Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy – serie

A penetrating and illuminating exchange of views between Richard Rorty, a highly influential and sometimes controversial philosopher, and seven of his most thoughtful critics, providing new insights into the impact of his work on contemporary American philosophy.Richard Rorty, William R. Kenan Professor and University Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, is a frequent and influential contributor to major literary magazines and professional journals in this country and abroad. Among his best-known book publications are The Linguistic Turn (1967 and 1992), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), The Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).

A challenging, iconoclastic study that makes clear the underlying unity of Whitehead's vision of the world.This important and provocative book on the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) explores how his avowed atomism is consistent with his equally essential commitment to a view of reality as a thoroughly interconnected sphere of relations. Judith Jones challenges Whitehead's readers to reconsider certain prevailing interpretations of his organic philosophy. To Jones, a rereading of Whitehead's overall philosophic project is essential to evaluating his contributions to metaphysics and ontology. SinceWhitehead's basic worldview is holistic, a return to viewing Whitehead's work as a whole helps clarify his ontological intentions and contributions to metaphysics.For this purpose, the concept of "intensity," which Jones defines as the quality and form of feeling involved in subjective experience, is basic to Whitehead's thinking about process at all naturalistic levels and is therefore particularly useful as a lens through which to view his entire system. "Intensity" is at once Whitehead's most basic metaphysical idea and a notion useful in deciphering the overall unity of purpose in his writings. A central aim of this book is to develop an aesthetically sensitive sense of being that demonstrates the profound and original contributions of process philosophy to realism.Jones shows that a thorough understanding of the concept of intensity yields modes of thought that help overcome knotty problems in conceiving Whitehead's distinction between the private experience of individuals and the public relations those individuals experience in relationship to other entities. Drawing frequently on poetic allusions to aid her interpretations, she focuses specifically on the status of intensity in intellectual and moral experience and develops an ethics of "attention" as an elaboration of Whitehead's aesthetic metaphysics.The result is a book that should be enthusiastically greeted and debated by scholars of Whitehead and by all who are interested in the field of process thought, including students of theology, literature, and feminist studies. Jones's unorthodox conclusions, backed up with scrupulous attention to both the Whitehead canon and related secondary literature, present challenges to accepted interpretations that cannot be ignored.

An original and ingenious introduction to the basic, experimental, trial-and-error process by which we acquire and validate facts and beliefs and through which we gain understanding and truth. Elements of Knowledge is an engaging introductory text, effectively and imaginatively designed to bring a working understanding and appreciation of the fundamental tenets and methods of the American school of philosophy known as pragmatism, as articulated by its founder C. S. Peirce, to undergraduates and general readers. It presents and explains the basic pragmatic tools that are the common thread in our acquisition and development of knowledge, whether in an academic, vocational, or professional setting, or in life at large. Pragmatism guides, without dictating, examinations of ordinary human experience, creative learning in all fields, and progress in academic disciplines.This book is intended for use by both general readers and students, particularly those in introductory logic or related philosophy courses. It will also fit well in the design of many "core curriculum" or "general education" course requirements. It is ultimately meant to be accessible and beneficial to anyone seeking a clearer understanding of the unifying principles for acquiring and assessing the soundness of all knowledge.

Infuses the first, highly acclaimed edition with new material that deepens our understanding of this distinguished American philosopher

Infuses the first, highly acclaimed edition with new material that deepens our understanding of this distinguished American philosopher

In the VANDERBILT LIBRARY OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, a book which reflects on the joy of living and the hatred of death. Written by the author of INTERMEDIATE MAN and THE COST OF COMFORT, it takes the view that delighting in small achievements will help provide courage to face the darker side of life.

More scholarly works on the history of American philosophy have been completed in Russian than in any other language outside of our own; yet most of that body of work has not been translated or studied comprehensively. Consequently, Soviet-era efforts to understand American thought have remained almost entirely unknown to Western scholars.In his pioneering new book Interpreting America John Ryder makes available for the first time to English-speaking readers Russian views of the full range of American philosophical thought: from seventeenth-century Puritanism through the colonial and revolutionary periods, nineteenth- century idealism, pragmatism, naturalism, and other twentieth-century movements and figures. Using his own accurate translations, he clearly reconstructs a chain of core ideas, emphasizes the most essential concepts of each writer's work, and gives a multidimensional reconstruction of the arguments of each author.By taking mainstream Soviet philosophical commentators like Baskin, Bogomolov, Karimsky, Melvil, Pokrovsky, Sidorov, and Yulina seriously and letting them speak for themselves, Ryder shows not only what Soviet philosophers and scholars thought of American philosophy (and why they were so interested in the first place) but also the nuances of the internal disagreements among Soviet thinkers about what American philosophers were saying. He also reveals a strong continuity between contemporary, post-Soviet Russian philosophy and earlier Soviet work.Perhaps no other book has ever explored in such a systematic manner the ways in which one philosophical system has regarded another. Ryder's revealing study of how others have viewed us helps to clarify the depth, richness, and complexity of our own American philosophical heritage.

Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution.Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till.Agrarianism should not be viewed as a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development.The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy.The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy.

Unknown to many, unintelligible to some, Richard McKeon (1900-1985) is considered by those familiar with his work to be among the most important of all twentieth-century philosophers. In a career that spanned seven decades, McKeon published eleven books and more than 150 articles, inspired and intimidated generations of students (among them Richard Rorty, Wayne Booth, and Paul Goodman), and received most of the honors available to an American philosopher. As a teacher and administrator at the University of Chicago, he was instrumental in founding its general education program and initiating the first interdisciplinary program in the humanities. His achievements outside the university included a major part in developing the first cultural and philosophical projects of UNESCO. Fearsome in the classroom, he is renowned for his scholarly brilliance; the problems he thought important, however, did not occupy his colleagues' attention. Ironically, they are now the very issues that present-day philosophers grapple with, namely pluralism, the relationship of philosophy to the history of philosophy, rhetoric and philosophy, the diversity of culture, and the problems of communication and community. Pluralism in Theory and Practice not only brings McKeon to the attention of contemporary philosophers and students; it also puts his theories into practice. Some of the essays explicate aspects of McKeon's thought or situate him in the context of American intellectual and practical engagement. Others take the concerns he raised as starting points for inquiries into urgent contemporary problems, or, in some cases, for reexamining McKeon's work as fertile ground for shaping the direction of new investigation.

While Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and George Santayana (1863-1952) may never have met or even have studied one another's work, they experienced similar cultural conditions and their thinking took similar shapes. Yet, until now, their respective bodies of work have been examined separately and in isolation from one another. Santayana is often regarded as an aesthetician and metaphysician, but Wittgenstein's work is usually seen as antithetical to the philosophical approaches favored by Santayana. In this insightful new study, Michael Hodges and John Lachs argue that behind the striking differences in philosophical style and vocabulary there is a surprising agreement in position. The similarities have largely gone unnoticed because of their divergent styles, different metaphilosophies, and separate spheres of influence. Hodges and Lachs show that Santayana's and Wittgenstein's works express their philosophical responses to contingency. Surprisingly, both thinkers turn to the integrity of human practices to establish a viable philosophical understanding of the human condition. Both of these important twentieth-century philosophers formed their mature views at a time when the comfortable certainties of Western civilization were crumbling all around them. What they say is similar at least in part because they wished to resist the spread of ruin by relying on the calm sanity of our linguistic and other practices. According to both, it is not living human knowledge but a mistaken philosophical tradition that demands foundations and thus creates intellectual homelessness and displacement. Both thought that, to get our house in order, we have to rethink our social, religious, philosophical, and moral practices outside the context of the search for certainty. This insight and the projects that flowed from it define their philosophical kinship. Thinking in the Ruins will enhance our understanding of these monumental thinkers' intellectual accomplishments and show how each influenced subsequent American philosophers. The book also serves as a call to philosophers to look beyond traditional classifications to the substance of philosophical thought.

Defining an "emphatic" as an intrusion that alters the import of what it intrudes on, Weiss sets the stage for an exquisitely systematic, speculative study of the major themes confronting modern metaphysics. The idea of an emphatic has its roots in Weiss's long-developed pluralistic ontology, with special focus on what we experience as an "emphasis." The most obvious examples are grammatical devices such as changed pitch in speech or exclamation and question marks in writing. Weiss also analyzes emphatics in etiquette, social status, nature, art, conventional behavior, encyclopedias, psychiatry, and religion.Brilliant in every respect, Emphatics rewrites Weiss's systematic ontology in new terms. Not only are the lineaments of the system reexamined, but this book floods the reader with new perspectives and insights on relationship, signs, truth, particularity, space-time causality, education, mind-body issues, Being and other ultimate philosophical categories, and good and evil.Weiss engages the various objections to his position in a series of question-and-answer epilogues at the end of each chapter that allow the reader to follow step-by-step a great philosophical mind at work. He takes his critics seriously, grapples with their objections, and answers them honestly. His discourse creatively revisits age-old questions and in reimagining new answers establishes the continuing relevance of philosophy as an academic discipline.

The ongoing revival of interest in the work of American philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey has given rise to a burgeoning flow of commentaries, critical editions, and reevaluations of Dewey's writings. While previous studies of Dewey's work have taken either a historical or a topical focus, Shook offers an innovative, organic approach to understanding Dewey and eloquently shows that Dewey's instrumentalism grew seamlessly out of his idealism. He argues that most current scholarship operates under a mistaken impression of Dewey's early philosophical positions and convincingly demonstrates a number of key points:that Dewey's metaphysical empiricism remained more indebted to Kant and Hegel than is commonly supposed; that Dewey owed more to the influence of Wundt than is commonly believed;that the influence of Peirce and James was not as significant for the development of Dewey's theories of mind and truth as has been argued in the past;and that Dewey's pragmatic theory of knowledge never really abandoned idealism.Shook's exposition of the unity of Dewey's thought challenges a large scholarly industry devoted to suppressing or explaining away the consistency between Dewey's early thought and his later work. In every respect, Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality is a provocative and engaging study that will occupy a unique niche in this field. It is certain to stimulate discussion and controversy, forcing Dewey traditionalists out of habitual modes of thought and transforming our conventional understanding of the development of classical American philosophy.

In this original contribution to the American philosophical tradition, Patrick Shade makes a strong argument for the necessity of hope in a cynical world that too often rejects it as foolish. While most accounts of hope situate it in a theological context, Shade presents a theory rooted in the pragmatic thought of such American philosophers as C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Shade first discusses the particular hopes we pursue and then turns to the habits of hope - persistence, resourcefulness, and courage - that are vital to their realization. Indeed, habits of hope are the basis for developing hopefulness, a complex habit that nurtures and sustains us even when we fail to realize particular hopes. Hopefulness, Shade maintains, enables us to avoid the paralysis of despair. Throughout the discussion, Shade gleans insights from a variety of sources, most notably John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Stephen King's novella ""Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,"" but also from the real-life experiences of such heroes as Cedric Jennings and Martha Manning. These examples embody and illuminate the concept of hope and offer incentive and illustrations for developing a hopeful life. Shade's account shows how we can make hoping practical without forfeiting its unique capacity to help us grow.

This enterprising book, written in the spirit of William James, urges our appreciation of the intensely personal character of spiritual transcendence. Phil Oliver's work has important implications for specialists concerned with the Jamesian concept of ""pure experience,"" and it illuminates significant interdisciplinary ties among philosophy, literature, and other intellectual domains. Oliver argues Jamesian transcendence is relevant to current questions in cognitive science and the emerging ecological, computer, and cyber worlds. The philosophy of William James celebrates subjectivity, recognizing the integrity of individual experience as it is subjectively understood. But James also proposes that we acknowledge a category of experience neither subjective not objective but ""pure"" of such conceptual distinctions. While it might seem, then, that anything James says about transcendence would come out of his philosophy of pure experience, Oliver shows James as an advocate for a type of personal transcendence that owes at least as much to our subjective natural state as to pure experience. Jamesian transcendence, according to Oliver, seeks to reconcile individual growth with social responsibility. In this age of impersonal information, it invites us all to embrace our own enthusiasms, or ""delights,"" as the surest sources of personal happiness, mutual regard, and real depth in experience.

Despite the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, his work on logical theory has received relatively little attention. Ironically, Dewey's logic was his ""first and last love."" The essays in this collection pay tribute to that love by addressing Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. All the essays are original to this volume and are written by leading Dewey scholars. Ranging from discussions of propositional theory to logic's social and ethical implications, these essays clarify often misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Dewey's work, while emphasizing the seminal role of logic to Dewey's philosophical endeavors. This collection breaks new ground in its relevance to contemporary philosophy of logic and epistemology and pays special attention to applications in ethics and moral philosophy.

Leading Harvard philosophy professor William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), author of 17 books and in his day second only to John Dewey in the breadth of his thinking, is now largely forgotten, and his once-influential writings are out of print. This volume, which combines a rich selection of Hocking's work with incisive essays by distinguished scholars, seeks to recover Hocking's valuable contributions to philosophical thought.

Leading Harvard philosophy professor William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), author of 17 books and in his day second only to John Dewey in the breadth of his thinking, is now largely forgotten, and his once-influential writings are out of print. This volume, which combines a rich selection of Hocking's work with incisive essays by distinguished scholars, seeks to recover Hocking's valuable contributions to philosophical thought.

In 1922 Charles Hartshorne, then an aspiring young philosopher, wrote to Edgar Sheffield Brightman, a preeminent philosopher of religion and one of the earliest members of the Boston School of Personalism. For twenty-three subsequent years, the two carried out an unusually rich and intensive correspondence, and, remarkably, almost every letter was preserved. They are presented here along with additional material that follows the philosophers' lives and interactions after 1945, when Brightman's ill health prevented him from continuing the correspondence. Hartshorne (1897-) has been called ""the world's greatest living metaphysician."" But when the correspondence began, he was just a graduate student, while Brightman (1884-1953) was already an influential philosopher and theologian. Over time, as Hartshorne gained prominence, the letters reveal first a relationship of equals and eventually a reversal of roles as the younger man began to influence his former mentor. Hartshorne's sustained critique of Brightman's epistemological and metaphysical position eventually led to important shifts in Brightman's views. In their introductory essays, editors Randall Auxier and Mark Davies place the correspondence in its intellectual context and address the relationship between personalism and process philosophy/theology in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. Theologians and philosophers in a wide range of specialties will welcome this record of an enduring intellectual friendship.

No philosopher's writing is more charming that James's. Few philosophers have been subjected to such intense psychological speculation as James. Fewer still have had so many non-philosophical stages to their careers. For all of these reasons, professional philosophers are wary of his philosophy, which is typically dismissed as fragmented or merely popular. Wesley Cooper opposes this traditional view, arguing instead that there is a systematic philosophy to be found in James's writings. His doctrine of pure experience is the binding thread that links his earlier psychological theorizing to his later epistemological, religious, and pragmatic concerns. To make this case as compelling as possible, Cooper provides a two-level approach to James's philosophical system: the metaphysical level of pure experience and the empirical level of science and everyday life. Making sense of James is partly a matter of seeing that, on a given occasion, he is writing at one level or the other.

Despite the resurgence of interest in the philosophy of John Dewey, his work on logical theory has received relatively little attention. Ironically, Dewey's logic was his ""first and last love."" The essays in this collection pay tribute to that love by addressing Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. All the essays are original to this volume and are written by leading Dewey scholars. Ranging from discussions of propositional theory to logic's social and ethical implications, these essays clarify often misunderstood or misrepresented aspects of Dewey's work, while emphasizing the seminal role of logic to Dewey's philosophical endeavors. This collection breaks new ground in its relevance to contemporary philosophy of logic and epistemology and pays special attention to applications in ethics and moral philosophy.

Peirce's Scientific Metaphysics is the first book devoted to understanding Charles Sanders Peirce's (1839-1914) metaphysics from the perspective of the scientific questions that motivated his thinking. Deftly situating Peirce's often original and pathbreaking ideas within their appropriate historical and scientific contexts, Reynolds traces his reliance upon the law of large numbers, which illustrated for Peirce the emergence of a stable order and regularity from a multitude of chance events, throughout his writings on late nineteenth-century physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and cosmology. Along the way, Peirce's vision of an indeterministic and evolutionary cosmology is contrasted with the thought of other important late nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, such as James Clerk Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel. While offering a detailed account of the scientific ideas and theories essential for understanding Peirce's metaphysical system (e.g., the irreversibility of time and the reversibility of physical laws, the statistical law of large numbers), this book is written in a manner accessible to the non-specialist. This will make it especially attractive to students of Peirce's philosophy who lack familiarity with the scientific and mathematical ideas that are so central to his thought. Those with an interest in the history and philosophy of science, especially concerning the application of statistical and probabilistic thinking to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and cosmology, will find this discussion of Peirce's philosophy invaluable.

John William Miller's radical revision of the idealistic tradition anticipated some of the most important developments in contemporary thought, developments often associated with thinkers like Heidegger, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida and Rorty. In this study, Vincent Colapietro situates Miller's powerful but neglected corpus not only in reference to Continental European philosophy but also to paradigmatic figures in American culture like Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau and James. The work is not simply a study of a particular philosopher or a single philosophical movement (American idealism). It is rather a philosophical confrontation with a cluster of issues in contemporary life. These issues revolve around such topics as the grounds and nature of authority, the scope and forms of agency, and the fateful significance of historical place. These issues become especially acute given Colapietro's insistence that the only warrant for our practices is to be found in these historically evolved and evolving practices themselves.

In this new contribution to moral theory, Todd Lekan argues for a pragmatist conception of morality as an evolving, educational, and fallible practice of everyday life. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Lekan asserts that moral norms are neither timeless truths nor subjective whims, but habits transmitted through practices. Like the habits that make up medicine or engineering, moral habits are subject to rational evaluation and change according to new challenges and circumstances. This pragmatic interpretation of morality provides a way out of the conundrum of relativism and absolutism. Building on classical American philosophy to address current philosophical concerns, Lekan's theory revises our basic understanding of moral life and the place of theorizing within that life. Making Morality will prove of great interest to ethical theorists, as it enjoins them to measure theoretical inquiries by how well they produce intellectual tools for problem-solving in dynamic, complex communities.

In this new contribution to moral theory, Todd Lekan argues for a pragmatist conception of morality as an evolving, educational, and fallible practice of everyday life. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, Lekan asserts that moral norms are neither timeless truths nor subjective whims, but habits transmitted through practices. Like the habits that make up medicine or engineering, moral habits are subject to rational evaluation and change according to new challenges and circumstances. This pragmatic interpretation of morality provides a way out of the conundrum of relativism and absolutism. Building on classical American philosophy to address current philosophical concerns, Lekan's theory revises our basic understanding of moral life and the place of theorizing within that life. Making Morality will prove of great interest to ethical theorists, as it enjoins them to measure theoretical inquiries by how well they produce intellectual tools for problem-solving in dynamic, complex communities.

Perhaps the most significant development in American philosophy in the late 20th century has been the extraordinary renaissance of pragmatism, marked most notably by the reformulations of the so-called ""neopragmatists"" Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. With pragmatism offering the allure of potentially resolving the impasse between epistemological realists and antirealists, analytic and continental philosophers, as well as thinkers across the disciplines, have been energized and engaged by this movement. In this volume Hildebrand asks two questions: first, how faithful are the neopragmatists' reformulations of classical pragmatism (particularly Deweyan pragmatism); and, second, and more significantly, can their neopragmatism work?

John William Miller's radical revision of the idealistic tradition anticipated some of the most important developments in contemporary thought, developments often associated with thinkers like Heidegger, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty. In this study, Vincent Colapietro situates Miller's powerful but neglected corpus not only in reference to Continental European philosophy but also to paradigmatic figures in American culture like Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, and James.The book is not simply a study of a particular philosopher or a single philosophical movement (American idealism). It is rather a philosophical confrontation with a cluster of issues in contemporary life. These issues revolve around such topics as the grounds and nature of authority, the scope and forms of agency, and the fateful significance of historical place. These issues become especially acute given Colapietro's insistence that the only warrant for our practices is to be found in these historically evolved and evolving practices themselves.