Mitchell Aboulafia

There are few living thinkers who have enjoyed the eminence and reown of Jürgen Hamermas. His work has been highly influential not only in philosopy, but also in the fields of politics, sociology and law. This is the first collection dedicated to exploring the connections between his body of work ahd America's most significant philosophical movement, pragmatism. _Habermas and Pragmatism_ considers the influence of pragmatism on Habermas's thought and the tensions between Habermasian social theory and pragmatism. Essays by distinguished pragmatists, legal and critical theorists, and Habermas cover a range of subjects including the philosophy of language, the nature of rationality, democracy, objectivity, transcendentalism, aesthetics, and law. The collection also addresses the relationship to Habermas of Kant, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, Piaget, Apel, Brandom and Rorty.

Arthur O. Lovejoy famously referred to thirteen pragmatisms. If he were called on to enumerate postmodernisms, no doubt he would increase this number tenfold.1 Fortunately I need not follow his lead for the task at hand, namely, to discuss whether the pragmatic tradition can narrow the divide between modernism and postmodernism on the topic of cosmopolitanism. To do so I will focus on specific sets of ideas that have been associated with these terms. So, for example, modernists have been viewed as defenders of some form of universality, ethical or conceptual, and of a responsible, self-actuating, authentic subject. Postmodernists look toward particularity and alterity, and stress that notions of a unitary subject..

After more than seventy-five years of scholarship on Mead’s notion of the self, commentators still debate the meaning of the term. There are those who argue that it should be understood primarily as a socially constructed “me,” while others claim that the self is a combination of the spontaneous “I” and the “me.” In addition, there are those who emphasize facets of the self that do not fit neatly into either of these two camps. Support for various interpretations of the self can in fact be found in Mead’s work. This article addresses Mead’s uses of the term, guided by two questions: what kinds of unity or continuity are characteristic of selves? And is there a form of unity – a “meta-self” – that can encompass the types of selves that we find in Mead? In response to the second question, it is demonstrated that Mead had a narrative account of the self, one that has the potential to incorporate different kinds of selves, although Mead left his account underdeveloped.

Traditionally pragmatists have been favorably disposed to improving our understanding of agency and ethics through the use of empirical research. In the last two decades simulation theory has been championed in certain cognitive science circles as a way of explaining how we attribute mental states and predict human behavior. Drawing on research in psychology and neuroscience, Alvin I. Goldman and Robert M. Gordon have not only used simulation theory to discuss how we “mindread”, but have suggested that the theory has implications for ethics. The limitations of simulation theory for “mindreading” and ethics are addressed in this article from an interactionist or neo-Meadian pragmatic perspective. To demonstrate the limitations of simulation theory scenes from the television show Mad Men are used as “thought-experiments”.