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Product Description
Pragmatism is the view that our
philosophical concepts must be connected to our practices - philosophy
must stay connected to first order inquiry, to real examples, to
real-life expertise. The classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce,
William James, and John Dewey, put forward views of truth, rationality,
and morality that they took to be connected to, and good for, our
practices of inquiry and deliberation. When Richard Rorty, the
best-known contemporary pragmatist, looks at our practices, he finds
that we don't aim at truth or objectivity, but only at solidarity, or
agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away
with saying. There is, however, a revisionist movement amongst
contemporary philosophers who are interested in pragmatism. When these
new pragmatists examine our practices, they find that the trail of the
human serpent is over everything, as James said, but this does not toss
us into the sea of post-modern arbitrariness, where truth varies from
person to person and culture to culture. The fact that our standards of
objectivity come into being and evolve over time does not detract from
their objectivity. As Peirce and Dewey stressed, we are always immersed
in a context of inquiry, where the decision to be made is a decision
about what to believe from here, not what to believe were we able to
start from scratch - from certain infallible foundations. But we do not
go forward arbitrarily. That is, these new pragmatists provide accounts
of inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and
hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one's subject matter
right. The best of Peirce, James, and Dewey has thus resurfaced in
deep, interesting, and fruitful ways, explored in this volume by David
Bakhurst, Arthur Fine, Ian Hacking, David Macarthur, Danielle Macbeth,
Cheryl Misak, Terry Pinkard, Huw Price, and Jeffrey Stout.
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| Tags: inquiry, practices, pragmatists, truth, connected |
