PHIL30700 Pragmatism

Academic Year 2018/2019

Pragmatism originated in the late 19th-century writings of two of America’s most talented philosophers and scientists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910). It continued to develop as an outlook on meaning and practice across the 20th century to today. Peirce's ‘pragmatic maxim’ was a method or test for clarifying the meaning of a concept in terms of the practical effects the adoption of that concept would have in the long run of experience. James broadened Peirce’s pragmatic method to include the effects of beliefs on believers themselves, thereby putting human beings’ most deep-seated faiths and sceptical attitudes to the test of experience. Together with John Dewey (1859–1952), the three ‘classical pragmatists’ and their 20th century successors (all collected together in _The Pragmatist Reader: from Peirce through the Present_, ed. Talisse and Aikin, Princeton 2011) challenged the traditional foundationalist conceptions of knowledge shared by both empiricists and rationalists. Pragmatists modeled inquiry, rather, on the fallibilist methods of experimental science, Darwinian evolution, and cultural change, including metaphysical and political ideas within the ambit of ‘experience’ broadly conceived. Given the open-ended nature of pragmatism it is not surprising that a wide-variety of approaches have fallen under that umbrella, from technical philosophy of language to radical democratic social critiques. This module will provide an analysis and survey of pragmatism from its classical and mid-century roots to its most recent expressions in Robert Brandom, Susan Haack, Cheryl Misak, and other thinkers.