Robert B. Talisse

In Cambridge Pragmatism, Cheryl Misak rounds out the distinctive narrative regarding Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th Century that she initiated in her 1995 book on Verificationism and subsequently developed significantly in her 2013 The American Pragmatists. In this brief essay, I address Cambridge Pragmatism in the context of the broader historical account she has been developing. In my view, Misak's account of pragmatism's past is largely correct; but I also think that the correctness of her account has far-reaching implications for pragmatism's future, implications that she has not adequately acknowledged. To preview: Once the history of pragmatism is told correctly, we see that there is little point in...

For over a decade I have been arguing that Deweyan democracy fails an intuitive test for political legitimacy.1 According to this test, a political order can be legitimate only if the principles underlying its most fundamental institutions are insusceptible to reasonable rejection. Crucially, reasonable functions here as a technical term; a principle is reasonably rejectable when its rejection is consistent with embracing the ideal of a constitutional democracy as a fair system of social cooperation among free and equal moral persons. From this emerges the corollary that a person is reasonable to the extent she seeks a political order whose basis is beyond reasonable rejection. The challenge for democratic theory...

There is a fundamental problem confronting theorists of democracy. Can a democratic society propose a philosophical account of its practices and institutions that is at once adequately robust to answer antidemocrats and sufficiently inclusive to win the assent of citizens who disagree about philosophical, moral, and religious essentials? A robust theory will have to draw upon some complex and controversial philosophical premises, and will thereby fail to be neutral about the content of these premises. Hence it will fail to respect the deep pluralism characteristic of a free society. Anything less than a robust philosophical theory, however, will raise questions of why anyone should prefer democracy to mild oligarchy or peaceful tyranny. ;This dissertation critically evaluates liberalism, the dominant attempt in the tradition of political philosophy to provide a philosophical foundation for democracy. Arguing that both the traditional varieties of liberal theory and also more recent formulations founder on the challenge presented above, the author concludes that there is a need for a "post-liberal" account of democracy, one which can answer the arguments of opponents of democracy and respect pluralism at the same time. Drawing upon the work of C. S. Peirce and in particular upon the idea of a "community of inquiry," the author argues for a discursive theory of democracy to meet this need. The discursive theory proposes an epistemic argument for democracy against tyranny and other antidemocratic regimes, but at the same time acknowledges fallibilism and thus can accommodate deep pluralism. Although the resulting democratic theory is not a liberal one insofar as it rejects the liberal doctrine of official state neutrality, it eschews the problems confronting communitarian forms of antiliberalism by insisting that the formative role of the state is epistemological and not moral

If one interprets Plato’s dialogues using the dialogical mode, then the principal philosophical significance of the work is not exhausted by the arguments put forward by its characters. Integral to the dialogical mode involves a consideration of the purpose of investigating a philosophical issue in the form of a dialogue rather than a treatise. But Plato’s dialogues should not only be understood in a dialogical mode but instructors should also teach (and students should examine) using this mode of interrogation. This paper describes a new way Plato’s Euthyphro might be taught to students, focusing less on its use as a logical primer and more on the character of Euthyphro.

For contemporary democrats, Socrates is a paradox: he is both the paragon of intellectual integrity and the archenemy of democracy. In this essay, the author attempts to navigate this paradox. By offering a revised account of the Socratic elenchus and an examination of Socrates’ objections to democracy, the author proposes a view according to which Socrates provides a compelling image of democracy citizenship. This image is then used to criticize and inform current versions of deliberative democracy.

Deweyan democracy is inherently comprehensive in the Rawlsian sense and therefore unable to countenance the fact of reasonable pluralism. This renders Deweyan democracy nonviable on pragmatic grounds. Given the Deweyan pragmatists’ views about the proper relation between philosophy and politics, unless there is a viable pragmatist alternative to Deweyan democracy, pragmatism itself is jeopardized. I develop a pragmatist alternative to Deweyan democracy rooted in a Peircean social epistemology. Peircean democracy can give Deweyan pragmatists all they should want from a democratic theory while avoiding the anti-pluralistic implications of Dewey’s own democratic theory. After presenting the arguments against Deweyan democracy and for Peircean democracy, I address a criticism of Peircean democracy recently posed by Matthew Festenstein

For well over a decade, much of liberal political theory has accepted the founding premise of Rawls's political liberalism, according to which the fact of reasonable pluralism renders comprehensive versions of liberalism incoherent. However, the founding premise presumes that all comprehensive doctrines are moral doctrines. In this essay, the author builds upon recent work by Allen Buchanan and develops a comprehensive version of liberalism based in a partially comprehensive social epistemic doctrine. The author then argues that this version of liberalism is sufficiently accommodating of the fact of reasonable pluralism. The conclusion is that the founding premise of political liberalism admits of a counterexample; there is a version of comprehensive liberalism that is sufficiently pluralistic

Contemporary liberal democracy employs a conception of legitimacy according to which political decisions and institutions must be at least in principle justifiable to all citizens. This conception of legitimacy is difficult to satisfy when citizens are deeply divided at the level of fundamental moral, religious, and philosophical commitments. Many have followed the later Rawls in holding that where a reasonable pluralism of such commitments persists, political justification must eschew appeal to any controversial moral, religious, or philosophical premises. In this way, the Rawlsian account of public political justification involves a politics of omission, where citizens are expected to bracket off their most fundamental commitments and seek justifications that draw only from uncontroversial premises. This politics of omission is necessary, Rawls argues, for political stability. But there is good social epistemic evidence for the view that the politics of omission encourages insularity among like-minded groups, and that this insularity in turn generates extremism. So omission is likely to lead to instability, not stability