these novel perspectives and insights concrete for those who are not already committed pragmatists. The case studies thus serve as invitations to constructive dialogue within an increasingly pluralistic philosophy of religion.

This book shows the unity and novelty of Josiah Royce’s philosophy, one that he called an Absolute Pragmatism. The development of Royce’s thought led him to propose a synthetic-semiotic view of community that constitutes a unique and unparalleled metaphysical vision in a world in great need of integration. Royce’s proposal also fosters the prominent value of loyalty and reconnects the individual human being to its more radical needs of transcendence. A Semiotic Theory of Community: Josiah Royce’s Absolute Pragmatism explores the mediation provided by community as a means by which to respond to the big questions entertained by humans at all times: through an ongoing and always open process of interpretation towards the Absolute, the community of interpretation in all its different forms provides an ideal of loyalty. Paniel Reyes Cárdenas argues that by undertaking the process of interpretation and recognition of ourselves and the Other, we become true persons, and that we get a hold of the sense of purpose and loyalty we crave—both individually and in a universal unlimited community.

Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion develops a distinctive approach to pragmatist philosophy of religion, and more generally to pragmatist investigations of the human search for meaning, by emphasizing what may be considered two closely interrelated main features of this tradition: humanism and antitheodicism. Humanism here emphasizes the need to focus on religion as a human practice within human concerns of meaningfulness and significance, as distinguished from any metaphysical search for cosmic meaning. Antitheodicism, in turn, stands for the refusal to accept any justification, divine or secular, for the experiences of meaninglessness that individuals undergoing horrendous suffering may have. Developing a critical form of pragmatism emphasizing these ideas, Sami Pihlström explores the relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy in the philosophy of religion, especially regarding the question of religious meaning, as well as the significance of literature for philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on William James's pragmatism.

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.