•  3
    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.…Read more
  •  45
    Depolarization Without Reconciliation
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 35 (4): 426-449. 2023.
    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 a…Read more
  •  68
    A Pragmatist Critique of Richard Rorty's Hopeless Politics
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 39 (4): 611-626. 2001.
  •  12
    Democracy, Civility, and Semantic Descent
    Analyse & Kritik 45 (1): 5-22. 2023.
    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 essa…Read more
  •  26
    Understanding John Dewey (review)
    Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 23 (72): 14-16. 1995.
  •  2
    Time in the Ditch (review)
    Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 29 (89): 41-42. 2001.
  •  38
    Two‐faced liberalism: John Gray's pluralist politics and the reinstatement of enlightenment liberalism
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 14 (4): 441-458. 2000.
    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 t…Read more
  • Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (review)
    Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 27 (84): 29-31. 1999.
  •  56
    The Cambridge Companion to Dewey Molly Cochran
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 48 (1): 112. 2012.
  •  38
    Recovering American Philosophy
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (3): 424. 2013.
    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. Refreshing…Read more
  •  272
    Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition (edited book)
    with Paniel Reyes Cárdenas and Daniel Herbert
    Routledge. 2023.
    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.…Read more
  • Introduction
    In Steven M. Cahn, Robert B. Talisse & Andrew T. Forcehimes (eds.), The Democracy Reader: From Classical to Contemporary Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2021.
  •  21
    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. Sust…Read more
  •  15
    The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism (edited book)
    Routledge. 2022.
    The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism offers 44 cutting-edge chapters--written specifically for this volume by an international team of distinguished researchers--that assess the past, present, and future of pragmatism. Going beyond the exposition of canonical texts and figures, the collection presents pragmatism as a living philosophical idiom that continues to devise promising theses in contemporary debates. The chapters are organized into four major parts: Pragmatism's History and Figures Pra…Read more
  •  13
    Why We Argue : A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason presents an accessible and engaging introduction to the theory of argument, with special emphasis on the way argument works in public political debate. The authors develop a view according to which proper argument is necessary for one's individual cognitive health; this insight is then expanded to the collective health of one's society. Proper argumentation, then, is seen to play a central role in a well-functioning democracy…Read more
  •  66
    Reply to Joshua Anderson
    The Pluralist 10 (3): 335-343. 2015.
    We are pleased to find that our 2005 paper “Why Pragmatists Cannot Be Pluralists” continues to draw critical attention. It seems to us that despite the many responses to our paper, its central challenge has not been met. That challenge is for pragmatists to articulate a genuine pluralism that is consistent with their broader commitments. Unfortunately, much of the wrangling over our paper has aimed to capture the word “pluralism” for pragmatist deployment; little has been done to clarify what th…Read more
  •  17
    Replies to my Critics
    Journal of Philosophical Research 46 209-219. 2021.
    The four critical essays responding to Overdoing Democracy exhibit a thematic progression. Some take issue with the conception of democracy that underlies my book, while others emphasize my diagnostic and prescriptive accounts. This essay follows that progression in addressing my critics.
  •  15
    Synopsis of Overdoing Democracy
    Journal of Philosophical Research 46 141-143. 2021.
    A brief synopsis of Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (Oxford University Press, 2019), which introduces the book.
  •  20
    The Democracy Reader: From Classical to Contemporary Philosophy (edited book)
    Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2021.
    This timely anthology gathers forty historical and contemporary readings edited for accessibility. Short introductions precede each reading and a general introduction increase student comprehension across the spectrum of readings. The volume is ideal for all levels of students in civics, political theory, and philosophy courses.
  •  15
    Democracy: What’s It Good For?
    The Philosophers' Magazine 89 44-49. 2020.
  •  9
    A Challenge for Republicanism
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 69 399-403. 2018.
    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…Read more
  •  55
    The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present (edited book)
    Princeton University Press. 2011.
    The Pragmatism Reader is the essential anthology of this important philosophical movement. Each selection featured here is a key writing by a leading pragmatist thinker, and represents a distinctively pragmatist approach to a core philosophical problem. The collection includes work by pragmatism's founders, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as seminal writings by mid-twentieth-century pragmatists such as Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Nelson Goodman, Rudolf Carnap, Wilfrid Sellar…Read more
  •  12
    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 i…Read more
  •  20
    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 ad…Read more
  •  20
    Pragmatism and “Existential” Pluralism: A Reply to Hackett
    Contemporary Pragmatism 15 (4): 502-514. 2018.
    In this reply to J. Edward Hackett’s “Why James Can Be an Existential Pluralist,” we show that Hackett’s argument against our 2005 thesis that pragmatism and pluralism are inconsistent fails. First, his rejection of our distinction between epistemic and metaphysical forms of pluralism does not affect our original argument’s soundness. Second, his proposed existential pluralism is a form of monism, and so fails as an example of pragmatist pluralism. Though we no longer hold the inconsistency thes…Read more