Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: Pragmatism

  • Why I am Not a Rortyan but Would Like to Be

    By Jay Jeffers ___ There is no rivalry like an intrastate rivalry. In the state of Pragmatism, the game of the week is always Richard Rorty vs. Hilary Putnam. Nothing ever gets settled, but the effort is there. This is the third and likely final entry in an ongoing attempt to settle a few things.…

  • A Pragmatic Option

    by Jay Jeffers ____ American Pragmatism has been controversial from the start. It was accused of “cosmic impiety” by Bertrand Russell, a founding father of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Rifts developed quickly even within the young school of thought, with the original pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce renaming his approach “pragmaticism,” which he thought was “ugly enough…

  • Truth Rediscovered: A Humanistic View of Rationality

    By Jay Jeffers ___ The Buddha said, “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” Or maybe he didn’t. Scholars would have to chime in on the popular interpretation through the lens of history, linguistics, and the like. Either way it’s a vivid quote. The real problem isn’t whether or…

  • My Optimism, Pessimism, and Ambivalence

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ____ Recently, I’ve noticed an ambivalence in my thinking about the future. At different times and in different moods I am sometimes an optimist and sometimes a pessimist. Some of things I believe about human beings and our relationships to one another and to the world make me optimistic, while other things…

  • What Can Philosophy Actually Do?

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Robert Gressis (Cal State Northridge), Dan Kaufman (Missouri State) and Kevin Currie-Knight (East Carolina) discuss what is and isn’t realistic to expect of philosophy. Topics include realism (Rob) and antirealism (Dan and Kevin), Foundationalism (maybe Rob) and anti-Foundationalism (Dan and Kevin), and what we do when we attempt to ground…

  • My Philosophical Temperament

    By Robert Gressis ___ I find myself to be a realist. By ‘find myself’, I mean that, despite sometimes wanting to not be a realist, I keep on returning to Realism, basically on the grounds that I don’t understand any kind of Anti-Realism. My lack of understanding can be encapsulated in the following kind of…

  • Psychologizing Philosophy: My Own Philosophical Temperament

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ Recently, I wrote an article here defending the position — held also by Nietzsche and William James — that a person’s philosophy must reflect their temperament and attitude toward the world. Different folks with different temperaments (and experiences) will inevitably have at least some different starting assumptions, respond differently to different…

  • Psychologizing Philosophy

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ___ I stand with Friedrich Nietzsche and William James when (albeit in different ways) they arrive at a similar position: a person’s philosophy reflects their temperament. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche suggested that every philosophy is “the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography.” In Pragmatism,…

  • Thought Control and Cultural Decline

    by Mark English ___ Late last year I wrote a piece about censorship and humor, alluding to the fact that in times of oppression and excessive censorship, humor tends to bubble up and create a space for the expression of dissenting thoughts and feelings. The self-expression involved here may be controlled and deliberate (as in…

  • Random Reflections on Intellectual History, Abstraction and Social and Political Values

    by Mark English Complexities Terms like “pragmatism” as it applies to philosophy and the history of ideas – most isms really – are intrinsically vague and useful only to the (necessarily limited) extent that they help to bring out persistent or more fleeting strands or commonalities in thinking within or across populations. Even the views…