Prophetic Pragmatism and Descending to Matters of Detail

This article names the three most urgent issues today in ethics: first, climate crisis and its impact on the poor and marginalized; second, the tragic banality of contemporary political leadership; and third, racism and antiblackness. Examining this last injustice reveals our failure in moral agency, for the first two crises derive from the incapacity of the American conscience, which has never acknowledged how racist and privileged our conscience has become. While arguing for conversion, the article also offers ways for imagining a more responsible expression of moral agency to rectify each present moral failure.

A Prophetic Pragmatist Response to Koopman’s Transitional Pragmatism

Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition offers a new insight into how to understand pragmatism, particularly by connecting pragmatism’s melioristic approach to problems with a Foucauldian genealogical analysis of the very problems that pragmatism hope to solve. Peculiarly absent from Koopman’s presentation is a consideration of Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism, which itself combined the melioristic problem-solving of pragmatism and the Foucauldian analysis proposed by Koopman. This absence is not malicious, of course, but it does bring to mind how West’s prophetic pragmatism has been generally disregarded by mainstream pragmatism scholarship.

Cornel West, American Pragmatism, and the Post-Obama Racial/Social Dynamics

Recent violent racial events in the United States, starting with the killing in Florida of Travon Martin by a white “crime vigilante” George Zimmerman, and followed in Fergusson, Missouri, by the killing of nineteen-year-old Michael Brown, by a white police officer, have provoked critical discussions about the issue of racial violence against young black males in US society. As a major crisis for black America, such killings have motivated cries about injustice from all quarters of society concerned with advancing social and racial justice. But while such calls have been made and outrage expressed in certain news outlets and by social activists “in the field” such as Black Lives Matter, there seems to have been an inaudible response from Cornel West, or one in which West deploys his theory of prophetic pragmatism as he does to certain issues he examines in Race Matters.

Prophetic Pragmatism and the Practices of Freedom: On Cornel West's Foucauldian Methodology

This essay explores the Foucauldian influence on Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism. Although West argues that Foucauldian methods are insufficient to deliver a philosophy of liberation, I argue that there is nothing in Foucault that would prohibit West from such a goal, even though a philosophy of liberation was not one of Foucault’s goals. Fortunately, one can understand West’s own project of liberation in terms of “practices of freedom,” allowing one to describe West’s philosophical project in strict Foucauldian terms.