Colin Koopman

The historical specificity of Michel Foucault’s practice of critical genealogy offers a valuable model for political theory today. By bringing into focus its historical attention to detail, we can locate in Foucault’s genealogical philosophy an alternative to prominent assumptions in contemporary political theory. The work of political theory is often positioned in light of an assumed goal of staking political theory to certain political positions, judgments, or normative determinations that already populate the terrain of politics. This goal may be illusory; certainly it is not requisite. The alternative model of political theory in Foucault’s work involves resolutely refusing to take positions in politics so as to enact specific critical politicizations on the terrain of the political. Such a practice of ‘critique without judgment’ is dependent upon the historical attention to specificity brought to bear in genealogical work. This history-centered genealogical model is instructively exemplified in Foucault’s under-discussed introduction to his book Herculine Barbin. Foucault’s curation and discussion of the Barbin dossier offers a concise account of how Foucauldian genealogy engages with historical specificity in order to politicize its objects of inquiry without reducing its own work to the task of issuing a political judgment.

William James's writings on morality form a vexed collection. Most philosophers regard James as having contributed primarily to epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology, viewing his moral philosophy as secondary, derivative, and accordingly uninteresting for contemporary debates. Among James's writings on moral matters, surely the most infamous is "The Will to Believe." Often read as primarily a contribution to epistemology or philosophy of religion,1 a number of critics spanning well over one hundred years of readership argue that "The Will to Believe" attempts to foist an incredible ethics of belief, one that is problematic in that it defends believing in precisely that which has not been credited as being...

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 Genealogy and Pragmatism? How can we most effectively develop comparative work across the entrenched divides, which such comparative work often labors to overcome?

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 move beyond these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another.

In 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 participants on both sides of the modernity debates. This mold can usually be traced back to the work of the influential sociologist, political economist, and philosopher Max Weber. One unfortunate residue of the subtle dominance of Weberian concepts in contemporary debates over modernity is that many thinkers who operated largely outside of these concepts cannot be brought into these debates without filtering their thought through this conceptual prism. In the case of Dewey and Foucault, their contributions to our understanding of the basic problems of modernity are widely misunderstood due to being filtered through Weberian concepts that simply were not central in Dewey's or Foucault's thinking. By distancing Dewey and Foucault from Weber as concerns their interpretations of modernity a significant point begins to emerge: a hitherto unnoticed convergence between pragmatism and genealogy. This convergence is significant because comparative analyses of pragmatism and genealogy, like those of these two traditions and Weber described above, generally tend to miss the important points of resonance which prove these traditions much closer than is commonly thought. After explicating Weber, Dewey, and Foucault I will conclude my discussion by considering briefly the attractive philosophical possibilities of combing Dewey's work on inquiry as reconstructive problem-solving with Foucault's work on critique as genealogical problematization.

Recent developments in contemporary pragmatist thought have the potential to help reshape our understandings of pragmatism in philosophy of education. We first survey the development of pragmatism as founded in experience, moving through linguistic pragmatism, to a newer actionistic approach in conduct pragmatism. Conduct pragmatism prioritises action over both experience and discursive thought in ways that can be central to educational activity and projects. Conduct pragmatism so conceived has the potential to alter and shift how philosophers of education relate to pragmatist thought and in the second part of the paper we outline some of these potentials. We indicate the possibilities for pragmatist philosophy of education to engage with diverse bodies of thought, moving away from an insular focus on one or two philosophers, and a diversity of locations where philosophy is active and conducted.

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 as “one extraordinarily concentrated moment of expression.”1 Grimstad, much like Matthiessen, moves American thought forward by first pressing it backward through those literary events just before philosophical pragmatism..

Much attention is focussed on recent debates in contemporary political philosophy concerning the relative merits of ideal theory and non-ideal theory. In one of their many forms, these debates take shape as a realist challenge to idealistic or utopian approaches to normative political theory. This article shows that the philosophical tradition of pragmatism both instructively anticipates and also, more importantly, can today contribute to contemporary realism. It is shown how a political pragmatism, particularly one centred in William James’ work, helps frame two key contributions that would be resources for the realist challenge to ideal theory. First is an orientation towards unruly pluralism as a feasibility condition that should constrain political theorising. Second is a procedural norm of inclusive tolerance that can help enact the motion of a liberal political vision under the constraints of unruly pluralism.

William James’s moral and political thought was remarkably well adapted to its historical context, in particular to the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a generalized culture of uncertainty, contingency, and probability that called into question traditional conceptions of sovereign selfhood and autonomous freedom. Facing the solidification of numerous apparatus of chance, James developed a strenuous ethics rooted in a conception of freedom as self-transformation. That this ethics was attuned to the pressing problematics of his day is shown by sideways glances at his contemporaries Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, as well as then-emergent forms of everydayness such as personal health insurance. Such an ethics remains a valuable source of freedom today insofar as we remain bound to chance as an ongoing problematic conditioning our moral possibilities.

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-called ‘American’ classico-pragmatisms. Long before these contemporary debates, Arthur Lovejoy wrote provocatively of thirteen pragmatisms. Before Lovejoy there was much jousting between Charles Sanders Peirce and William ..

Terms 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 enables, it is still in the process of its emergence. This presents particular difficulties for understanding openness insofar as emergent practices are by definition not yet stabilized. This paper is an attempt to discern the nascent forms of stability already extant in the emerging world of openness. We begin with a brief history culminating in the near future. We then summarize the limited conclusions of an initial inquiry into these emerging openness practices which we have conducted in the context of an orientation for inquiry recently put forward by Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett. The bulk of the paper is devoted to elaborating openness equipment in terms of the analytic and synthetic categories made available by Rabinow and Bennett's Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms. On the basis of this inquiry we return in the final section to reflection on the Diagnostic itself in an attempt to critically delineate its positive and negative usages for our inquiry.

Chris Voparil’s Reconstructing Pragmatism builds the best case to date that the neopragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty decisively and productively reshaped the lineage of pragmatist philosophy. In developing new directions for pragmatism, the book seeks to press past a number of recent debates. One such debate concerns the relative priority of experience and language as methodological starting points for pragmatist philosophy. While Voparil seeks to abandon this debate as outworn, this review argues that the issue of pragmatism’s methodological apparatus cannot be easily set aside. Only by addressing head-on the disadvantages of experience-first pragmatism and language-first pragmatism can a next iteration of pragmatist philosophy properly develop a third methodological option, tantalizingly noted by Voparil, of a practice-first pragmatism.

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, speeches, and policies. It is argued that contemporary pragmatists too often neglect the methodological approach

This review essay is occasioned by two books on the moral and political thought of William James. Sarin Marchetti’s Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James and Trygve Throntveit’s William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic pose crucial questions for how we are to frame, interpret, and assess the philosophical contributions of William James more than one hundred years after his passing. In offering interpretations of James as contributing to social and political questions through his moral philosophy, both books raise important questions that bear on contemporary debates in political philosophy between ideal theorists and political realists. If ideal theorists put moral philosophy first and extract a political vision therefrom, political realists seek to begin theoretical reflection in the specifically political circumstances of our lives. This review essay is centered on the following question: through which of these two lenses should the writings of William James be received?