Vincent Colapietro

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)

“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...

ABSTRACT This article offers a critique of a deeply engrained tendency to narrate the story of American pragmatism exclusively or primarily in terms of modern European philosophy. While it suggests alternative stories, it is principally a metanarrative, an intentionally polemical story about our entrenched habits of philosophical storytelling. Indeed, the pragmatics of storytelling merits, especially in reference to historical accounts of American pragmatism, critical attention. The seemingly simple question, “What are we doing when we tell the story of this movement in this manner rather than that?” is a truly important one. It is also an avowedly pragmatic question.

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

Expressed in terms of his categories, Peirce criticized Hegel for having overlooked secondness, “not mere twoness [or duality] but active oppugnancy” (CP 8.291; emphasis omitted), “the sense of shock,” surprise, and especially struggle and conflict (CP 5.45). In particular, he judged his predecessor harshly for having neglected or, at least, downplayed the role secondness, especially in the form of experience, plays in the growth of knowledge. In Peirce’s judgment, then, Hegel’s emphasis on thirdness (mediation, conciliation, integration, and the overcoming of estrangement) tended to eclipse secondness (otherness, opposition, conflict, clash, and direct encounters with irreducible otherness). If one considers what Hegel actually wrote about both experience vis-à-vis reason and, more generally, the role of conflict in the generation of knowledge and indeed of much else, Peirce’s criticism hardly seems fair. My proximate purpose is, however, not so much to defend Hegel’s thought against Peirce’s charge as to show how close Hegel and Peirce are in their understanding of the relationship between experience and reason. Beyond this, my ultimate objective is to illuminate this relationship, by consideration of the nuanced, subtle manner in which these thinkers construe this relationship. That is, my main purpose is not hermeneutic or historical but philosophical. Becoming clearer about how Peirce stands to Hegel is not nearly as important as becoming clearer about how experience stands to reason. As it turns out, however, a philological comparison facilitates our philosophical task.

ABSTRACT This article is an exploration of certain central features of the affective dimension of human lives. It moves from a consideration of moods, especially as these feature into several of Emerson's essays, to a consideration of sentiments, as they are treated by Peirce, and concludes with tones. At the center of this article, there is an attempt to bring into focus some of the most important connections among moods, sentiments, and tones. The ephemeral and variable character of moods is contrasted to the abiding and integrated character of sentiments in Peirce's sense. The article concludes with a discussion of tone in general and its bearing on democracy in particular. The topic of tone is first examined in light of James's “The Social Value of the College-Bred” and, then, in that of Duke Ellington's musical experiments in hitting upon the right sound, including the right tone. This is an ongoing experimental and improvisatory process in which “mistakes” are taken up and incorporated into the flow of the music or some other endeavor. “By their tone,” James insisted, “are all things human either lost or saved.” This text is dedicated to showing the contemporary relevance of James's claim.