•  30
    Review of H. Joas, Die Kreativität des Handelns (review)
    Philasophical Quarterly (Scotland) 45 (179): 247-249. 1995.
  •  18
    Meaning Holism and Semantic Realism
    Dialectica 46 (1): 41-59. 1992.
    SummaryReconciliation of semantic holism with interpretation of individual expressions is advanced here by means of a relativization of sentence meaning to object language theories viewed as idealizations of belief‐systems. Fodor's view of the autonomy of the special sciences is emphasized and this is combined with detailed replies to his recent criticisms of meaning holism. The argument is that the need for empirical evidence requires a holistic approach to meaning. Thus, semantic realism requi…Read more
  •  33
    Sense, Reference and Purported Reference
    Logique Et Analyse 25 (March): 93-103. 1982.
    This paper argues for the importance of the concept of purported reference in understanding linguistic meaning and reference.
  •  82
    The opening essay of Emerson’s 1860 book, The Conduct of Life, posed, in that fateful year of threatening Civil War and disunion, the philosophical problem of human freedom and fate. The essay “Fate” is followed in the present book by a series of essays on related themes, including: “Power,” “Wealth,” “Culture,” “Worship,” “Beauty” and “Illusions.” The central question of the volume is, “How shall I live?” Appreciating both our freedom and its limits, we understand the vitality of power to acqui…Read more
  •  50
    Review of Sidney Hook, John Dewey, An Intellectual Portrait (review)
    Canadian Philosophical Reviews (6): 403-407. 1995.
    Newly re-printed, Sydney Hook’s classic (1939) work on Dewey appears with an Introduction by Richard Rorty. Hook may help us see how Dewey fit into his own time. That story is important. The new printing may also help us see how Dewey fits into our time. Rorty lauds more recent treatments of Dewey’s work, especially Robert Westbrook’s intellectual biography John Dewey and American Democracy (1991), and Steven Rockefeller’s John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (1991) gets honorable…Read more
  •  5
    Book review (review)
    with Myra E. Moss
    Journal of Value Inquiry 27 (3-4): 543-549. 1993.
  •  279
    Review of Gochet, Ascent to Truth (review)
    Dialectica, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1988, Pp. 45-58 42 (No. 1): 45-58. 1988.
    This book focuses on issues in epistemology, semantics and logic with Quine’s views always setting the themes, even if Quine does not always remain quite at center stage. Gochet, Professor at Liège and Secretary to the Editorial Board of Logique et Analyse is a prominent of Quine’s views in Europe. The author does not aim to take up the whole of Quine’s philosophy here. Rather, the aim is to “focus on a few central themes...and to treat them thoroughly.” Continental Europe not only recognizes Qu…Read more
  •  67
    Review of Boisvert, John Dewey, Rethinking Our Time (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35 (2): 409-415. 1999.
    The author's prior book, a very Aristotelian look at Dewey's Metaphysics (1988) starts from a criticism of the idea of freedom as autonomy. That theme persists, along with an Aristotelian flavoring in the present account of Dewey. "Autonomy as a model of freedom," Boisvert says, "leads in practice to a separation from others, not toward democratic community" (p.64). While it is true that emphasis on autonomy may put community under strain, we must ask if this is not sometimes needed to ensure it…Read more
  •  401
    Review of Alison L. LaCroix Ideological Origins of American Federalism (review)
    Law and Politics Book Review 21 (10): 619-627. 2011.
    Alison L. LaCroix is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where she specializes in legal history, federalism, constitutional law and questions of jurisdiction. She has written a fine, scholarly volume on the intellectual origins of American federalism. LaCroix holds the JD degree (Yale, 1999) and a Ph.D. in history (Harvard, 2007). According to the author, to fully understand the origins of American federalism, we must look beyond the Constitutional Convention of 1…Read more
  •  12
    Open Transcendentalism and the Normative Character of Methodology
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 44 (1): 1-24. 1993.
    After setting out some basic elements in Henri Lauener's open transcendentalism, in comparison with related views in Quine and Davidson, the two views surveyed converge on a moderately holistic, normative cognitivism in Lauener's philosophy of science. Though resisting similar conclusions in the name of anti-naturalism, Lauener's "open transcendentalism" is plausibly constmed as a non-reductive naturalism, with important implications for the normative determination of meanings. At the last Lauen…Read more
  •  68
    This paper proceeds from an analysis (Callaway 1992, pp. 239-240) of a role of conflict in the origin of value commitments, a pervasive sociological pattern in the development of unifying group values which transforms personal conflicts, or differences, into large-scale collective conflicts. I have urged that these forces are capable of distorting even the cognitive processes of science and that they are a chief reason why value claims are regarded as incapable of objective evaluation. …Read more
  • Ludwig Nagl, "Charles Sanders Peirce" (review)
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (3): 722. 1994.
  •  1388
    Schelling and the Background of American Pragmatism: (review)
    Arisbe, Peirce-Related Papers 1 1-12. 1996.
    The short cover-description of the present book tells that "Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) was one of the formative philosophers of German idealism, whose great service was in the areas of the philosophy of nature, art, and religion." Those having some familiarity with Schelling, and his influence on American philosophy, indirectly via Coleridge and Carlyle and more directly via Emerson and C. S. Peirce, will perhaps not be surprised to learn that German idealism itself looks som…Read more
  •  60
    Democracy, value inquiry, and Dewey's metaphysics
    Journal of Value Inquiry 27 (1): 13-27. 1993.
    This essay proposes a re-evaluation of Dewey's work with emphasis upon the ability of his philosophy to effect a realistic reformulation and development of America's tradition of humanistic liberalism. Dewey combines the tough-minded realism (or naturalism), congenial to the scientific orientation of American philosophy, with a firm conviction of the need of values and revaluation in community life. I draw on recent work of Hilary Putnam on Dewey and argue for the viability of Dewey's conception…Read more
  •  25
    Review of Larry Hickman, John Dewey's Pragmatic Technology (review)
    with Guy W. Stroh
    Journal of Value Inquiry 30 (June): 345-348. 1996.
    This book appears in the Indiana Series in the philosophy of technology, edited by Don Ihde. Hickman emphasizes Dewey as a philosopher of technology and aims to make Dewey's perspective and contributions available to specialists. Still, as claimed on the book jacket, Hickman aims at a "comprehensive yet accessible overview of Dewey's philosophical work." The link between the two projects is the interpretation of Dewey's instrumentalism as a "critique of technology" (p. xi).
  •  571
    This book focuses on issues in epistemology, semantics and logic with Quine’s views always setting the themes, even if Quine does not always remain quite at center stage. Gochet, Professor at Liège and Secretary to the Editorial Board of Logique et Analyse is a prominent of Quine’s views in Europe. The author does not aim to take up the whole of Quine’s philosophy here. Rather, the aim is to “focus on a few central themes...and to treat them thoroughly.” Continental Europe not only recognizes Qu…Read more
  •  66
    Review of D.W. Howe, What Hath God Wrought (review)
    History News Network, Online 2009. 2009.
    This is my review of D.W. Howe's 2007 book, What Hath God Wrought, Transformation of America 1815-1848. The book is a volume in the new Oxford History of the U.S.(O.U.P. 2007)--exploring the transformation of the early American republic through the period of domination of the Jacksonian Democrats. This is also the period of the New England Renaissance and the early work of R.W. Emerson. Howe devotes a good deal of attention to Emerson and his influence and thereby provides needed historical cont…Read more
  •  129
    This paper focuses on abduction as explicit or readily formulatable inference to possible explanatory hypotheses--as contrasted with inference to conceptual innovations or abductive logic as a cycle of hypotheses, deduction of consequences and inductive testing. Inference to an explanation is often a matter of projection or extrapolation of elements of accepted theory for the solution of outstanding problems in particular domains of inquiry. I say "projections or extrapolation" of accepted theor…Read more
  •  355
    Meaning without analyticity: essays on logic, language and meaning (edited book)
    Cambridge Scholars Press. 2008.
    Meaning without Analyticity draws upon the author’s essays and articles, over a period of 20 years, focused on language, logic and meaning. The book explores the prospect of a non-behavioristic theory of cognitive meaning which rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction, Quinean behaviorism, and the logical and social-intellectual excesses of extreme holism. Cast in clear, perspicuous language and oriented to scientific discussions, this book takes up the challenges of philosophical communicatio…Read more
  •  165
    Semantic Theory and Language: A Perspective (Reprinted in Callaway 2008, Meaning without Analyticity)
    Proceedings of the Southwestern Philosophical Association; Philosophical Topics 1981 (summer): 93-103. 1981.
    Chomsky’s conception of semantics must contend with both philosophical skepticism and contrary traditions in linguistics. In “Two Dogmas” Quine argued that “...it is non-sense, and the root of much non-sense, to speak of a linguistic component and a factual component in the truth of any individual statement.” If so, it follows that language as the object of semantic investigation cannot be separated from collateral information. F. R. Palmer pursues a similar contention in his recent survey of is…Read more
  •  62
    Intelligence, Community and Cartesian Doubt
    Humanism Today 13 31-48. 1999.
    This paper attempts some integration of two perspectives on questions about rationality and irrationality: the classical conception of irrationality as sophism and themes from the romantic revolt against Enlightenment reason. However, since talk of "reason" and "the irrational" often invites rigid dualities of reason and its opposites (such as feeling, intuition, faith, or tradition), the paper turns to "intelligence" in place of "reason," thinking of human intelligence as something less abstrac…Read more
  • Review of The Collected Works of John Dewey . The Electronic Edition, on CD-ROM. 63MB (review)
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 11 225-230. 1997.
  •  64
    Review of John Dewey, The Later Works, Vol. 13, (1938-1939) (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry 28 (3). 1994.
    Vol. 13 of John Dewey, The Later Works, brings this edition of Dewey's Collected Works to the fateful years 1938-1939. It contains three main texts Experience and Education, Freedom and Culture, and Theory of Valuation, plus essays and miscellany. The editors, Jo Ann Boydston and Barabara Levine, provide twenty-five pages of Appendices, and Steven M. Cahn has written and excellent Introduction. The hardback version includes a scholarly apparatus featured in each of the volumes of the series.
  •  67
    Review of Mott, W.T and R.E. Burkholder eds., Emersonian Circles, Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson (review)
    Transactions of the C.S. Peirce Society 35 (3): 629-632. 1999.
    The 14 essays assembled in this volume, along with their intensive scholarship, create somewhat the impression of a Who's Who of contemporary literary studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. All has been brought together by Mott and Burkholder to honor Joel Myerson, with the words of Emerson's famous remark to Walt Whitman, "We greet You at the Mid-point of a Great Career" (p. xi). An authority on Transcendentalism, textual and bibliographical studies, Myerson has wri…Read more
  •  76
    Review: Carl R. Hausman, Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy (review)
    Dialectica 50 (No. 2): 153-161. 1996.
    Carl Hausman is a former editor of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, a revival of one of the first American philosophy journals, where Peirce published some of his early work; and Hausman has devoted a good deal of his career to Peirce scholarship. He interprets Peirce’s thought “as a fallibilistic foundationalism that affirms a unique realism according to which what is real is a dynamic, evolving extramental condition.” The theme is an interesting one partly in view of the many recent cr…Read more
  •  15
    Review of Lee (2011) From House of Lords to Supreme Court (review)
    Law and Politics Book Review 25 (2): 22-26. 2015.
    The papers collected in the present volume arose from a 2009 seminar organized by the Society of Legal Scholars and the University of Birmingham, and convened at the Law Society’s Hall in Bristol, England. The seminar, “Judges and Jurists: Reflections on the House of Lords,” commemorated the centenary of the Society; and it chiefly focused on the transition from the House of Lords, as the U.K.’s court of final appeals, to the prospects of the newly instituted United …Read more