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10"Good Questions and Bad Answers in Talisse"'s A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy: TalisseRobert B.Pragmatist philosophy of democracy' (review)Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 45 (1): 60-64. 2009.
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19What Pragmatism Was by F. Thomas Burke (review)Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50 (2): 304-308. 2014.Pragmatism, like every other important intellectual tradition, is best characterized as a tradition of debate. In every intellectual tradition for which internal debate is central, the substance of the constitutive contestations sometimes concerns the aims and achievements of the tradition itself. In the case of pragmatism, the long history of these contesting interpretations is well known. Recent pragmatist philosophy has been characterized by debates between analytic neo-pragmatisms and so-cal…Read more
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59Foucault across the disciplines: introductory notes on contingency in critical inquiryHistory of the Human Sciences 24 (4): 1-12. 2011.Foucault is one of the most widely cited thinkers across social sciences and humanities disciplines today. Foucault’s appeal, and ongoing value, across the disciplines has much to do with the power of his thought and his method to help us see the contingency of practices we take to be inevitable. It is argued in this introductory article that Foucault’s emphasis on contingency is as misunderstood as it is influential. I distinguish two senses of contingency in Foucault. A first sense, widely ack…Read more
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127Revising Foucault: The history and critique of modernityPhilosophy and Social Criticism 36 (5): 545-565. 2010.I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightfo…Read more
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19Terms such as open source and various modifications including open content and more generally openness have been mobilized with increasing frequency in recent years to describe many different collaborative and not-for-profit projects, products, services, and business models. Typically associated with the computer and internet industry, openness has in recent years assumed something of the status of a nascent movement. Whatever this movement is, whatever qualities it embodies and possibilities it…Read more
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49Public and Private in Feminism and PragmatismInternational Studies in Philosophy 40 (2): 47-60. 2008.
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12James Livingston. Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xii + 232. Cloth ISBN 0-415-93029-4. Paper ISBN 0-415-93030-8 (review)Contemporary Pragmatism 3 (1): 177-180. 2006.
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155Genealogical Pragmatism: How History Matters for Foucault and DeweyJournal of the Philosophy of History 5 (3): 533-561. 2011.This article offers the outlines of a historically-informed conception of critical inquiry herein named 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. The two forms of critical inquiry featured by these thinkers are not opposed, as is too commonly supposed. Genealogical problematization and pragmatist reconstruction …Read more
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26The Vanishing Subject in Laclau and Mouffe's Politics of the RealIn Jacquelyn Kegley & Krzyszof Piotr Skowronski (eds.), Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy, Lexington. pp. 85. 2013.
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33Conduct Pragmatism: Pressing Beyond Experientialism and LingualismEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (2). 2014.Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can mo…Read more
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11Robert B. Talisse, Democracy After Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. New York: Routledge, 2005. Pp. x + 162. Cloth ISBN 0-415-95018-X. Paper ISBN 0-415-95019-8 (review)Contemporary Pragmatism 3 (1): 180-182. 2006.
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1964Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian LineagesFoucault Studies 8 100-121. 2010.A growing body of interpretive literature concerning the work of Michel Foucault asserts that Foucault’s critical project is best interpreted in light of various strands of philosophical phenomenology. In this article I dispute this interpretation on both textual and philosophical grounds. It is shown that a core theme of ‘the phenomenological Foucault’ having to do with transcendental inquiry cannot be sustained by a careful reading of Foucault’s texts nor by a careful interpretation of Foucaul…Read more
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74Morals and markets: Liberal democracy through Dewey and HayekJournal of Speculative Philosophy 23 (3). 2009.One of the most vexing problems in contemporary liberal democratic theory and practice is the relation between ethics and economics. This article presents a way of bringing this relation into focus in the terms offered by two incredibly influential but too-often neglected twentieth-century political philosophers: John Dewey and Friedrich Hayek. I describe important points of contact between Dewey and Hayek that enable us to begin the project of reframing contemporary debates between ethical egal…Read more
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111Historical Conditions or Transcendental Conditions: Response to Kevin Thompson's ResponseFoucault Studies 8 129-135. 2010.
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54The Birth of the Concept of Biopolitics – A Critical Notice of Lemke's Biopolitics (review)Theory and Event 15 (4). 2012.
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151Foucault's historiographical expansion: Adding genealogy to archaeologyJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (3): 338-362. 2008.This paper offers a rereading of Foucault's much-disputed mid-career historiographical shift to genealogy from his earlier archaeological analytic. Disputing the usual view that this shift involves an abandonment of an archaeological method that was then replaced by a genealogical method, I show that this shift is better conceived as a historiographical expansion. Foucault's work subsequent to this shift should be understood as invoking both genealogy and archaeology. The metaphor of expansion i…Read more
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28In bringing the philosophical traditions of pragmatism and genealogy to bear upon contemporary debates regarding modernity, the work of both John Dewey and Michel Foucault has been subjected to misinterpretations that portray both traditions in a way that depletes them of the full force of their critical insight. The source of these misinterpretations is in many cases an attempt to squeeze the philosophical projects of pragmatism and genealogy into the mold that shapes the thought of most partic…Read more
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72Rorty’s Moral Philosophy for Liberal Democratic CultureContemporary Pragmatism 4 (2): 45-64. 2007.Richard Rorty's moral writings offer a cogent summary of the moral content of contemporary liberal democratic culture. Rorty insists on a divide between our public and private lives, yet he claims that moral progress is primarily driven by the imagination of great poetry and philosophy . A pressing tension thus emerges between private imagination and public moral justification, which is also very real in contemporary liberal democratic culture itself. I sketch a way out of this problem, which fi…Read more
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2287Putting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian InquiryCritical 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
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79I 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
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81William James's politics of personal freedomJournal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (2): 175-186. 2005.
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25Experience 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
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3Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (review)Symposium 10 (2): 625-627. 2006.
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12Review 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.
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5726Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to PhilosophyContemporary 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
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193Pragmatism as a philosophy of hope: Emerson, James, Dewey, RortyJournal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (2): 106-116. 2006.
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