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19The Metaphysics of Morris R. Cohen: From Realism to Objective RelativismJournal of the History of Ideas 78 (3): 449-471. 2017.
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9The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism and PostmodernismWiley-Blackwell. 2002.This book engages the confrontation between the foundationalist aims of traditional philosophy, the postmodern critique, and the pragmatic attempt to maintain a form of non-foundational inquiry. Through readings of the work of Peirde, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Buchler, Derrida, Rorty, and others, the author examines the nature and scope of philosophically relevant knowledge. Ambitious and important work, by a respected philosopher. Presents a clear and thoughtful analysis of key philosophical tra…Read more
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1The Modern Intellectual TraditionThe Teaching Company. 2010.Disc 1. Philosophy and the modern age ; Scholasticism and the scientific revolution -- Disc 2. The rationalism and dualism of Descartes ; Locke's empiricism, Berkeley's idealism -- Disc 3. Neo-Aristotelians : Spinoza and Leibniz ; The Enlightenment and Rousseau -- Disc 4. The radical skepticism of Hume ; Kant's Copernican revolution -- Disc 5. Kant and the religion of reason ; The French Revolution and German idealism -- Disc 6. Hegel, the last great system ; Hegel and the English century -- Dis…Read more
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5The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism and PostmodernismWiley-Blackwell. 2002.This book engages the confrontation between the foundationalist aims of traditional philosophy, the postmodern critique, and the pragmatic attempt to maintain a form of non-foundational inquiry. Through readings of the work of Peirde, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Buchler, Derrida, Rorty, and others, the author examines the nature and scope of philosophically relevant knowledge. Ambitious and important work, by a respected philosopher. Presents a clear and thoughtful analysis of key philosophical tra…Read more
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13The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism and PostmodernismState University of New York Press. 1995.This is a critique of Peirce, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Buchler, Derrida, and Rorty as anti-realists, showing that each of these philosophers affirms some form of self-undermining relativism that cannot account for itself
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11Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind (review)Review of Metaphysics 69 (4): 838-839. 2016.
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19The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-CultureState University of New York Press. 1987.Cahoone carefully develops the idea of subjectivity and narcissism using psychological theory, the dialectical theory of the Frankfurt school, and historians.
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30Physicalism, the Natural Sciences, and NaturalismPhilo 16 (2): 130-144. 2013.The most common definitions of the physical lead to a problem for physicalism. If the physical is the objects of physics, then unique objects of other sciences are not physical and, if the causal closure of the physical is accepted, cannot cause changes in the physical. That means unique objects of chemistry, the Earth sciences, and biology cannot causally affect physical states. But physicalism’s most reliable claim, the nomological dependence of nonphysical entities and properties on the physi…Read more
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19The Consolation of Antiphilosophy: Scepticism, Common Sense Pragmatism, and RortyPhilosophy Today 38 (2): 204-224. 1994.
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105Reduction, emergence, and ordinal physicalismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (1). 2008.A metaphysics of the world described by contemporary science faces the problem of the relative ontological status of microphysical constituents (e.g. elementary particles), ultimate mathematical structures (e.g. of the Standard Model and General Relativity), and complex macroscopic systems with their arguably emergent properties. Justus Buchler's ordinal metaphysics, which provides a "view from anywhere" by analyzing whatever is under consideration through its location in an order of relationshi…Read more
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46Margoline RelativismIdealistic Studies 32 (1): 27-35. 2002.Following Dorothy Gale over Thomas Wolfe, there’s no place like Clark, and it is a great pleasure to come home today, in a panel organized by one of my teachers, Gary Overvold, chaired by another, Bernie Kaplan, with yet another, Walter Wright, in attendance, not to mention my friend Bob Scharf, to comment on the work of an admired colleague, Joe Margolis. I will add to the standard list of Clark boosterisms by noting that Charles Peirce—a figure important for Joe, and for me, as will be obvious…Read more
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35Our Recent RousseauEnvironmental Philosophy 3 (1): 13-26. 2006.Paul Shepard, a Rousseau armed with modern evolutionary ecology, presents our most rational primitivism. In his work, ecology recapitulates mythology. His critique of civilization compares to 20th century critics of “alienation,” except for Shepard the break with “authentic” existence is not Modern industrialism but Neolithic agrarianism. His argument remains largely impractical. Yet his late work suggests a reasonable meliorism. He recognized that his “Techno-Cynegeticism” may find room in a po…Read more
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12Commentary on “Our Recent Rousseau”Environmental Philosophy 3 (1): 27-34. 2006.In the “Commentary” on “Our Recent Rousseau: on Paul Shepard,” the author praises Lawrence Cahoone’s comprehensive and critical analysis of Shepard’s interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of human ecology, in particular, his theories of the wild and hunting and the contributions of archaic cultures to civilization. The author then elaborates further on the importance of the Paul Shepard’s unifying ideas of evolution, ontogeny, and neoteny to the understanding of the psychohistory of human d…Read more
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34Local NaturalismContemporary Pragmatism 6 (2): 1-23. 2009.Robert Brandom's book Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism does not incorporate the larger views of any of the “pragmatisms” he deliberately invokes, such as those of the classical American pragmatists, apart from an “analytic” cohort of Wittgenstein-inspired pragmatisms that he himself favors
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98Hunting as a Moral GoodEnvironmental Values 18 (1). 2009.I argue that hunting is not a sport, but a neo-traditional cultural trophic practice consistent with ecological ethics, including a meliorist concern for animal rights or welfare. Death by hunter is on average less painful than death in wild nature. Hunting achieves goods, including trophic responsibility, ecological expertise and a unique experience of animal inter-dependence. Hunting must then be not only permissible but morally good wherever: a) preservation of ecosystems or species requires …Read more
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17Is Stellar Nucleosynthesis a Good Thing?Environmental Ethics 38 (4): 421-439. 2016.Environmental ethicists typically find value in living things or their local environments: (1) anthropocentists insofar as they have value for human beings; (2) biocentrists in all organisms; and (3) ecocentrists in all ecosystems. But does the rest of nature have value? If so, is it merely as instrument or stage setting for life? A fanciful thought experiment focuses the point: is stellar nucleosynthesis a good thing? There are reasons to believe that it is intrinsically good, that even before …Read more
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149From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology Expanded (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2003.This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies
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6Cultural Revolutions: Reason Versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and JihadPennsylvania State University Press. 2005.In this probing examination of the meaning and function of culture in contemporary society, Lawrence Cahoone argues that reason itself is cultural, but no less reasonable for it. While recent political and philosophical movements have recognized that cognition, the self, and politics are embedded in culture, most fail to appreciate the deep changes in rationalism and liberal theory this implies, others leap directly into relativism, and nearly all fail to define culture. Cultural Revolutions sys…Read more
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9Cultural Revolutions: Reason Versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and JihadPennsylvania State University Press. 2005.In this probing examination of the meaning and function of culture in contemporary society, Lawrence Cahoone argues that reason itself is cultural, but no less reasonable for it. While recent political and philosophical movements have recognized that cognition, the self, and politics are embedded in culture, most fail to appreciate the deep changes in rationalism and liberal theory this implies, others leap directly into relativism, and nearly all fail to define culture. Cultural Revolutions sys…Read more
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21From modernism to postmodernism: an anthology (edited book)Blackwell. 1996.This revised and expanded second edition of Cahoone's classic anthology provides an unparalleled collection of the essential readings in modernism and postmodernism. Places contemporary debate in the context of the criticism of modernity since the seventeenth century. Chronologically and thematically arranged. Indispensable and multidisciplinary resource in philosophy, literature, cultural studies, social theory, and religious studies.
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24American Realism, Objective Relativism, Columbia Naturalism, and Justus BuchlerTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 52 (3): 416. 2016.Justus Buchler’s 1966 Metaphysics of Natural Complexes seems so unique as to be sui generis. In it he declares that everything discriminable in any way is a “natural complex,” including every fact, substance, particular, process, universal, experience, property, mind, etc., even the concept of a natural complex itself. Every natural complex obtains in multiple orders of relations to other complexes, so each complex has indefinitely many “integrities,” each its function in some order. No complex …Read more
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10Cassirer's Interpretation of GalileoJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 (3): 268-278. 1985.
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54Buchler on Habermas on modernitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 27 (4): 461-477. 1989.The work of justus buchler is used to critique and to suggest a reformulation of certain ideas in jurgen habermas's "theory of communicative action", Most especially his analysis of modernity in terms of the conflict between "lifeworld" and "system." the difficulties of this dualistic analysis are examined. A buchlerian "pluralistic" alternative is suggested, For which the pathologies of modernity are attributed, Not to the dominance of the system, But to the condition of dominance "per se", Tha…Read more
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372Arguments from nothing: God and quantum cosmologyZygon 44 (4): 777-796. 2009.This essay explores a simple argument for a Ground of Being, objections to it, and limitations on it. It is nonsensical to refer to Nothing in the sense of utter absence, hence nothing can be claimed to come from Nothing. If, as it seems, the universe, or any physical ensemble containing it, is past-finite, it must be caused by an uncaused Ground. Speculative many-worlds, pocket universes and multiverses do not affect this argument, but the quantum cosmologies of Alex Vilenkin, and J. B. Hartle …Read more
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