Gregory Fernando Pappas

John Dewey and the Contemporary “Deliberative Turn” in Political TheoryIn recent years Political Theory and Socio-Political Philosophy has experienced what has been called a “deliberative turn”. I argue against the recent proclamations of John Dewey as a predecessor, an influence, or as a founding father of deliberative democracy, and instead use Dewey to suggest some serious limitations of Deliberative democracy to deal with the challenges we face in the 21st century in our counterfeit democracy, such as the new forms of emotional and visual persuasion.. Deliberative democratic thinkers share with Dewey the concern that the quality of deliberation in our “democracy” continues to deteriorate, but they assume a restrictive “rationalism” and constricted view of what goes on “in” and “around” deliberation. As important as public deliberation was for Dewey, the “turn” that he hoped for in the philosophy of democracy was towards a view of democracy as experience

E n e s t e e n s a y o a r g u me n t o q u e l ametafilosofía de los pragmatistas es lacontribución más importante de estosf i l ós of os a l a hi s t or i a de l a f i l os of í ay es t ambi én l o que l os di st i ngue deot ros f i l ósof os. Los f i l ósof os cl ási cosamericanos y losfilósofos pragmatistas hispanos, Ortegay Gasset y Risieri Frondizi, propusieronque l a f i l osof í a debe de part i r desdel a experi enci a, es deci r, un punt o departida práctico. Despues de explicar quésignifica sostener que la experiencia es elpunto de partida, examino las razonesque tienen estos filósofos para sostenerque la experiencia es el punto de partidaapropiado si se quiere que la filosofía seaempírica y relevante. In this paper the metaphilosophy of pragmatists is the most important contribution of these philosophers to the history of philosophyand is also what distinguishes them fromother philosophers. The classic Americanphilosophers and the Hispanic philosophers, Ortega yGasset and Risieri Frondizi, proposed thatphilosophy must start from experience.After explaining what it means to takeexperience as the starting point, I examinethe reasons that pragmatists philosophershave for holding the view that experienceshould be the starting point if philosophyis to be empirical and relevant

pragmatism has been appropriated and welcomed in Latin America because there is much prior practice and circumstance that makes for a good fit, and not simply because it was an external solution to local problems. In fact, many developments have already occurred in Latin America that, although not directly influenced by John Dewey, are better examples of his methods and ideas than what occurs north of the Rio Grande.1 Indeed, when Dewey was in Mexico, he was impressed with their educational reforms,2 while Sandinista Nicaragua, as Joe Betz has argued, exemplifies “the social experimentation Dewey called for in his 1935 ‘Liberalism and Social Action.’”3This paper provides new evidence that the ideas and practices in...

The book will prove an invaluable source for philosophers and philosophy students, as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, diversity studies, and gender and race studies) to begin understanding the dynamic relationship in thinking between the two Americas. In addition to documenting the results of a new and thriving area of research, it can also function as a primer to direct and provoke further inquiry. Its essays, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American scholars, fill a void in the humanities and introduce a number of Hispanic pragmatists who have not been included in standard pragmatist texts.

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. In his later works, more specifically in his seminal 1930 essay “Qualitative Thought”, John Dewey questioned some of the traditional assumptions about the nature and function of the qualitative in inquiry. Dewey foresaw what recent scientific accounts of human thinking are confirming: it is more complex, less linear, more emotional, affective, bodily-based, non-reflective, non-linguistic, non-conscious than philosophers have assumed. Secondary sources on Dewey have emphasized how, contrary to orthodoxy, inquiry is social, instrumental, and experimental, but for...

Dewey provides an ethics that is committed to those aspects of experience that have been associated with the "feminine." In addition to an argument against the devaluation of the affective and of concrete relationships, we also find in Dewey's ethics a thoughtful appreciation of how and why these things are essential to our moral life. In this article I consider the importance of the affective and of relationships in Dewey's ethics and set out aspects of Dewey's ethics that might be useful resources for feminist writers in ethics.

The work of Risieri Frondizi is an important historical and philosophical connection between the Hispanic world and American philosophy. Frondizi shares with the classical American pragmatists, especially with John Dewey, the same criticism of the starting point of modern philosophy, and a defense of ‘experience’ as the proper basis for any philosophical inquiry. Moreover, Frondizi can be read as making significant and original contributions to the history of doctrines such as pragmatism, which take ‘experience’ as their starting point.

I attempt to find an adequate answer to the two following basic issues of an ethics of belief: How do we determine what we ought to believe? What dispositions and abilities ought one to develop in order to lead a responsible "doxastic life"? I consider first how the traditional but still predominant view is in need of a radical revision and then propose a new and more promising pragmatic position. ;In an introductory chapter I elucidate the scope, richness, and contemporary relevance of the above issues. In the second chapter I show the inadequacy of the "epistemicist" ethics of belief. This view assumes the ideal of the epistemically responsible believer and holds that the only legitimate justification for any belief comes from an epistemic point of view. I argue that the restriction to epistemic considerations, goals, and virtues is unwarranted, and that even the most flexible recent versions of this tradition are not without difficulties. ;In third chapter I consider the alternative view of William James. I argue that this view avoids many of the pitfalls of the epistemic tradition. Convinced that the views of William James on the ethics of belief have not been given their due, I try to develop a treatment of the topic that goes beyond the usual discussions of "The Will to Believe" and considers all of James' published and unpublished manuscripts. James' view suggests that a pragmatists needs to be committed to a "situation" ethics of belief. James also takes us in the direction of a more inclusive ideal, a more promising and flexible understanding of rationality. ;In the final chapter, I propose a basic sketch of a pragmatist position which goes beyond James and is nurtured by the insights of John Dewey. I first consider what are the fundamental differences between the traditional view presented in Chap II and a general pragmatic approach to the issues of the ethics of belief. Then, in the remainder of the chapter, I examine the plausibility of complementing the situation approach with a virtue approach. Pragmatism is presented as taking a positive stand on what constitutes an ideal believer and its ideal community or way of life

there has been a recent resurgence of pragmatism1 in sociopolitical theory, one in which pragmatism is presented as offering an alternative and promising approach to nonideal theories of justice. This may seem ironic since the record of the classical pragmatists on being explicit about justice or the injustices of their time in their philosophical corpus is a mixed one at best. However, this has not stopped recent philosophers from continuing to draw from the philosophical resources in this tradition to address the injustices of today. The title of the 2014 SAAP presidential address by Ken Stikkers was “Toward a..