•  2307
    Putting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian Inquiry
    with Tomas Matza
    Critical Inquiry 39 (4): 817-840. 2013.
    The forceful impact of Michel Foucault’s work in the humanities and social sciences is apparent from the sheer abundance of its uses, appropriations, and refigurations. This article calls for greater self-conscious reflexivity about the relationship between our uses of Foucault and the opportunities afforded by his work. We argue for a clearer distinction between analytics and concepts in Foucault-inspired work. In so doing we draw on key moments of methodological self-reflection in Foucault’s C…Read more
  •  31
    Knowledge and Civilization (review)
    Dialogue 45 (2): 384-385. 2006.
  •  81
    William James's politics of personal freedom
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (2): 175-186. 2005.
  •  79
    I argue for a new broad-based form of critical inquiry which I refer to as genealogical pragmatism. This conception of critical inquiry combines the genealogical emphasis on problematization featured in Michel Foucault's work with the pragmatist emphasis on reconstruction featured in John Dewey's work. Rather than being understood as two opposed forms of critique and inquiry, as is commonly supposed, I demonstrate that problematization and reconstruction fit together quite well. The work of prob…Read more
  •  25
    Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses by Paul Grimstad (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51 (3): 381-384. 2015.
    In Experience and Experimental Writing, Paul Grimstad moves both forward out of contemporary pragmatism into its future and backward through the history of pragmatism to its zero moment at the proto-pragmatism of the philosophical inception of literary America in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his contemporaries. This is the moment that F.O. Matthiessen, writing backward from 1941 during exactly that period about which it is often said that pragmatism fell from its mantles, summarized a…Read more
  •  5814
    Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to Philosophy
    Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1): 61-84. 2011.
    The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foun…Read more
  •  12
    Review Essay: A New Foucault: The Coming Revisions in Foucault Studies (review)
    Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 11 (1): 167-177. 2007.
  •  65
    Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of histor…Read more
  •  93
    Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of…Read more
  •  28
    Review of Mitchell Aboulafia, Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
  •  1
    An Ethics of Dissensus (review)
    Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale 8 (1): 139-141. 2004.
  •  17
    Pragmatist Interpretations of Obama: On Two Ways of Being a Pragmatist
    Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (2): 99-112. 2011.
    This article distinguishes two ways in which a pragmatist might approach the relation between Obama's politics and the resources furnished by pragmatist political philosophy. The first way, conceptual pragmatism, specifies pragmatism in terms of conceptual commitments in order to find out whether or not those commitments can be found in Obama. The second path, methodological pragmatism, works to better understand what Obama stands for in terms of the practical consequences of his actions, speech…Read more
  •  59
    Good questions and bad answers in Talisse's a pragmatist philosophy of democracy (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (1). 2009.
  •  101
    What ought a political philosophy seek to achieve? How should political philosophy address itself to its subject matter? What is the relation between political philosophy and other forms of reflective inquiry? In answering these metaphilosophical questions, political philosophy has long been dominated by a roughly utopian self-image. According to this conception, the aim of political philosophy is the rigorous development of theoretical ideals of justice, state, and law. I show that leading poli…Read more
  •  37
    Being an introduction to a special issue on the theme of “Foucault and Pragmatism” this article offers a brief set of metaphilosophical comments on the project of building bridges across familiar philosophical divides. The paper addresses questions in metaphilosophical methodology raised by the pairing in the issue title: What is at stake in the comparison of philosophical figures like Michel Foucault and John Dewey? What is at stake in the comparison of philosophical traditions such as Genealog…Read more
  •  43
    Review Essay: A New Foucault
    Symposium 11 (1): 167-177. 2007.
  •  22
    A brief overview on the existing comparative literature on pragmatism and genealogy. This paper comprehensively introduces all of the existing literature, focusing especially on the comparative literature on Dewey and Foucault. This work is intended as an ongoing project collecting work in this area.
  •  92
    This deep presence of Foucault’s influence across contemporary theoretical landscapes signals a need for self-reflectiveness that has largely (though not entirely) been missing in contemporary uses of Foucault. While scholarship in a Foucauldian vein is obviously alive and well, scholarship on Foucauldian methodology is not. This paper develops a distinction between two methodological features of Foucault’s work that deserve to be disentangled: I parse the methods (e.g., genealogy, archaeology) …Read more
  • Review: William James. Politics in the Pluriverse (review)
    William James Studies 4 133-137. 2009.
  •  87
    Bernard Williams on Philosophy’s Need for History
    Review of Metaphysics 64 (1): 3-30. 2010.
    A rather enthusiastic account, according to which analytical philosophy was thoroughly ahistorical and Williams changed that.
  •  93
    Pragmatist Resources for Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26 (1): 1-24. 2012.
    Recent attention given to the upstart movement of experimental philosophy is much deserved. But now that experimental philosophy is beginning to enter a stage of maturity, it is time to consider its relation to other philosophical traditions that have issued similar assaults against ingrained and potentially misguided philosophical habits. Experimental philosophy is widely known for rejecting a philosophical reliance on intuitions as evidence in philosophical argument. In this it shares much wit…Read more
  •  150
    Language is a form of experience: Reconciling classical pragmatism and neopragmatism
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43 (4). 2007.
    : The revival of philosophical pragmatism has generated a wealth of intramural debates between neopragmatists like Richard Rorty and contemporary scholars devoted to explicating the classical pragmatism of John Dewey and William James. Of all these internecine conflicts, the most divisive concerns the status of language and experience in pragmatist philosophy. Contemporary scholars of classical pragmatism defend experience as the heart of pragmatism while neopragmatists drop the concept of exper…Read more