Diana Heney

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the performance called for by being human is rational flourishing and a life that falls short of flourishing will fail to constitute a life lived in accordance with the norms governing human kind in virtue of its function. Against this constitutivist story, a puzzle arises: On Aristotle's criteria, it looks impossible for a person with a mental disorder to flourish. I consider whether this puzzle can be satisfactorily addressed without abandoning Aristotelian constitutivism. I regard this as a puzzle worthy of serious engagement because there is a tension between the adoption of Aristotelian virtue ethics as a normative backbone for applied ethics and the possibility that the theory would consign many, many people to being incapable of virtue or flourishing. I first set out the basic commitments of a constitutivist Aristotelian account and show how it generates the hypothesis that a person with mental disorder could never flourish. I then present two contemporary concepts of mental disorder—one from the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and one from philosopher George Graham's The Disordered Mind. I show that Graham's treatment of mental disorder supplies the basis for a compelling response to the puzzle for constitutivism. That response is rooted in his conceptualization of disorder as involving truncated rather than absent rationality. I suggest that Aristotle's discussion of death can be construed as supporting a second response. Finally, I discuss possible clinical implications under the auspices of caring constitutivism, which treats Aristotle's account of the human function as a basis from which ideals of rationality and recovery can be empathetically developed.

One of the enduring themes of pragmatism is that truth is group work. Knowing better requires knowing together. In epistemological matters, there is no them and us – only us. But in our contemporary world, we stand in a strange moment with respect to knowledge communities: we have both incredible access to information about distant places and peoples, and the formation of epistemic bubbles, insular information silos within which agreement is prized and inquiry curtailed. For advocates of free and open inquiry, these may seem like dark days. In this paper, I have two purposes: to develop the epistemic basis for broadening our knowledge communities, and to consider what habits of mind and action a Peircean pragmatist form of cosmopolitanism can concretely recommend in our contemporary context. I argue that the normativity which most clearly transcends borders is epistemic normativity. The pervasive importance of epistemic norms in daily life is sufficiently widespread to demand universal concern for others as epistemic agents.

When we face an equation with an unknown variable, we ‘solve for x’, using methods that allow us to isolate and identify the unknown. Stigma is a known variable in health care equations, but remains impactful in a variety of ways that are not fully mapped or understood. In other words, stigma is a known unknown: it presents potential obstacles to the delivery of effective health care, but what kind of obstacles, of what size and significance, and for whom is often unclear. This paper investigates what Erving Goffman called the ‘stigma situation’: ‘the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance.’ The core argument is that to successfully incorporate the experiential knowledge of mental health care service users, we must first solve for stigma—that is, we must determine the nature and scope of its significance, and then mitigate its effects. The present paper begins by demonstrating that stigma in mental health care remains an obstacle worthy of sustained attention. It then discusses typical methods taken in efforts to destigmatize mental illness, and suggests that additional work is needed in the clinical context of mental health care. The pervasiveness and complexity of stigma requires diligence in clinical settings to integrate the experience of mental health care service users and work towards an adequate model of recovery.

The subject of this chapter is the engagement with ethics that permeates pragmatism. My tasks are to identify contributions that pragmatists have made to philosophical ethics, to identify some challenges that may be associated with taking a pragmatist ethics on board, and to gesture toward possible next steps for pragmatist ethics. The tasks just described, arranged in that way, have a kind of intuitive order – what’s on offer; what’s trouble; what’s next? Despite the plausibility of proceeding in the intuitive way, I think there is something to be gained by starting with the troubles, for in doing so we can perhaps begin to clear the way for making good use of pragmatism’s contributions in our own times and on our own terms.

The question of what makes a life go well for the person living it is a perennial philosophical concern. It is also, as pragmatist C. I. Lewis suggests, an existential predicament: “How to cook up a good life, out of whatever ingredients, or of the ingredients found in the cupboard, is indeed the practical problem of every man. But it would be an utterly hopeless problem if he did not know what manner of thing he was wishing to achieve” (1970 [1950]). In this chapter, I demonstrate that methodological pragmatism offers a productive approach for questions about well-being—that thing we are wishing to achieve—and offers us preliminary answers through its vindication of a form of objectivism.

In this paper, I argue that Huw Price’s widely read “Truth as Convenient Friction” overstates the onerousness, and underrates the utility, of the ontological commitments involved in Charles S. Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth. This argument comes in three parts. First, I briefly explain Peirce’s view of truth, and relate it to his account of assertion. Next, I articulate what I take Price’s grievance against Peirce’s view to be, and suggest that this criticism misses the target. Finally, I argue that Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth has greater explanatory power than the narrowly linguistic version put forward by Price, such that even the ontology-averse should accept it

This paper1 aims to develop a model of practitioner narrative competence specifically for mental health care. I begin by considering the status of narratives as a form of evidence. Following Rita Charon and Cheryl Misak, I claim that there is no distinction to be made between evidence-based medicine and narrative medicine. I then explore Charon’s model of practitioner narrative competence, and suggest that it can be fruitfully adapted for mental health care contexts, a project for which I employ Jennifer Radden and John Z. Sadler’s psychiatric ethics. This project brings together two independently promising accounts to develop what I refer to as the adapted model of...

In addition to being a founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce was a scientist and an empiricist. A core aspect of his thoroughgoing empiricism was a mindset that treats all attitudes as revisable. His fallibilism seems to require us to constantly seek out new information, and to not be content holding any beliefs uncritically. At the same time, Peirce often states that common sense has an important role to play in both scientific and vital inquiry, and that there cannot be any “direct profit in going behind common sense.” Our question is the following: alongside a scientific mindset and a commitment to the method of inquiry, where does common sense fit in? Peirce does at times directly address common sense; however, those explicit engagements are relatively infrequent. In this paper, we argue that getting a firm grip on the role of common sense in Peirce’s philosophy requires a three-pronged investigation, targeting his treatment of common sense alongside his more numerous remarks on intuition and instinct. By excavating and developing Peirce’s concepts of instinct and intuition, we show that his respect for common sense coheres with his insistence on the methodological superiority of inquiry. We conclude that Peirce shows us the way to a distinctive epistemic position balancing fallibilism and anti-scepticism, a pragmatist common sense position of considerable interest for contemporary epistemology given current interest in the relation of intuition and reason.

In our current social landscape, moral questions—about economic disparity, disadvantaging biases, and scarcity—are rightly receiving attention with a sense of urgency. This book argues that classical pragmatism offers a compelling and useful account of our engagement with moral life. The key arguments are first, that a broader reading of the pragmatist tradition than is usually attempted within the context of ethical theory is necessary; and second, that this broad reading offers resources that enable us to move forward in contemporary debates about truth and principles in moral life. The first argument is made by demonstrating that there is an arc of theoretical unity that stretches from two key founders of pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce and William James—through the work of John Dewey and Clarence Irving Lewis. The second argument is made by engaging with contemporary debates concerning the truth-status of the judgments and assertions made in ordinary moral discourse, as well as the role and nature of moral principles. _Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics_ will be of interest to scholars of American philosophy, American intellectual history, and moral and political theorists, as well as anyone interested in the contours and demands of shared moral discourse.

Examining Scepticism and Animal Faith (SAF) together with the work of Descartes—first, in terms of structure, style, and substance; and second, in terms of method and purpose—supports a rethinking of Santayana’s philosophical project, supporting the notion that his primary aim was not epistemological but fundamentally moral. Considering the contrasting characters of Cartesian and Santayanan scepticism suggests that Descartes is not so much a foil but an inspiration for Santayana in attempting to order the mind as a sort of personal improvement.

This paper presents core features of the virtue ethics of American philosopher Ella Lyman Cabot. It offers an articulation of her position in Everyday Ethics (1906), and argues that Cabot's account has the resources to respond to a critique leveled against her mentor, Josiah Royce—namely, that a virtue ethics organized around loyalty is too easily corrupted by loyalty to bad causes. In addition to its importance to a full picture of the pragmatist tradition in moral philosophy, engagement with Cabot's work is critical to an accurate grasp of the virtue ethics revival of the 20th century.

While the topic of assertion has recently received a fresh wave of interest from Peirce scholars, to this point no systematic account of Peirce’s view of assertion has been attempted. We think that this is a lacuna that ought to be filled. Doing so will help make better sense of Peirce’s pragmatism; further, what is hidden amongst various fragments is a robust pragmatist theory of assertion with unique characteristics that may have significant contemporary value. Here we aim to uncover this theory, and to show that assertion for Peirce is not a mere corollary of pragmatic conceptions of truth, judgement, and belief, but is rather a central aspect of his philosophy.