Review of Theorizing Power by Jonathan Hearn. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. (original) (raw)

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, XII-1 | 2020

2020

The paper will focus on Rorty’s project as it emerges in the compelling introductions to his books from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards. Even disagreeing with his conclusions, some interesting items suggest that Rorty was a legitimate member of the pragmatist family and that he shared with classic pragmatists much more than a reader can see at first glance. First, Rorty understood better than anyone else that the fight against Kant’s rationalism is crucial to pragmatism considered as a whole. He paralleled Kantism with the history of explaining knowledge as a mirroring representation and he wanted to get rid of it. Second, Rorty shared with classic pragmatists what I call the “synthetic drive” of philosophy, namely, the view of philosophy as the habit of action of looking at anything in a way that makes it “hang together with everything else.” Third, the outcome of the synthetic drive is conceiving philosophy as a transformative activity. In all these cases, Rorty took r...

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV-2 | 2012

2017

Dewey’s influence is seldom mentioned in the literature when the relationships between Wittgenstein and pragmatism are addressed. Yet, it should be known that Dewey’s philosophy is clearly echoed in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, as it is expressed in his Philosophical Investigations. In particular, Dewey’s Experience and Nature develops many creeds also taken up by Wittgenstein: for instance, the critic attitude towards artificial notions that break with primary experience (e.g., the “Self”), the will to bring philosophy back to the ordinary, or the emphasis laid on the necessity to pay attention to what lies open to the view. Consequently, the influence of pragmatism on Wittgenstein is far from being limited to the influence of C. S. Peirce or of

Bacon Pragmatism and Its Prospects

The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism, 2022

This chapter draws on the work of Robert B. Brandom, Huw Price, Cheryl Misak, Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin to sketch a narrative suggesting that the most interesting and important work in contemporary pragmatism is that which, explicitly or implicitly, brings together its theoretical commitments in epistemology and in political theory.

The Pragmatist Enlightenment (and its Problematic Semantics

Classical American pragmatism can be viewed as a minor, parochial philosophical movement that was theoretically derivative and practically and politically inconsequential. From this point of view—roughly that of Russell and Heidegger (Mandarins speaking for two quite different philosophical cultures)—it is an American echo, in the last part of the nineteenth century, of the British utilitarianism of the first part. What is echoed is a crass shopkeeper's sensibility that sees everything through the reductive lenses of comparative profit and loss. Bentham and Mill had sought a secular basis for moral, political, and social theory in the bluff bourgeois bookkeeping habits of the competitive egoist, for whom the form of a reason for action is an answer to the question 'What's in it for me?'. James and Dewey then show up as adopting this conception of a practical reason and extending it to the theoretical sphere of epistemology, semantics, and the philosophy of mind. Rationality in general appears as instrumental intelligence: a generalized capacity for getting what one wants. From this point of view, the truth is what works; knowledge is a species of the useful; mind and language are tools. The instinctive materialism and anti-intellectualism of uncultivated common sense is given refined expression in the form of a philosophical theory. The utilitarian project of founding morality on instrumental reason is notoriously subject to serious objections, both in principle and in practice. But it is rightfully seen as the progenitor of contemporary rational choice theory, which required only the development of the powerful mathematical tools of modern decision theory and game theory to emerge (for better or worse) as a dominant conceptual framework in the social sciences. Nothing comparable can be said about the subsequent influence of the pragmatists' extension of instrumentalism to the theoretical realm. In American philosophy, the heyday of Dewey quickly gave way to the heyday of Carnap, and the analytic philosophy to which Carnap's logical empiricism gave birth supplanted and largely swept away its predecessor. Although pragmatism has some prominent contemporary heirs and advocates—most notably, perhaps, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam— there are not many contemporary American philosophers working on the central topics of truth, meaning, and knowledge who would cite pragmatism as a central influence in their thinking.