Gregory Pappas

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Grayson Douglas Browning (1929–2023)Gregory Pappas, David Hildebrand, and William T. MyersBrowning, Grayson Douglas was born on March 7, 1929, in Seminole, Oklahoma.He received his PhD from the University Texas, Austin, 1958, where he returned later in 1972 to become its Philosophy Department chairman for four years.He was president of the Southwestern Philosophical Association in 1977, of the Florida Philosophical Association in 1967, and of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1972.He was not only a member of the Society for Advancement of America Philosophy; he encouraged all of his students to attend and become members of this society. Among these former students are Bill Myers, David Hildebrand, and Gregory Pappas.He thought that this was one of the best societies, not only because of its pluralism and scholarship, but because it was a community. He was right!He was the author of several books of philosophy, including Act and Agent and Ontology and the Practical Arena, and he co-edited Philosophers of Process (with William T. Myers). He also has published poetry in Voices, A Journal of Poetry and the Beloit Poetry Journal.In the last years of his life, Doug Browning was a retired Professor of Philosophy, living outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labored at length over poems and novels, staying up throughout the night reading, writing, listening to jazz, and smoking cigars, and enjoying life in his countryside hacienda with his beautiful wife, Becky. During that time, he managed to write and publish sixteen books of fiction. [End Page 106]For us (his former students), one of the most important philosophical contributions of Doug Browning was his insistence that if there is a key lesson from American Philosophy, it is the importance of lived experience ("La Vida") as the "starting point" of philosophical investigation.As he wrote in one of his last published essays:[T]he point is that, wherever one thinks we should start, we can't start with the world. We can't start with the world and we can't test our theories by testing them against the world. Whatever we take to indicate or to provide evidence of a "real" world apart from experience must be found, can only be found, in experience. It must be found in the glass of Barrilito, the aroma of a good cigar, conversation among friends, hotel hallways, cats, thunderstorms, oak trees, and all of the brazen and all of the unpretentious things that we encounter and live among in our day-to-day lives.1Gregory PappasTexas A&M UniversityDavid HildebrandUniversity of Colorado DenverWilliam T. MyersBirmingham-Southern Collegenote1. Douglas Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point," Pragmatism in the Americas, edited by Gregory Fernando Pappas (Fordham UP, 2011), p. 155.Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Unconscious Dimension of Thinking, Situations, and La Vida:Reflections on Bethany Henning's Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousGregory Pappasthis book is doing different related and valuable things. First, Bethany Henning explores a neglected dimension of Dewey's thought. In particular, the book inquires into the dimension of the unconscious and tries to develop what she considers an "implicit" "theory of the unconsciousness" or of the "aesthetic unconscious" in Dewey's philosophy. Then, based on all of the above, it provides a diagnosis and possible solution to a problem with philosophers and with American culture.The neglected dimension of Dewey's thought that Henning explores highlights the ways in which Dewey foresaw what feminist thinkers have said, and recent scientific accounts of human life and thinking are confirming: What we "feel" (what is "qualitative," "ineffable," and "noncognitive") is key to how to think and how to live (guidance and meaning). It has therefore been puzzling to me (along with John McDermott, Tom Alexander, Mark Johnson, and a few others) why even Dewey scholarship has to a large extent neglected exploring this aspect of his thought. Frustrated with Bertrand Russell, Dewey says that "Mr. Russell has not been able to follow the distinction I make between the immediately had material of non-cognitively experienced situations and the material of cognition—a distinction without which my view cannot be understood" (LW 14:33; emphasis added).More importantly, by neglecting this insight and these aspects of his thought, we have failed to utilize one of the most important resources to diagnose sociopolitical-moral problems today! This is what I have been trying to do in recent years, and I see Dr. Henning as trying to do the same. She is not just providing a theory of the unconscious for the sake of speculation, but she does so with instrumental intent, in the hope that it will help us better approach a concrete social-cultural problem we suffer in our society, a topic to which I will return. [End Page 84]My reading of Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious has provoked a few questions:(a). Is there, in Dewey, a conception of aesthetic and religious experience that can be understood as an "implicit theory of the unconscious"?(b). Even if there is one, do we need one? For what purpose?(c). What would we miss if we were to say what needs to be said and explored by Henning by using different terms/concepts and avoiding the possible misunderstanding and dangers of making reference to "the unconscious"?(d). Would Henning agree that the problematic aversion or repression in American culture that concerns us is more than that of the unconscious, the qualitative, body, and nature that form the focus of her book?(e). Henning agrees that we need more than art and "deep" psychology to ameliorate the problems that concern us. What is this "more"? How?In regard to (b), I can think of one good purpose, which Henning develops in Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: to engage in a dialogue with psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophies that draw from psychoanalysis and feminism (e.g., Kristeva) or, in general, other academics concerned with the same problems. I also wondered as I was reading the book why Henning does not put Carl Jung in dialogue with Dewey as well, just as a matter of curiosity. But I wonder, if we need to develop a "theory of the unconsciousness" or of the "aesthetic unconsciousness" to both make a contribution to the "depth" of lived experience (La Vida) and also deal with the social-cultural problems that concern us.There are dangers with talking about or making reference to "the" unconsciousness or "the" aesthetic unconsciousness and theorizing about them. The problem is that it comes across as a noun, and not as way of participating in La Vida or nature, that is continuous in a significant way with what is more conscious and more cognitive: we are at any time more or less conscious. But Henning seems aware of all of this. She is careful enough to make clear that she is acknowledging continuity, but I confess to "feeling" uncomfortable sometimes with her reference to that...

John Dewey, widely known as "America's philosopher," provided important insights into education and political philosophy, but surprisingly never set down a complete moral or ethical philosophy. Gregory Fernando Pappas presents the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of Dewey's ethics. By providing a pluralistic account of moral life that is both unified and coherent, Pappas considers ethics to be key to an understanding of Dewey's other philosophical insights, especially his views on democracy. Pappas unfolds Dewey's ethical vision by looking carefully at the virtues and values of ideal character and community. Showing that Dewey's ethics are compatible with the rest of his philosophy, Pappas corrects the reputation of American pragmatism as a philosophy committed to skepticism and relativism. Readers will find a robust and boldly detailed view of Dewey's ethics in this groundbreaking book

International Relations's intellectual history is almost always treated as a history of ideas in isolation from both those discursive and political economies which provide its disciplinary and wider context. This paper contributes to this wider analysis by focusing on the impact of the field's discursive economy. Specifically, using Foucaultian archaeologico-genealogical strategy of problematization to analyse the emergence and disciplinary trajectories of Constructivism in IR, this paper argues that Constructivism has been brought gradually closer to its mainstream Neo-utilitarian counterpart through a process of normalization, and investigates how it was possible for Constructivism to be purged of its early critical potential, both theoretical and practical. The first part of the paper shows how the intellectual configuration of Constructivism and its disciplinary fortunes are inseparable from far-from-unproblematic readings of the Philosophy of Social Science: the choices made at this level are neither as intellectually neutral nor as disciplinarily inconsequential as they are presented. The second and third parts chart the genealogies of Constructivism, showing how its overall normalization occurred in two stages, each revolving around particular practices and events. The second part concentrates on older genealogies, analysing the politics of early classificatory practices regarding Constructivism, and showing how these permitted the distillation and immunization of Constructivism – and thus of the rest of the mainstream scholarship which it was depicted as compatible with – against more radical Postmodernist/Post-structuralist critiques. Finally, the third part focuses attention on recent genealogies, revealing new attempts to reconstruct and reformulate Constructivism: here, indirect neutralization practices such as the elaboration of ‘Pragmatist’ Constructivism, as well as the direct neutralization such as the formulation of ‘Realist’ Constructivism, are key events in Constructivism's normalization. These apparently ‘critical’ alternatives that aim to ‘provide the identity variable’ in fact remain close to Neo-utilitarianism, but their successful representation as ‘critical’ help neutralize calls for greater openness in mainstream IR. Rather than a simple intellectual history, it is this complex process of reading and producing that counts as ‘Constructivism’, which explains both the normalization of Constructivism and the continued marginalization of Postmodernist/Post-structuralist approaches in mainstream IR's infra-disciplinary balance of intellectual power

The book will prove an invaluable source for philosophers and philosophy students, as well as for scholars from other disciplines (e.g., history, political science, sociology, diversity studies, and gender and race studies) to begin understanding the dynamic relationship in thinking between the two Americas. In addition to documenting the results of a new and thriving area of research, it can also function as a primer to direct and provoke further inquiry. Its essays, from North American, Spanish, and Latin American scholars, fill a void in the humanities and introduce a number of Hispanic pragmatists who have not been included in standard pragmatist texts.

pragmatism has been appropriated and welcomed in Latin America because there is much prior practice and circumstance that makes for a good fit, and not simply because it was an external solution to local problems. In fact, many developments have already occurred in Latin America that, although not directly influenced by John Dewey, are better examples of his methods and ideas than what occurs north of the Rio Grande.1 Indeed, when Dewey was in Mexico, he was impressed with their educational reforms,2 while Sandinista Nicaragua, as Joe Betz has argued, exemplifies “the social experimentation Dewey called for in his 1935 ‘Liberalism and Social Action.’”3This paper provides new evidence that the ideas and practices in...

in "whites: made in america," the Rev. Thandeka takes on the issues that have recently been in the minds of many Americans in light of racial problems and the shocking results of the elections: "What is going on?" She does not pretend to provide a full diagnosis, but argues that there is a need for a new conceptual shift and new target of our inquiries. Thandeka argues that underneath the veil of whiteness, there are troublesome feelings and emotions that need to be revealed and, if possible, transformed. What we find are not feelings of racial supremacy, but feelings of "fear, dread, confusion, anger, rage, shame, anxiety, sorrow, embarrassment, humiliation, and loss."1 Historical events have helped create "the...

there has been a recent resurgence of pragmatism1 in sociopolitical theory, one in which pragmatism is presented as offering an alternative and promising approach to nonideal theories of justice. This may seem ironic since the record of the classical pragmatists on being explicit about justice or the injustices of their time in their philosophical corpus is a mixed one at best. However, this has not stopped recent philosophers from continuing to draw from the philosophical resources in this tradition to address the injustices of today. The title of the 2014 SAAP presidential address by Ken Stikkers was “Toward a..

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.