Vincent Colapietro

One criticism of pragmatism, forcefully articulated by Stanley Cavell, is that pragmatism fails to deal with mourning, understood in the psychoanalytic sense as grief-work (Trauerarbeit). Such work would seemingly be as pertinent to philosophical investigations (especially ones conducted by pragmatists) as to psychoanalytic explorations. Finding such themes as mourning and loss in R. W. Emerson's writings, Cavell warns against assimilating Emerson's voice to that of American pragmatism, especially Dewey's instrumentalism, for such assimilation risks the loss or repression of Emerson's voice in not only professional philosophy but also American culture. While granting Emerson's distinctive voice, this essay argues that the way Cavell insists on differences problematically represses recognition of the Emersonian strains in Dewey's own philosophical voice. In doing so, Cavell falsely flattens the resounding depth of Dewey's philosophical voice and narrows the expansive range of pragmatic intelligence. But Dewey all too often lends himself to such a misreading, for his writings at once repress and embody the strains of a distinctively Emersonian voice.

Questo saggio offre un ritratto pragmatista del sé e dunque una descrizione che parte dalla premessa per cui il sé è anzitutto un attore sociale incarnato, situato, che possiede la capacità di un’effettiva autocritica. Così, oltre a evidenziare il ruolo dell’azione, l’autore sottolinea anche quello della socialità e della riflessività. A differenza di molti ritratti abbozzati da altri autori pragmatisti, quello presente cerca di rendere una più completa giustizia alla dimensione «interiore» della soggettività umana, soprattutto attraverso la costruzione dell’interiorità come riflessività (il rapporto del sé con se stesso)

‘Books are the work of solitude, and the children of silence.’ Thus Marcel Proust. The writer is not the same person as the man. The writer, if any good, is a different person, a higher person or at least one who distils something more worthy than is evidenced in the blunderings and fumblings and inadequacies of the everyday character who shares the same skin. This was the basis of Proust's own blistering attack on Sainte-Beuve, to the effect that the critic substituted gossip for criticism and, incidentally, failed to recognize the genius of Baudelaire.In philosophy we have our own Proustian tendency, in the unlikely form of Karl Popper, For Popper, the provenance of ideas is supremely unimportant—and so, by extension is the biography of their authors. A healthy corrective, one might think, to the present day culture of celebrity, even at the intellectual level, and to the flood of philosophical biographies and title-tattle. At a more serious level, it warns us that we should not treat a philosopher's ideas with suspicion because (just because he was a Nazi in his lifetime or she was a communist when she was young or the apostle of equality is a snob living high on the hoof or the advocate of open discussion anything but its practitioner.

“The world is,” William James notes, “full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times. They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds”. As a radical empiricist, he takes there to be more to experience than any of our stories or other forms of account can ever capture. Here as everywhere else, “ever not quite” and “ever not yet” qualify even our master strokes. As a radical pluralist, accordingly, he takes these partial stories to be the best we can ever do. The plurality of narratives can never all be gathered into our hands and woven into a fully coherent metanarrative or even an all-inclusive story. Loose...

George Santayana was not only a poet but also a philosopher whose style, concerns, and even positions drew in his own time and continues to draw in ours the attention of poets and, more broadly, literary authors. He was, in short, a poet's philosopher. In so characterizing Santayana, however, there is no slight of his strictly philosophical achievement. The philosophical finesse with which he treated complex topics is, indeed, nowhere more evident than in his rigorous analysis of poetic utterance. The author of this essay explores Santayana's nuanced account of poetic utterance and, then, interprets Santayana's own literary accomplishments, including his philosophical writings, in light of this account. Given the attention which Angus Kerr-Lawson has paid to the rhetorical strategies and literary qualities of this singular philosopher, it is fitting to contribute such an essay to an issue in his honor.

This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere—Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires—creativity and imagination. Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehensive outlook, there remains a drive for coherence and detailed integration. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. Her theory differentiates itself from other offerings and, at the same time, is envisioned as a process of self-differentiation. Petrilli's contribution is at once historical and theoretical. It is historical in its recovery of major figures of language; it is theoretical in its articulation of a comprehensive framework. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment.

There are various reasons for taking a second look at anything at all. One reason is to discern aspects which have been overlooked; another frequently related reason is to reappraise the value or relevance of whatever is being reconsidered. A thing might be deemed worthless or negligible because some feature or set of features has been overlooked. And this way of conceiving the thing might become so familiar, so entrenched, that it powerfully, because subtly, works against alternative conceptions. In certain intellectual circles, for example, the critiques of religion have become so familiar that the religious hypothesis is not a “living option.” As John Dewey noted, familiarity is more likely to breed credulity than contempt: We take the familiar conception, containing its implicit evaluation, as worthy of our belief, simply because it is familiar. Thus, a second look undertaken from a fresh perspective is ordinarily most promising; for it is most likely to bring into focus overlooked facets and unsuspected relevancies of familiar topics.

Relazione presentata al Seminario di Filosofia Teoretica nella primavera 2015.Given the topic of the given, it would be all too easy to become entangled in highly technical disputes about Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and other authors regarding how to interpret and, then, assess, their critiques of “myth of the given.” Though I am dubious whether we could within the limits of this articlemove toward resolving any of these questions, such an engagement might nonetheless prove profitable. It would also likely prove to be invigorating, since wrestling with technical issues in a systematic manner carries a unique form of intellectual enjoyment for the properly trained philosopher. Even so, that is not my intention today. Rather my aim is simply to sketch, mostly in broad bold strokes, though to some extent also in minute, careful ones, what I take to be a pragmatist approach to this multifaceted controversy. In my judgment, much still depends upon coming to a deeper appreciation of one of the central lessons of the pragmatist movement: the recurrent need to articulate a more truly empirical understanding of human experience. Above all else, then, my reflections aim at deepening the contemporary appreciation of the pragmatist take on human experience.

From time to time, Peter H. Hare emphatically reminded me he was drawn to William James as a philosopher, not just a stylist. While Peter1 was throughout his life appreciative of James's efforts to articulate an ethics of belief (see, e.g., Hare 2003), he was skeptical of them in the context of religion. He felt compelled to hound the gods and their defenders (Hare and Madden 1969). Even so, the ethics of belief outlined and partly filled in by James provided Peter with crucial insights for developing a distinctive form of responsibilism2 (Hare 2003, 240).3In addition to the ethics of belief, James's reconstruction of experience provided, Peter argued, an invaluable resource for mounting an effective defense of..