Description
Book SynopsisPragmatism 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 pers
Trade ReviewReview from previous edition this excellent collection...[is] consistently engaging. * Henry Jackman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; 1. On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism ; 2. On Not Being a Pragmatist: Eight Reasons and a Cause ; 3. Relativism, Pragmatism, and the Practice of Science ; 4. Pragmatism and Deflationism ; 5. Pragmatism, Quasi-Realism, and the Global Challenge ; 6. Pragmatism and Ethical Particularism ; 7. Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism? ; 8. Pragmatism and Objective Truth
