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This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.
In 1969 Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? revolutionized philosophy of ordinary language, aesthetics, ethics, tragedy, literature, music, art criticism, and modernism. This volume of new essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of Cavell's first and most important book, fifty years after its publication. The key subjects which animate Cavell's book are explored in detail: ordinary language, aesthetics, modernism, skepticism, forms of life, philosophy and literature, tragedy and the self, the questions of voice and audience, jazz and sound, Wittgenstein, Austin, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare. The essays make Cavell's complex style and sometimes difficult thought accessible to a new generation of students and scholars. They offer a way into Cavell's unique philosophical voice, conveying its seminal importance as an intellectual intervention in American thought and culture, and showing how its philosophical radicality remains of lasting significance for contemporary philosophy, American philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.
“The Current State of Philosophy in the United States“ begins by asking why the sense of crisis prevalent within the contemporary humanities seems absent from American philosophy departments. Rorty proposes that this is because these departments are largely analytic and analytic philosophy does not consider itself a humanistic discipline. He then traces that view to the logical positivists’ attempt to put philosophy on the secure path of a science by developing a rigorous method of conceptual analysis. He argues that while the project of conceptual analysis had collapsed, analytic philosophy retained a sense of being a science and its sense of superiority to other traditions in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Finally, he proceeds to show some negative consequences of the dominance of this model in American philosophy departments by comparing analytic philosophy with continental philosophy and putting it in a larger academic and social context. Among the consequences are a growing isolation from other academic fields, as well as the insufficient attention analytic philosophy gives to philosophy written in languages other than English, to the history of philosophy, and to questions of social justice.
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