Matteo Santarelli

This article examines Theodor W. Adorno's engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis, especially in the late 1940s and in the early 1950s. It argues that Adorno developed a powerful psychoanalytic interpretation of fascist mass phenomena, based on Freud's theory of identification. At the same time, he exposed the limitations of purely psychological explanations of social domination. The paper reconstructs Adorno's critique of two major attempts to integrate psychology and sociology: revisionist psychoanalysis (notably Karen Horney), and Talcott Parsons' theory of social action. In both cases, Adorno rejects integration as theoretically misleading and politically conformist, contending that it neutralizes the critical potential of psychoanalysis. According to Adorno, Freud is "right where he is wrong": his psychological one-sidedness preserves a critical insight into social power that is obscured by later sociological corrections. The article concludes by identifying immanent tensions in Adorno's own position, particularly his underestimation of Freud's dialectical concept of reality and of psychoanalytic practice. It suggests that these neglected dimensions could have strengthened Adorno's critical project.

This article offers a reconstruction of Dewey’s account of common sense, emphasising its emotional, intellectual and practical aspects. Dewey analyses the similarities and differences between everyday problem solving and the experimental method, while also emphasising the tension between qualitative immediacy and the abstractions produced by science. This framework enables us to understand the political implications of common sense. The article then places Dewey in dialogue with Clifford Geertz, whose anthropological analysis of common sense as a cultural system highlights naturalness, thinness, practicality, informality and accessibility as its five defining features. Juxtaposing Dewey and Geertz suggests a synthesis in which common sense is both culturally situated and open to pragmatic reconstruction. The conclusion briefly discusses a possible application of this Deweyan-Geertzian model to contemporary debates on the nature of the encounter between anthropologists and natives.

Over the past few years, scientists and philosophers have discussed the concept of gesture as promising to overcome hyper-intellectualist conceptions of human beings. Its ascendancy reaffirmed the importance of the pragmatic, relational dimension in human experience and cognitive processes. Many questions arise when we focus on the cognitive role of gestures, especially in the new cultural landscape shaped by the digital revolution. Does the idea of gestures highlight the preeminence of bodily experiences? Does it lead to the thinning of the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals? Do gestures help us rethink the allegedly higher human capacities in an antireductionist vein? Do gestures involve reasoning? Are they purely external actions? Do they serve to communicate, or is all communication a form of gesture? What kinds of social relations are involved in the concept of gesture? According to a multidisciplinary orientation, the book inquiries into the possibilities and issues opened up by attending to a philosophy of gestures in philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communication studies. Given the current centrality of gestures, the general aim of the book is to reconsider the meaning of "gestures" and try to answer old and new questions.

This chapter deals with the importance of gestures in psychoanalysis. To that end, I will adopt a pragmatic and semiotic approach to the philosophy of psychoanalysis, drawing theoretical resources from pragmatism, specifically from Giovanni Maddalena’s theory of gesture. In this way, I will attempt to offer an alternative to an overly intellectualized understanding of psychoanalysis by highlighting the importance of incomplete gestures in psychoanalytic practice and theory. By leaning on Jonathan Lear’s interpretation, I will highlight the pragmatic dimension of transference, understood as a complete mixture of complete and incomplete gestures. In the final part of the chapter, I will briefly speculate about the relation between completeness and vague gestures.

This article presents a reconstruction of Dewey’s anthropology of interests. In particular, it aims to show the originality of Dewey's choice to place the concept of interest at the center of his understanding of human beings. This is manifested in three distinctive moves made by Dewey: (1) the critique of the reduction of human interests to self-interest; (2) the rejection of the concept of disinterestedness; and (3) the central role of both interests and values in understanding the nature of human action and experience. In the final part of the article, I will identify some problems that the Deweyan theory of interests and values fails to resolve, leaving them open for further discussion.

Jane Addams takes sympathetic knowledge as a key concept for her moral and political philosophy. However, regarding the classical objections to sympathy as a foundation for morality and democracy, some theoretical remarks are still needed. In this article we aim at showing that the main problem is not due to the absence but to the qualitative import of sympathy in democratic societies. To achieve this goal, we firstly consider Addams’ idea of sympathetic knowledge in light of the influence of social evolutionary theorizing and her distinction between individual and social ethics. Secondly, we analyze the 1894 Pullman strike and the “newsboy” case, and we argue that failures in sympathy may be corrected by a horizontal process. As a result, we consider them not only as failures but mainly as lessons to be learned towards democracy as a rule of living.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that positions from the historical tradition of pragmatism can offer insights into the role that values play in ameliorative projects. By focusing on Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative project regarding gender, I will try to show how the Deweyan idea of the circuit provides a convincing understanding of the mutual interplay between values and conceptual revision within ameliorative approaches. I propose to understand this circuit as a process of articulation, through which our understanding of an initially vague value becomes more detailed and fine-grained. To this end, I will focus on a specific aspect of Haslanger's recent intellectual production, namely the idea that ameliorative projects are inspired and organized by partially indeterminate values. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss a potential moral and political pitfall associated with ameliorative projects – i.e. the proliferation of cultural bubbles which are mutually exclusive and unable to communicate among themselves. This discussion addresses a further challenge for implementation, which is connected to the field of values, and not merely to the domain of concepts.

Abstract:"Issues of Pragmaticism" (1905) contains the only published version of Peirce's doctrine of "critical common-sensism." One of the claims of that doctrine is that common sense beliefs are invariably vague. In this paper, we seek to explain this claim. We begin by providing a philological reconstruction of the drafts of "Issues of Pragmaticism" and a comparison of Peirce's several, successive expositions of critical common-sensism across those drafts. Then we examine Peirce's theory of vagueness; we show that there is both a "subjectal" and a "predicative" variety of vagueness, and that Peirce construes predicative vagueness according to three distinct models. Finally, we assess in what sense, i.e., according to which of the three models, common sense beliefs may be said to be invariably vague.

Che cos'e la realta, cosa definisce il reale? Hegel ci ha detto che tutto cio che e reale e razionale, ma non ci ha detto che cosa e reale. Una roccia e reale o sono reali solamente i suo elementi primari? Sembrano interrogativi piuttosto eccentrici e con scarsa valenza pratica giornaliera. Eppure filosofi, scienziati e studiosi di scienze sociali si vanno interrogando sui fondamenti della realta e sulle ragioni del realismo, il costrutto teorico del reale. Questo testo per la prima volta propone in sequenza i contributi di alcuni dei maggiori studiosi di questa materia, provenienti dalle tre aree del pensiero coinvolte nel dibattito sulla reality: la filosofia, la scienza e le scienze sociali. Si tratta di testi impegnativi da leggere, seppur spiegati e commentati dai loro giovani curatori. Eppure la loro lettura vi dara una ricompensa unica come quella di un paesaggio terrestre osservato da una vetta alpina dopo averla scalata."

La critique de la philosophie de William James qu’Émile Durkheim développe dans Pragmatisme et sociologie est examinée selon deux aspects : 1) le désaccord entre James et Durkheim sur le problème des concepts et de la conceptualisation ; 2) l’échec presque total de Durkheim à considérer le thème le plus proprement sociologique du travail de James : sa théorie de l’ habit (ou habitude). Dans les deux cas, référence est faite au rôle joué (et parfois non joué) dans la critique de Durkheim par les Principles of Psychology. Malgré l’influence du contexte historique et les malentendus qui en découlent, la réception du pragmatisme par Durkheim touche ainsi parfois des nerfs sensibles de la philosophie et de la psychologie de James.

In this article I want to reconstruct some threads of the recent discussions on pragmatism and genealogy. As a starting point for this discussion, I will discuss Koopman’s proposal of a division of labor between genealogy and pragmatism. While preserving his emphasis on the centrality of problematization in genealogical inquiry, I will try to challenge his ideas about the incompatibility between genealogies that problematize, and genealogies that vindicate. In the subsequent parts of the paper, I aim at developing the hypothesis about the compatibility between problematization and vindication by discussing two different pragmatist approaches to genealogy: Hans Joas’s genealogy of human rights, and Mathieu Queloz’s pragmatic genealogy. In the final part of the article, I will sketch a possible contribution to the understanding of the normative status of genealogies, by focusing on Dewey’s concept of evaluation. More specifically, I hope to show that evaluative genealogy inquiries can preserve their sui generis normative force, without being reduced to a tool for defending and backing ready-made moral and political positions.

The notion of politicization has been often assimilated to that of partisanship, especially in political and social sciences. However, these accounts underestimate more fine-grained, and yet pivotal, aspects at stake in processes of politicization. In addition, they overlook cognitive mechanisms underlying politicizing practices. Here, we propose an integrated approach to politicization relying on recent insights from both social and political sciences, as well as cognitive science. We outline two key facets of politicization, that we call partial indetermination and contestability, and we show how these can be accounted for by appealing to recent literature in cognitive science concerned with abstract conceptual knowledge. We suggest that politicizing a concept often implies making its more abstract components more salient, hence legitimating its contestable character. Finally, we provide preliminary suggestions to test our proposal, using the concept of gender as case study.

Peirce’s anti-psychologism hinges on two main assumptions. First, logic and psychology belong to two separate disciplines – respectively, the normative sciences and the experimental sciences. Second, externalism must be understood as a crucial and inescapable epistemological criterion. The introspectionist illusion, according to which individuals have direct and epistemologically flawless access to their own internal states, should be dismissed. As Colapietro (2003) and Calcaterra (2006) observe, Peirce’s standpoint is far different from the Kantian classical account of anti-psychologism. This original take on anti-psychologism leaves room for a functional distinction between logic and psychology, emerging from a semiotic and communicative continuity. This means that psychology, unlike logic as a formal doctrine of signs, will be epistemologically appropriate for dealing with internal psychological states, on the condition that this inquiry be focused on the communicative processes through which these internal states are expressed and conveyed. Such a Peircean account of anti-psychologism forms the epistemological background of this paper. My goal is to show how Peirce’s approach to communication and semiosis can be applied in order to discuss a specific psychological theory, in this case, attachment theory. Specifically, I propose employing Giovanni Maddalena’s Peircean distinction between complete and incomplete gestures (Maddalena 2015) to account for the distinction between secure, dismissing and preoccupied attachment patterns. To this end, I will be discussing three different measurements of attachment: the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan & Main 1985), the Adult Attachment Projection (AAP, George & West 2006), and the Patient Attachment Coding System (PACS, Talia, Miller-Bottome & Daniel 2015). Throughout this discussion, I will examine the connection between the semiotic and phenomenological category of completeness, and the psychological category of security. This connection involves an interesting normative import, which I briefly discuss in the conclusions.

The Philosophy of Gesture by Giovanni Maddalena is a multilayered volume: It is a "history of philosophy" book, endorsing a challenging anti-Kantian interpretation of Peirce and pragmatism. It is a "theoretical philosophy" book, dealing with classic issues—for example, the difference between synthetic and analytic, the definition of identity—and introducing a new concept, that of complete gesture. Finally, it is a book of "applied philosophy," pointing to a further application of the new concept of complete gesture to the fields of pedagogy, morality, psychology, and literature.Dealing with all these three aspects in a single review would be impossible, maybe even unfair. Therefore, I will focus here mainly on the...