Parysa Mostajir

When discussing scientism, the most often cited concerns among philosophers are scientism’s implications for the legitimacy of philosophical methods and concepts and for philosophy’s value as a discipline. Scientism is argued to carry two implications for philosophy: the “replacement thesis,” the need to replace traditional philosophical methods and concepts with those of certain sciences, and the “valuative thesis,” a diminishment of the value of philosophical inquiry. While this is often true for more recent cases of scientism, the history of philosophy contains cases that diverge from this structure. I demonstrate that the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey is properly classified as holding the view of epistemological scientism according to definitions widely held by philosophers today, but it diverges from the expected implications of epistemological scientism insofar as it does not imply the replacement thesis or the valuative thesis. These differences arise from diverging definitions and theories of scientific method. The differences in Dewey’s scientism indicate that certain elements of current-day philosophical assessments of scientism may be contingent to a subset of scientistic positions. They more broadly indicate that consideration of historical versions of scientism may improve accuracy and comprehensiveness when analyzing scientism’s possible structures and implications, particularly as pertains to the practice of philosophy.

zine magubane provides a thorough and cogent critique of Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Theory-inspired sociology of race from a Marxist perspective. Magubane explains that Critical Race Theory and sociology of race posit a deeply ingrained racial structure at the base of American society and its institutions and collective concepts. This racial structure is argued to be a permanent fixture of American history that undergirds a variety of projects of oppression, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and the War on Drugs. Magubane’s contention, in brief, is that, by placing racial structure and discrimination at the center of their analyses, these areas of scholarship occlude important elements of... Read More.

Scientism has recently experienced a resurgence of interest in philosophy. One version of scientism often defended is ontological scientism—the view that any kind or property not mentioned in the theories of science has only a subordinate, secondary kind of reality. It is worth noting that a dominant tradition in the history of philosophy of science—classical American pragmatism—undertook decades of critical engagement with contemporaneous scientistic beliefs, many of which resemble those being debated at the present time. This anti-scientistic philosophy has multiple points of relevance for contemporary debates and defenses of ontological scientism.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.in this short excerpt, John Dewey expresses the pragmatist conviction—first stated by Jane Addams in Democracy and Social Ethics—that a society must cultivate dispositions of curiosity and understanding between its diversely situated members in order to sustain a robust and genuine democracy. It is by our habitual exposure to the experiences of our fellow citizens that we can imagine and understand each other’s diverse situations, struggles, and needs. In enabling such imagination and understanding, we create the possibility of fairly incorporating these diverse perspectives into...

While Collingwood’s Idea of History (ih) is an excellent resource for defending history’s autonomy, its invocation is not without problems. If history deals only in reflective thought, how can it encompass irrational action? How can history reconcile its subjective method of imagination with its claim to objectivity? The most successful solutions to these problems, such as those proposed by D’Oro and Mink, appeal to Collingwood’s greater philosophical system, but they typically attribute him a restrictive and unintuitive view of historical inquiry. We are left with a historical practice that is less equipped to address the problems we intuitively want it to solve – those dealing with past human experience as it actually occurred. Using The Principles of Art (pa), I present an interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy of history in which emotions are communicable between individuals. His theory of art defines artistic creation as a process in which unconscious emotions are harnessed and transformed into conscious emotions, which can then draw another individual into an imaginative experience that ‘repeats’ or ‘is identical with’ the artist’s original experience. We therefore acquire an account of historical inquiry that permits the interpretation of emotionally-driven actions. In this interpretation, the a priori imagination becomes an irreducible faculty of everyday human activity, a means of interpreting fellow agents in our social environments; and the onus is transferred to the natural sciences to justify their encroachment into this irreducible activity at the foundation of human experience and society.