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22The emergence of value: human norms in a natural worldState University of New York Press. 2023.Argues that truth, moral right, political right, and aesthetic value may be understood as arising out of a naturalist account of humanity, if naturalism is rightly conceived.
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10The Other RelativismJournal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (4): 461-478. 2023.ABSTRACT Relativism and discussions of the relativity of human judgment have played an important role in philosophy since the 1950s. Such claims are regarded by many as the enemy of realism, the view that human judgments can be valid with respect to their objects as those objects obtain independent of the judgments. Most relativisms assert the relativity of human judgment to some trait of the judge, hence are anthropic. But there is another kind: objective relativism. It was espoused by some of …Read more
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18The End of Enlightenment Liberalism?Journal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (1): 81-98. 2023.ABSTRACT Enlightenment liberalism has come under furious attack from multiple sources in recent years, including cognitive science, the social sciences, identity politics of the left, and populism and nationalism on the right. The notions of individual liberty, free speech, and broad rights protections operating under neutral procedural law has been tied to elitism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and oppressive capitalism. This article points out that recent criticisms from progressives and conser…Read more
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87Mead, Joint Attention, and the Human DifferenceThe Pluralist 8 (2): 1-25. 2013.The struggle between the parties bent on inflating humanity's self-conception and those bent on deflating it continues. Mind, consciousness, soul, reason, free will, language, culture, tool-use—all have been invoked as the unique character of the human, some deriving from Judeo-Christian religion, others from classical philosophy and modern anthropology. Opponents, sometimes motivated by ethical concerns about the treatment of animals, and buoyed by scientific advances in animal and especially p…Read more
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18A Kind of NaturalismAmerican Journal of Theology and Philosophy 34 (3): 214-225. 2013.This paper suggests a kind of naturalism that, while based in the natural sciences, can address questions of value and meaning, including the compatibility of religion and naturalism. Certainly any of its details may be wrong, and other theories may be more deeply or more comprehensively true. Nevertheless I think it is likely approximately true, and its direction should be capable of incorporation into successor theories (should any successors be interested). It is built to respond to three pro…Read more
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28The Pluralist RevoltPhilosophy Today 65 (3): 747-765. 2021.Post–World War Two philosophy in America has been divided into the mainstream of analytic philosophy and a family of nonanalytic schools of thought, for example, continental philosophy and American pragmatism. The current balance of power among these perspectives reflects an event that occurred forty years ago: the “Pluralist Revolt” at the 1979 APA Eastern Division Meetings. What follows is a progress report on the Revolt’s hopes. The tale has something to do with the recent history of philosop…Read more
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15Margolis as Columbia NaturalistMetaphilosophy 52 (1): 49-59. 2021.Is Joseph Margolis a member of the often neglected school of “Columbia naturalism”? Columbia naturalism promoted a distinctive non-reductive nationalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Inspired by pragmatism, and Dewey in particular, its members included Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Joseph Blau, Herbert Schneider, and Justus Buchler. Margolis received his degree from Columbia in 1953. Neither his early work in aesthetics nor his mature attempt to justify pragmatic themes in an uncompromi…Read more
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28Truth, Nature, and Sellars's Myth of the GivenJournal of Speculative Philosophy 34 (4): 463-477. 2020.ABSTRACT When a philosopher and a dog play Frisbee, do they cognize the same Frisbee? Is Fido subject to the “myth of the given”? The questions are not silly, for as Marjorie Grene quipped, “Epistemology is a branch of ethology.” What follows accepts what is usually called a “correspondence” theory of truth and a “realist” account of human knowledge. Nothing new, but what will be distinctive is that it seeks to exploit an unusual naturalism deriving from the American philosophical tradition. It …Read more
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10The Selves of LindseyMetaphilosophy 51 (5): 635-645. 2020.Kathleen Wallace’s The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019) presents an understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Its central conundrum is how a person or self can be a something that, while being related to and even constituted by many things, including endless experiences and events and social roles, hence subject to continuous change, can nevertheless sustain an identity capable of responsible agency and all the other moral and narrative predicates so crucial t…Read more
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17Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John DeweyMetaphilosophy 51 (2-3): 472-478. 2020.
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21Self-, Social-, or Neural-Determination?Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (28): 95-108. 2019.Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some mind…Read more
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13Mead and the Emergence of the Joint Intentional SelfEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 11 (2). 2019.What is the core of the distinctiveness of Homo sapiens? Some of the most famous hypotheses include tool use and tool making, language, free will and moral agency, self-consciousness, mind itself, and reason or rational problem-solving. All these answers are partly true. But recent work in comparative psychology, primatology, and cognitive science have converged on a conception of human distinctiveness that underlies these. Remarkably, it was explored a century ago by George Herbert Mead. The Am…Read more
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58Response to Timothy Engström' Review of The Ends of PhilosophyMetaphilosophy 30 (1-2): 135-139. 1999.
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12Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication (review)Metaphilosophy 26 (4): 424-431. 2007.
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76The Interpretation of Galilean Science: Cassirer Contrasted with Husserl and HeideggerStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 17 (1): 1. 1986.
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20The Consolation of Antiphilosophy: Scepticism, Common Sense Pragmatism, and RortyPhilosophy Today 38 (2): 204-224. 1994.
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The Dynamics of Subjectivism: A Philosophy of ModernityDissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook. 1985.This work develops a philosophical theory of modernity. It critically re-formulates the dialectical theory of modernity offered by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and others, by exploring the development of modern philosophy and applying the structure found therein to modern culture in general. This reformulation allows us to preserve positive and socially irreplaceable features of early modernity, e.g., humanist individualism. ;The dialectical theory correctly recognizes that post-Renaissance…Read more
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14Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal PoliticsWiley-Blackwell. 2002.In _Civil Society_, Lawrence Cahoone stages a critical engagement between the social-political viewpoints of liberalism, communitarianism, and conservatism in order to effect a balanced relation that will bypass or overcome the inadequacies of each position
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34The plurality of philosophical ends: Episteme, praxis, poiesisMetaphilosophy 26 (3): 220-229. 1995.
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27The Things in Heaven and Earth: An Essay in Pragmatic Naturalism. By John Ryder. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii + 327 (review)Metaphilosophy 44 (5): 708-713. 2013.
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25Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of CommunicationMetaphilosophy 26 (4): 424-431. 1995.
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7The Orders of NatureState University of New York Press. 2013._A systematic theory of naturalism, bridging metaphysics and the science of complexity and emergence._
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13The Orders of NatureState University of New York Press. 2013.A systematic theory of naturalism, bridging metaphysics and the science of complexity and emergence
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21Two Metaphysical Naturalisms: Aristotle and Justus Buchler by Victorino TejeraTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51 (4): 539-542. 2015.The American philosophical school called “Columbia Naturalism” began with Aristotle. That is, the naturalist thinkers at Columbia University over the first half of the 20th century, including John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, began with F.J.E. Woodbridge, Columbia’s famed Aristotelian from 1902 to 1937 and founder of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. Dewey arrived in 1904, retired in 1930. Later John Herman Randall took up the cause of interpreting Aristotle so as to be c…Read more
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