Robert B. Talisse

Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway's work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. Hookway's original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce's interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William James, John Dewey and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book-which include contributions from several of Hookway's former students and colleagues-include studies of Hookway's engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology.

ABSTRACT According to contemporary diagnoses, democracy is foundering because of polarization. It is natural to think that if polarization is a problem, the remedy is to reconcile the conflicting sides. Yet reconciliation seems to involve the disturbing prescription that citizens should reconcile with radicals who have divested from democratic norms. That assumes, however, that polarization is symmetrical, whereby each side is equally responsible for it. But polarization need not depend on the assumption of such symmetry, such that depolarization may be possible without reconciliation. If so, polarization may be a problem not only between political alliances but within them.

In a well-functioning democracy, must citizens regard one another as political equals, despite ongoing disagreements about normatively significant questions of public policy. A conception of civility is needed to supply citizens with a common sense of the rules of political engagement. By adhering to the norms of civility, deeply divided citizens can still assure one another of their investment in democratic politics. Noting well-established difficulties with the very idea of civility, this essay raises a more fundamental problem. Any conception of civility faces the problem of semantic descent, the phenomenon by which second-order norms devolve into tools for conducting first-order disputes. The problem of incivility in politics thus is not simply that of designing a suitably inclusive view of what civility demands. It might be that political civility can be cultivated only by way of interactions that are themselves not at all political.

In Two Faces of Liberalism, John Gray pursues the dual agenda of condemning familiar liberal theories for perpetuating the failed “Enlightenment project,” and promoting his own version of anti‐Enlightenment liberalism, which he calls “modus vivendi.” However, Gray's critical apparatus is insufficient to capture accurately the highly influential “political” liberalism of John Rawls. Moreover, Gray's modus vivendi faces serious challenges raised by Rawls concerning stability. In order to respond to the Rawlsian objections, Gray would have to reinstate the aspirations and principles characteristic of Enlightenment theories of liberalism.

In The American Pragmatists Cheryl Misak (2013) offers a highly compelling and nuanced account of pragmatism’s founding and development. Her narrative is also unorthodox, as it undermines the story of pragmatism’s past that prevails among contemporary classical pragmatists.1 That Misak gladly acknowledges the deep sympathies between pragmatism and logical empiricism (2013: 156) is enough to place The American Pragmatists far outside the mainstream of classicalists’ self-understanding. Refreshingly, Misak’s book demonstrates just how distorted that self-understanding is. Yet Misak’s achievement is not solely historiographical, for the dominant narrative among classicalists is also philosophically debilitating...

Christopher Hookway has been influential in promoting engagement with pragmatist and naturalist perspectives from classical and contemporary American philosophy. This book reflects on Hookway’s work on the American philosophical tradition and its significance for contemporary discussions of the understanding of mind, meaning, knowledge, and value. Hookway’s original and extensive studies of Charles S. Peirce have made him among the most admired and frequently referenced of Peirce’s interpreters. His work on classical American pragmatism has explored the philosophies of William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce, and examined the influence of pragmatist ideas outside of the United States. Additionally, Hookway has participated in a number of celebrated exchanges with some of the most high-profile figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, including Karl-Otto Apel, Philip Pettit, Hilary Putnam, and W.V.O. Quine, through which his treatments of a large range of topics in epistemology and the philosophies of mind and language have been developed and promoted. The chapters in this book—which include contributions from several of Hookway’s former students and colleagues—include studies of Hookway’s engagement with the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey, his contributions to virtue epistemology, and his discussions of hope and pragmatist metaphysics. Pragmatic Reason will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, and epistemology.

Democracy is not only a form of government. It is also the moral aspiration for a society of self-governing political equals who disagree about politics. Citizens are called on to be active democratic participants, but they must also acknowledge one another's political equality. Democracy thus involves an ethic of civility among opposed citizens. Upholding this ethic is more difficult than it may look. When the political stakes are high, the opposition seems to us tobe advocating injustice. Sustaining Democracy poses the question: why should we uphold democratic relations with those whose politics we despise?

Republicans hold that freedom is non-domination rather than non-interference. This entails that any instance of interference that does not involve domination is not freedom-lessening. The case for thinking of freedom as non-domination proceeds mostly by way of a handful of highly compelling cases in which it seems intuitive to say of some person that he or she is unfree despite being in fact free from interference. In this essay, I call attention to a kind of case which directs attention to what seems to me to be a highly counterintuitive element of the republican conception of freedom. The challenge to republicanism is that of providing a compelling response to this kind of case.

In his Pragmatist Egalitarianism, David Rondel proposes a “pluralist egalitarianism” as a pragmatist resolution to longstanding debates over egalitarian justice. On Rondel’s view, egalitarianism has three distinct and irreducible variables. In this comment, I argue that pluralist views generally do not reconcile anything, but instead posit sites of normative conflict that are in principle invulnerable to remediation by human intelligence. I then propose that although Rondel might be correct to identify three distinct sites of egalitarian concern, there remains reason to prioritize what he calls the “institutional” variable.

In Overdoing Democracy, Robert B. Talisse turns the popular adage "the cure for democracy's ills is more democracy" on its head. Indeed, he argues, the widely recognized, crisis-level polarization within contemporary democracy stems from the tendency among citizens to overdo democracy. When we make everything--even where we shop, the teams we cheer for, and the coffee we drink--about our politics, we weaken our bonds to one another, and work against the fundamental goals of democracy. Talisse advocates civic friendship built around shared endeavors that we must undertake with fellow citizens who do not necessarily share our political affinities as the best way we can obtain a healthier, more sustainable democracy.

In Cambridge Pragmatism, Cheryl Misak rounds out the distinctive narrative regarding Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th Century that she initiated in her 1995 book on Verificationism and subsequently developed significantly in her 2013 The American Pragmatists. In this brief essay, I address Cambridge Pragmatism in the context of the broader historical account she has been developing. In my view, Misak's account of pragmatism's past is largely correct; but I also think that the correctness of her account has far-reaching implications for pragmatism's future, implications that she has not adequately acknowledged. To preview: Once the history of pragmatism is told correctly, we see that there is little point in...

For over a decade I have been arguing that Deweyan democracy fails an intuitive test for political legitimacy.1 According to this test, a political order can be legitimate only if the principles underlying its most fundamental institutions are insusceptible to reasonable rejection. Crucially, reasonable functions here as a technical term; a principle is reasonably rejectable when its rejection is consistent with embracing the ideal of a constitutional democracy as a fair system of social cooperation among free and equal moral persons. From this emerges the corollary that a person is reasonable to the extent she seeks a political order whose basis is beyond reasonable rejection. The challenge for democratic theory...

There is a fundamental problem confronting theorists of democracy. Can a democratic society propose a philosophical account of its practices and institutions that is at once adequately robust to answer antidemocrats and sufficiently inclusive to win the assent of citizens who disagree about philosophical, moral, and religious essentials? A robust theory will have to draw upon some complex and controversial philosophical premises, and will thereby fail to be neutral about the content of these premises. Hence it will fail to respect the deep pluralism characteristic of a free society. Anything less than a robust philosophical theory, however, will raise questions of why anyone should prefer democracy to mild oligarchy or peaceful tyranny. ;This dissertation critically evaluates liberalism, the dominant attempt in the tradition of political philosophy to provide a philosophical foundation for democracy. Arguing that both the traditional varieties of liberal theory and also more recent formulations founder on the challenge presented above, the author concludes that there is a need for a "post-liberal" account of democracy, one which can answer the arguments of opponents of democracy and respect pluralism at the same time. Drawing upon the work of C. S. Peirce and in particular upon the idea of a "community of inquiry," the author argues for a discursive theory of democracy to meet this need. The discursive theory proposes an epistemic argument for democracy against tyranny and other antidemocratic regimes, but at the same time acknowledges fallibilism and thus can accommodate deep pluralism. Although the resulting democratic theory is not a liberal one insofar as it rejects the liberal doctrine of official state neutrality, it eschews the problems confronting communitarian forms of antiliberalism by insisting that the formative role of the state is epistemological and not moral