Pragmatism and the Reflective Life PDF Download

Author: Stuart Rosenbaum
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739132393
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Pragmatism and the Reflective Life explains the moral perspective embedded in the American pragmatist tradition and offers pragmatist moral thought as an alternative to analytic moral theory. Following the lead of John Dewey, Rosenbaum explores what it means to make the ideal of the reflective life implicit in pragmatism central to an understanding of morality. The discussion illuminates how this ideal of the reflective life captures the value of both individual autonomy and communal ideals and encourages commitment to a radically idealistic and ecumenical hope in the power of inclusive democracy and global egalitarianism.

Author: Hilary Putnam
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674979222
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Throughout his diverse and highly influential career, Hilary Putnam was famous for changing his mind. As a pragmatist he treated philosophical “positions” as experiments in deliberate living. His aim was not to fix on one position but to attempt to do justice to the depth and complexity of reality. In this new collection, he and Ruth Anna Putnam argue that key elements of the classical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey provide a framework for the most progressive and forward-looking forms of philosophy in contemporary thought. The Putnams present a compelling defense of the radical originality of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey and their usefulness in confronting the urgent social, political, and moral problems of the twenty-first century. Pragmatism as a Way of Life brings together almost all of the Putnams’ pragmatist writings—essays they wrote as individuals and as coauthors. The pragmatism they endorse, though respectful of the sciences, is an open experience-based philosophy of our everyday lives that trenchantly criticizes the fact/value dualism running through contemporary culture. Hilary Putnam argues that all facts are dependent on cognitive values, while Ruth Anna Putnam turns the problem around, illuminating the factual basis of moral principles. Together, they offer a shared vision which, in Hilary’s words, “could serve as a manifesto for what the two of us would like philosophy to look like in the twenty-first century and beyond.”

Author: Scott R. Stroud
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056878
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Aesthetic experience has had a long and contentious history in the Western intellectual tradition. Following Kant and Hegel, a human’s interaction with nature or art frequently has been conceptualized as separate from issues of practical activity or moral value. This book examines how art can be seen as a way of moral cultivation. Scott Stroud uses the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey to argue that art and the aesthetic have a close connection to morality. Dewey gives us a way to reconceptualize our ideas of ends, means, and experience so as to locate the moral value of aesthetic experience in the experience of absorption itself, as well as in the experience of reflective attention evoked by an art object.

Author: Clifford S. Stagoll
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438473370
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Illustrates how William James’s philosophical pragmatism can help to resolve issues in everyday contemporary life. William James, one of America’s most original philosophers and psychologists, was concerned above all with the manner in which philosophy might help people to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, James experienced firsthand, much as we do now, the impact upon individuals and communities of rapid changes in extant values, technologies, economic realities, and ways of understanding the world. He presented an enormous range of practical recommendations for coping and thriving in such circumstances, arguing consistently that prospects for richer lives and improved communities rested not upon trust in spiritual or material prescriptions, but rather on clear thinking in the cause of action. This volume seeks to demonstrate how James’s astonishingly rich corpus can be used to address contemporary issues and to establish better ways for thinking about the moral and practical challenges of our time. In the first part, James’s theories are applied directly to issues ranging from gun control to disability, and the ethics of livestock farming to the meaning of “progress” in race relations. The second part shows how James’s theories of ethics, experience, and the self can be used to “clear away” theoretical matters that have inhibited philosophy’s deployment to real-world issues. Finally, part three shows how individuals might apply ideas from James in their personal lives, whether at work, contemplating nature, or considering the implications of their own habits of thought and action. “This book is the first sustained attempt to take James’s call for a lived philosophy at face value, both exploring the extent of James’s own philosophical project and furthering it in ever new directions. As is clear from the reading of the various contributions, we are given a taste of what Jamesian philosophy might or should achieve rather than merely presenting what it promises to deliver. And this is clearly novel and extremely intriguing.” — Sarin Marchetti, author of Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James

Author: Valerie Tiberius
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614556
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, do lots of research? Make lists of pros and cons, or go with your gut? These are not questions that can be answered in general or in the abstract. Rather, these questions are addressed to the first person point of view, to the perspective each of us occupies when we reflect on how to live without knowing exactly what we're aiming for. To answer them, The Reflective Life focuses on the process of living one's life from the inside, rather than on defining goals from the outside. Drawing on traditional philosophical sources as well as literature and recent work in social psychology, Tiberius argues that, to live well, we need to develop reflective wisdom: to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, to have perspective on our successes and failures, and to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part of wisdom, Tiberius maintains, is being able to shift perspectives: to be self-critical when we are prepared for it, but not when it will undermine our success; to be realistic, but not to the extent that we are immobilized by the harsh facts of life; to examine life when reflection is appropriate, but not when we should lose ourselves in experience.

Author: Kelly A. Parker
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498581064
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The essays in Pragmatist and American Philosophical Perspectives on Resilience offer a survey of the ways that “resilience” is becoming a key concept for understanding our world, as well as providing deeper insight about its specific actual and proposed applications. As a concept with multiple theoretical and practical meanings, “resilience” promises considerable explanatory power. At the same time, current uses of the concept can be diverse and at times inconsistent. The American philosophical tradition provides tools uniquely suited for clarifying, extending, and applying emerging concepts in more effective and suggestive ways. This collection explores the usefulness of theoretical work in American philosophy and pragmatism to practices in ecology, community, rurality, and psychology.

Author: John Lachs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253357187
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
John Lachs, one of American philosophy's most distinguished interpreters, turns to William James, Josiah Royce, Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Santayana to elaborate stoic pragmatism, or a way to live life within reasonable limits. Stoic pragmatism makes sense of our moral obligations in a world driven by perfectionist human ambition and unreachable standards of achievement. Lachs proposes a corrective to pragmatist amelioration and stoic acquiescence by being satisfied with what is good enough. This personal, yet modest, philosophy offers penetrating insights into the American way of life and our human character.

Author: Robert B. Talisse
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441103139
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The recent revival of interest in pragmatism has reintroduced into mainstream philosophy the insights and arguments of great American philosophers such as C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey. But it has also led to the use of the term 'pragmatism' in a huge variety of contexts, such that students and readers can find this fascinating subject confusing. Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed seeks to dispel some of the ambiguity surrounding the term 'pragmatism'. The book offers a clear and thorough account of this important philosophical movement. Thematically structured, it lays out the historical development and surveys the key thinkers. Crucially, it concentrates on the ways in which pragmatists, both contemporary and historical, have attempted to address some of the most important problems in philosophy. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to have a sound understanding of pragmatism, the book serves as an ideal companion to study of this most important and influential of movements.

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135149726X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Pragmatism is rooted in the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Pragmatism was intended, by Charles S. Peirce, its founder, as a doctrine for the rational substantiation of knowledge claims. For Peirce, what mattered was successful prediction and control. Practice was to serve as the arbiter of theory. Objective efficacy, not personal satisfaction, is what matters for fixing opinion in a community of rational inquirers.According to Nicholas Rescher, later pragmatists saw the matter differently. They envisioned subjective satisfactions, rather than objectively determinable functional effectiveness, as being the aim of the enterprise. Rescher notes that William James, in particular, had an agenda different from that of Peirce.The two pragmatisms are complete opposites, Rescher argues, in terms of claims and intentions. James's soft pragmatism abandons the classical idea of inquiry as the paramount of truth; it believes that truth is an illusion, an unrealizable figment of the imagination. By contrast, Peirce's hard pragmatism believes that the classic idea of truth remains valid. Rescher seeks to examine and explore pragmatism dialectically, with a conviction that brings pragmatism to life for specialist and generalist alike.

Author: Cheryl Misak
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199279977
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book 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. Contemporary philosophers explore this and develop the pragmatist project, showing that pragmatism is a strong current in philosophy today.