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171The Great Brain Suck: And Other American EpiphaniesUniversity of Chicago Press. 2008.“Witty, acerbic, and brilliant. Halton takes on truly basic philosophical issues, but unlike the great majority of cultural critics today, he is philosophically prepared and highly competent to do so. Halton’s extraordinary work is nearly unique among current writers in its relevance, incisiveness, and philosophical power.” (Bruce Wilshire, Rutgers University) “The Great Brain Suck is a wholly original book that draws on Eugene Halton’s careful empirical and conceptual work to offer critical i…Read more
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232The Degenerate MonkeyIn Torkild Thellefsen & Bent Sorensen (eds.), Charles S. Peirce in his Own Words: 100 years of Semiotics, Communication and Cognition, . pp. 245-251. 2014.The chapter discusses the following quotation from Charles Peirce: "One of these days, perhaps, there will come a writer of opinions less humdrum than those of Dr. (Alfred Russel) Wallace, and less in awe of the learned and official world...who will argue, like a new Bernard Mandeville, that man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them 'civilization,' and who, in place of the unerring instincts of other…Read more
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198Planet of the Degenerate MonkeysIn John Huss (ed.), In Planet of the Apes and Philosophy, Open Court Chicago. pp. 279-292. 2013.In the words of Charles Peirce from 1901, “man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them ‘civilization…’” Peirce’s concept of degenerate monkey draws attention both to our neotenous or prolonged newborn-like nature as “degenerate” in the mathematical sense of a genetic falling away from more mature genomes of other primates, and also to our monkeying around with the long evolutionary narrative of foragin…Read more
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299The revolutionary outbreak in a variety of civilizations centered around 600 B.C.E., a period in which the great world religions as well as philosophy emerged, from Hebrew scriptures and the teachings of Buddha to the works of Greek and Chinese philosophers, has been named the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers. Yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and still unknown to the world, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a fully developed and more nuanced theory of what he termed The Moral Revol…Read more
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627Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic AttitudeUniversity of Chicago Press. 1986.The twentieth-century obsession with meaning often fails to address the central questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? In this radical critique of modernity, Eugene (Rochberg-) Halton resurrects pragmatism, pushing it beyond its traditional formulations to meet these questions head on. Drawing on the works of the early pragmatists such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and particularly C.S. Peirce, Meaning and Modernity is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct concepts from philosophica…Read more
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3174The Foundations of Modern Semiotic: Charles Peirce and Charles MorrisAmerican Journal of Semiotics 2 (1/2): 129-156. 1983.
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272The Reality of DreamingTheory, Culture and Society 9 (4): 119-139. 1992.Dreaming is a communicative activity between the most sensitive archive of the enregistered experience of life on the earth, the brain, and the most plastic medium for the discovery and practice of meaning, the mind or culture. Both love and war have been made on the basis of dreams, not to mention scientific discoveries. In ancient Greece dreams were medicinal parts of curative sleeping or "incubation" rites in the temple of Aesculapius, and many psychoanalytic physicians today still consider d…Read more
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162The Fetishism of SignsIn Eugene Rochberg-Halton & Eugene (eds.), Semiotics 1984, . pp. 409-418. 1984.The tendency in semiotics toward unnecessary abstractionism and antinaturalism is criticized. More broadly, a transformation is proposed from abstractionism, with its fetishism of signs, to an animism of signs in which the imagination and the signs it gives birth to not only reconnect with the biocultural heritage, but also animate an idea of culture as involving living purpose, not simply inert code. See the revised version of this chapter in my book, Meaning and Modernity.
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477Why pragmatism now?Sociological Theory 5 (2): 194-200. 1987.Across several disciplines there has been renewed interest in philosophical pragmatism in the past few years. What had been a body of thought reduced largely to the influence of George Herbert Mead in sociology, has reemerged with significance for semiotics, philosophy, literary criticism, and other disciplines. The reasons for a renewed interest in the thought of Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and a revised George Herbert Mead can be found in the theory of meaning proposed by the pr…Read more
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18Pragmatic E-PistolsEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (2): 41-63. 2011.If pragmatists conceive of thought as an internal dialogue, then why not externalize that thought as a dialogue in the form of letters to the major pragmatists concerning their ideas in the contemporary world. This piece consists of letters fired off to William James, Charles Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey, concerning key ideas from each and how these ideas relate to contemporary social thought. Queries are posed concerning what modifications of pragmatists’ ideas might be needed to…Read more
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266Bereft of Reason: On the Decline of Social Thought and Prospects for its RenewalUniversity of Chicago Press. 1995.In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose acceptance of the myths of the mind/body dichotomy make them incapable of solving our social dilemmas. Claiming that human beings should be understood as far more than simply a form of knowledge, social construction, or contingent difference, Halton argues that contemporary thought has lost touch with the spontaneous passions—or enchantment—of life. Ex…Read more
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435Peircean Animism and the End of CivilizationContemporary Pragmatism 2 (1): 135-166. 2005.Charles Peirce claimed that logically "every true universal, every continuum, is a living and conscious being." Such a claim is precisely what hunter-gatherers believe: a world-view depicted as animism. Suppose animism represents a sophisticated world-view, ineradicably embodied in our physical bodies, and that Peirce's philosophy points toward a new kind of civilization, inclusive of what I term animate mind. We are wired to marvel in nature, and this reverencing attunement does not require a c…Read more
University of Chicago
PhD, 1979
Notre Dame, Indiana, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophical Traditions |
Philosophy, Misc |
Other Academic Areas |
Areas of Interest
Philosophical Traditions |
Philosophy, Misc |
Other Academic Areas |