Gregory Pappas

In this essay I pay homage to one of the most important but neglected philosophers of liberation in Latin America, Luis Villoro, by considering what possible lessons we can learn from his philosophy about how to approach injustices in the Americas. Villoro was sympathetic to liberatory-leftist philosophies but he became concerned with the direction they took once they grew into philosophical movements centered on shared beliefs or on totalizing theories that presume global explanatory power. These movements became vulnerable to extremes or vices that undermine their liberatory promise. I examine some of these worrying tendencies among that body of literature roughly described as “decolonial thought” (e.g., Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo). After a concise presentation of Villoro and the decolonial turn, I consider four dangers that this new liberatory-leftist movement faces and why Villoro should be a significant voice as the decoloniality debate moves forward.

Leonard Harris’s work on Alain Locke and insurrectionism are invaluable contributions to American philosophy, but for some reason his “insurrectionist challenge to Pragmatism” gets the most attention; it presses Pragmatism to show how it can facilitate insurrection and revolt against moral abominations such as oppression, racism, and slavery. For some, the implication of the challenge is that Pragmatism and insurrectionism are incompatible; for others, there is still hope that at least future Pragmatism could meet the challenge. But overall the legitimacy or soundness of the insurrectionist challenge has not been questioned. Pragmatism does have weaknesses and should be subject to criticism, but I argue that none of the arguments presented by Harris, and repeated by others, undermine the adequacy of Pragmatism in any significant way. Pragmatism is compatible or includes everything that Harris accuses it of lacking, or it has good reasons not to meet his expectations of adequacy.

Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. In his later works, more specifically in his seminal 1930 essay “Qualitative Thought”, John Dewey questioned some of the traditional assumptions about the nature and function of the qualitative in inquiry. Dewey foresaw what recent scientific accounts of human thinking are confirming: it is more complex, less linear, more emotional, affective, bodily-based, non-reflective, non-linguistic, non-conscious than philosophers have assumed. Secondary sources on Dewey have emphasized how, contrary to orthodoxy, inquiry is social, instrumental, and experimental, but for...

The work of Risieri Frondizi is an important historical and philosophical connection between the Hispanic world and American philosophy. Frondizi shares with the classical American pragmatists, especially with John Dewey, the same criticism of the starting point of modern philosophy, and a defense of ‘experience’ as the proper basis for any philosophical inquiry. Moreover, Frondizi can be read as making significant and original contributions to the history of doctrines such as pragmatism, which take ‘experience’ as their starting point.

Dewey provides an ethics that is committed to those aspects of experience that have been associated with the "feminine." In addition to an argument against the devaluation of the affective and of concrete relationships, we also find in Dewey's ethics a thoughtful appreciation of how and why these things are essential to our moral life. In this article I consider the importance of the affective and of relationships in Dewey's ethics and set out aspects of Dewey's ethics that might be useful resources for feminist writers in ethics.

we have recently seen the publication of several books on the narrative and identity of Pragmatism. Perhaps this is a sign that, after the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars of Pragmatism now have the required distance or historical perspective to be confident about the history of Pragmatism in the twentieth century. In this paper, I examine the narratives of Pragmatism in Richard Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn and Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition.1 In spite of their differences, these scholars argue for an inclusive “big-tent” Pragmatism.2 Their view of Pragmatism in America is optimistic and reconciliatory about the past, present, and future tensions that exist between pragmatist ..

The centrality of “experience” for Pragmatism has been challenged. Neopragmatists insinuate that experienced-centered pragmatists (ECP) are conservative in hanging on to a passé philosophical notion. This paper argues that, on the contrary, ECP continue to insist on experience because of its present relevance and its future potential for philosophy, but this requires understanding what the classical figures were trying to accomplish with the notion of experience. In the first section I remind readers what these functions are; the rest of the paper argues that experience continues to serve Pragmatism well, in particular in their view of inquiry. The notion of experience was what enabled Dewey to put forth a view of inquiry as guided by the qualitative that is still robust, defensible, and relevant, and that is not susceptible to the objections and dangers found in language centered Pragmatism (LCP).

The recent discovery of the original manuscript Dewey wrote in preparation to his Lectures in China is an opportunity to revisit the question of what are the key texts in Dewey’s socio-political philosophy. The assumption in Dewey’s scholarship and teaching has been that The Public and its Problems or his other books on Liberalism are the main texts to be read.1 While these texts are important, much that is fundamental and that distinguishes Dewey’s approach from others would be missed without reading the Lectures. I will provide an analysis and reconstruction of this new manuscript that supports making the text central to understanding Dewey’s socio-political philosophy and the source of insights for any...