Colin Koopman

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 problematization invites the response of reconstruction just as the work of reconstruction requires the motivation supplied by problematization. This combination of genealogy and pragmatism not only yields an effective conception of critical inquiry, but also helps repair crucial deficits in both genealogy and pragmatism as they currently stand on their own.

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..

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 foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn.

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 historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history

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 Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

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

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 political philosophers of the twentieth century, most notably John Rawls, have continued to perpetuate this utopian conception of the aims of political philosophy. I then explicate an emerging alternative metaphilosophical view of political philosophy which has recently emerged in two seemingly disparate strands of political philosophy: the first strand being Bernard Williams's realist conception of political critique and the second strand being Richard Rorty's pragmatist conception of cultural criticism. The views developed by Williams and Rorty leave to the side questions about political ideals and focuses instead on definite ways in which we can improve the situations in which we find ourselves. Such improvement, Williams and Rorty provocatively argue, does not require an ideal theory of best justice.

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?