Larry Hickman

After summarizing what I take to be the main contribution of Norton’s book––his proposal for a new vocabulary for public discourse as it pertains to environmental stability––I attempt to locate his work among some of the current debates regarding sustainability and public policy. I detail some of the ways in which this work constitutes a further development of themes he presented in 1991 in Toward unity Among Environmentalists. I discuss his prescriptions for defusing confrontations regarding environmental policy by functionalizing issues in ways that cut across historically entrenched interest groups. From the standpoint of method, I␣argue that Norton has stacked a Habermas- type proceduralism on top of a pragmatic experimentalist platform (and I add that if he had constructed his method the other way around it would not have worked.) In all this I find Norton’s proposals both imaginative and full of promise.

Rad razmatra predavanja o globalnoj etici koje je držao John Dewey tijekom svojih međunarodnih putovanja, posebno tijekom dvije godine koje je proveo u Kini . Tvrdim da je Deweyev naturalizam, utemeljen na uvažavanju načina na koje se djelo Charlesa Darwina može primijeniti u humanističkim disciplinama, pruža modele za međukulturalnu etičku diskusiju. Smatram da se neke prepreke uvažavanju Deweyevog doprinosa globalnoj etici mogu naći u pogrešnim čitanjima i krivim interpretacijama njegovog djela, poput onih koje je razvio Roberto M. Unger. Naposljetku, smatram da postoji mala vjerojatnost pojave globalne etike sve dok ljudi ne nadiđu uske nad-naturalističke i ne-naturalističke dogme i ne prihvate naturalističke svjetonazore

This article begins with a brief attempt to ascertain Nicholas Rescher's position with respect to the different versions of pragmatism mounted by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I then suggest that despite Rescher's self-described fealty to Peirce, his views are in some ways closer to Dewey's constructivism than he has acknowledged. I conclude, however, that his treatment of truth is quite different from Dewey's "warranted assertibility." Rescher's concept of truth appears to alternate somewhat inelegantly between truth-as-correspondence-to-fact and truth-as-trans-horizonal-limit

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism.