Marianne Janack

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s two major published works on feminist theory and practice: his essay “Feminism and Pragmatism” and his essay “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View.” The first essay takes up issues about the ontological integrity of the term “woman” and defends forms of feminist discourse that are based in radical feminist political discourse, arguing that the hopes and visions projected by the prophetic nature of such discourse can be assisted by pragmatism better than by traditional philosophy. “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction” criticizes the project of ideological critique that Rorty thinks is unhelpful for feminist political projects and further develops his idea of philosophy as a process of “ground-clearing” contrasting it with the work of social change and activism.

Chapter 1 discusses John Dewey's pragmatism and his reasons for rejecting a picture of the world which disallows human interest, striving, and concerns. Chapter 2 discusses the work of Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalism and attempts to reconstruct philosophy as hermeneutics. Chapter 3 discusses the work of Helen Longino, Lynn Hankinson Nelson, and Sandra Harding all of whom represent feminist attempts to reconstruct a concept of objectivity which is answerable to feminist concerns and which is built around an epistemolgical framework which does not depend on the conception of a thing-in-itself and which emphasizes the social nature of epistemology. Longino makes clear how objects of inquiry are characterized differently in the context of different research projects. Nelson addresses the connection between moral reasoning and scientific reasoning. Harding's version of feminist standpoint theory constructs a version of 'strong objectivity'. In Chapter 4 I turn to a discussion of interpretations of Nietzsche. I argue that we need not see Nietzsche as denying truth, and I suggest the promising metaphor of omniperspectvism, found in The Genealogy of Morals, as a framework for a new concept of objectivity. Chapter 5 draws on the work of Lorraine Code to discuss how omniperspectivism and a discourse of epistemological virtue can be combined to define a better conception of objectivity than the traditional concept which emphasizes value-neutrality and disinterestedness. The major tenets of this chapter are that moral reasoning and scientific reasoning inform each other, and that these discourses interact together in the process of coming to know the world and each other; that feminist insights into the functioning of sexism and racism in scientific research, reasoning, and theory construction must be taken seriously, and that a new objectivity must allow us to evaluate and critically analyze presuppositions; that we will inevitably have problems of exclusion and disagreement, but that this need not undermine objectivity but may, in some instances, actually enhance it

Why has James been relatively absent from the neopragmatist revival of the past twenty years? I argue that part of the reason is that his psychological projects seem to hold little promise for a socially and culturally progressive philosophical project, and that his concern with religious issues makes him seem like a religious apologist. Bringing together James's psychological writings with his philosophical writings shows these assumptions to be wrong. I offer a reading of “The Will to Believe” and The Principles of Psychology to support my position (a) that James's philosophical methodology and his psychological works lend themselves to a naturalized approach to philosophical inquiry, which both allows for a reshaping of traditional philosophical questions and offers a check on scientism, and (b) that, contrary to many commentators' claims, James is not defending religion against science but is instead using science to address epistemic and moral issues more broadly. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which James's naturalism demands a reconsideration of the nature of philosophical inquiry, as well as a revised view of a scientific psychology that avoids scientism.

Social scientists and scholars in the humanities all rely on first-person descriptions of experience to understand how subjects construct their worlds. The problem they always face is how to integrate first-person accounts with an impersonal stance. Over the course of the twentieth century, this problem was compounded as the concept of experience itself came under scrutiny. First hailed as a wellspring of knowledge and the weapon that would vanquish metaphysics and Cartesianism by pragmatists like Dewey and James, by the century's end experience had become a mere vestige of both, a holdover from seventeenth-century empiricist metaphysics. This devaluation of experience has left us bereft, unable to account for first-person perspectives and for any kind of agency or intentionality. This book takes on the critique of empiricism and the skepticism with regard to experience that has issued from two seemingly disparate intellectual strains of thought: anti-foundationalist and holistic philosophy of science and epistemology and feminist critiques of identity politics. Both strains end up marginalizing experience as a viable corrective for theory, and both share notions of human beings and cognition that cause the problem of the relation between experience and our theories to present itself in a particular way. Indeed, they render experience an intractable problem by opening up a gap between a naturalistic understanding of human beings and an understanding of humans as cultural entities, as non-natural makers of meaning. Marianne Janack aims to close this gap, to allow us to be naturalistic and hermeneutic at once. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience, the pragmatist tradition, and ecological psychology, her book rescues experience as natural contact with the world