Dewey and Rorty’s Pragmatism and Bioethics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Arras ◽  
James Childress ◽  
Matthew Adams
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the “classical” roots of American pragmatism, and explains the ongoing importance understanding these roots holds for contemporary bioethics. It begins by outlining some central themes from the work of John Dewey, particularly his understanding of principles. The chapter then examines the relevant aspects of Richard Rorty’s philosophy and explains the way in which Rorty was influenced by Dewey, despite parting company with him on several important issues. Both the appeal and the limitation of these two authors’ work is brought into focus, in order to prepare the way for the discussion of “freestanding” pragmatism in chapter 7.

The Philosophic Origins of Deliberative Ideals

2018 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Simone Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Intellectual Heritage ◽  
The Way

Deliberative democracy is a relatively recent development in democratic theory. But the theorists and practitioners of deliberative democracy often reach far back for philosophical and theoretic resources to develop the core ideas. This chapter traces some of those sources and ideas. As deliberative democracy is itself a somewhat contested theory, the chapter does not present a linear story of intellectual heritage. Instead it draws on a variety of sometimes disparate sources to identify different ideals that become stressed in different versions of deliberation and deliberative democracy. The philosophic sources canvased include Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey and American Pragmatism, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. The chapter pays special attention to the way different philosophical sources speak to the balance between the epistemic and normative claims of deliberative democracy.

Democracy and Everyday Life

2015 ◽  
pp. 6-41
Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
The Self ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
National Community ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
The Way

In chapter 1, democracy is analyzed as everyday life practices. American pragmatism provides theoretical underpinnings for my approach. George Herbert Mead’s and John Dewey’s political concepts are interpreted as showing a passage from everyday life to politics. While G.H. Mead depicts how communication creates the self and, consequently, how politics can be treated as a universalization of everyday life practices, John Dewey describes the way in which democracy becomes a community’s form of life. Both show that community is not inevitably hostile to liberalism, but it can enhance liberal ideals of individual freedom and autonomy Therefore, the pragmatist concept of community is relevant to contemporary discussions on the relationships between community, especially the national community, and democracy, because it transcends the communitarian liberal debate.

Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
The Self ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
Infantile Development

Together with Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey, George Herbert Mead is considered one of the classic representatives of American pragmatism. He is most famous for his ideas about the specificities of human communication and sociality and about the genesis of the ‘self’ in infantile development. By developing these ideas, Mead became one of the founders of social psychology and – mostly via his influence on the school of symbolic interactionism – one of the most influential figures in contemporary sociology. Compared to that enormous influence, other parts of his philosophical work are relatively neglected.

Pragmatism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Crick
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
The State ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Secondary Function ◽  
Common World

When John Dewey announced that communication was the most wonderful of all affairs, he recognized the centrality of communication within the tradition of American pragmatism. In other traditions of philosophy, such as idealism or empiricism, communication certainly played a role, but usually it was a secondary function of transmitting ideas from one mind to another. In idealism, ideas were discovered through intuitive revelation of the whole and only later expressed through transcendent eloquence, whereas in empiricism, particular data was attained purely by the senses and communication served a kind of documentary function of fact gathering. Pragmatism, however, inverted this traditional hierarchy. By arguing that the meaning of our ideas was only found in their effects and consequences in experience, particularly those consequences brought about through shared experience, pragmatists made communication both the origin and consummation of knowledge—regardless if that knowledge was practical, scientific, aesthetic, or social. Consequently, pragmatists believed that improving the quality of communication practices was central to improving not only the state of knowledge but the quality of our experience living together in a common world.

scholarly journals Problems All the Way Down

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642096638
Author(s):  
Martin Savransky
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
French Philosophy ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Modern Image ◽  
The Way

Besieged by ongoing economic crises, global health emergencies, geopolitical instabilities, ecological devastation, and growing political resentments, the intractable nature of the problems that configure the present has never loomed larger or more darkly. But what, indeed, is a problem? Problematising the modern image that treats problems as obstacles to be overcome by the progress of technoscientific knowledge and policy, this introductory article lays the groundwork for a generative conceptualisation of problems. Reweaving intercontinental connections between traditions of French philosophy and American pragmatism, it proffers a conception of the problematic as a mode of existence that is irreducible to the subjective, the methodological, or the epistemological. Problems go all the way down and up, requiring nothing less than an art of metamorphosis capable of engendering processes of creation, invention, and transformation in whose hold bodies and practices, knowledges and lives, thoughts and worlds, are done and undone, made and remade.

scholarly journals The Subterranean Influence of Pragmatism on the Vienna Circle: Peirce, Ramsey, Wittgenstein

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Misak
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
History Of Analytic Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
The Way

<p>An underappreciated fact in the history of analytic philosophy is that American pragmatism had an early and strong influence on the Vienna Circle. The path of that influence goes from Charles Peirce to Frank Ramsey to Ludwig Wittgenstein to Moritz Schlick. That path is traced in this paper, and along the way some standard understandings of Ramsey and Wittgenstein, especially, are radically altered.</p>

Public relations: Theorizing the contestation of security technology

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 531-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Monsees
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Security Technology ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Security Practices ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

This article contributes to the emerging literature on publics within critical security studies. Its particular focus is on contestation in the context of diffuse security technology. Contemporary security practices are characterized by diffusion and dispersion. As a result, contestation of security technology is also dispersed and diffuse and requires an account of publics that is sensitive to this aspect. The article conceptualizes ‘multiple publics’ as a mode of fundamental contestation of established political institutions. In order to do so, it discusses previous approaches to sociotechnical controversies and material participation. As a result of this discussion, it becomes apparent that we need a concept of publics that does not reduce political contestation to a pre-existing set of institutions. I develop a notion of publicness that emphasizes the way in which publics are embedded in societal struggles. This is achieved by reading John Dewey as a theorist to whom contestation is a vital part of democracy. It becomes possible to understand contestation against diffuse security practices – such as surveillance – as forms of emerging publics, even though they might not feed back into governmental decisionmaking.

Individual

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-263
Author(s):  
James W. Underhill ◽  
Mariarosaria Gianninoto
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Chinese Economy ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
The People ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This chapter treats the individual as a conceptual problem, both a modern ideal and a European characteristic. But the authors set out by considering the European traditions that have warned against excessive individualism, from the Church, from Marxists, and even from those who are now seen today as the champions of individual rights (such as John S. Mill). The enlightened individualism of William James and John Dewey, and the celebration of the individual by American poets such as Walt Whitman, is contrasted with Marxist objections to the keyword. Milan Kundera’s story about Ludvík, in The Joke, shows the way Czech communists mistrusted individualists and considered them to be enemies of the people. The Chinese section treats ‘individual’ as a foreign term, like citizen, that is introduced to Chinese after being borrowed from Japanese. The authors argue that the keywords used to denote the individual in Chinese and other languages have never been neutral. Clearly perceived in negative terms for many decades in China, the authors explore the way citizens began to discuss individual rights and individual obligations when the Chinese economy and the society began to open up after 1978.

Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy

2018 ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ecological View ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

Chapter 4 makes the case that the work of Eliot and Lewes exemplifies a pragmatist understanding of knowledge that is centred on the idea of “experience as experiment” (Jay) or “experience as a craft” (Sennett). Distinguishing between two main senses of ‘experience’, practical wisdom and intense awareness, the chapter traces the manifold implications of that term through G.H. Lewes’s five volume fragment Problems of Life and Mind, Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy. Moreover, close readings of these texts are interwoven with references to the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism, as represented by the work of William James and John Dewey. Briefly, my main argument is that these Pragmatist writers shared with their Victorian predecessors an ecological view of experience as an incipient pattern, an advancing middle between the past and the future as well as inside and outside, or subject and object, that essentially lacks anything like a firm ground.

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