• Vocabularies and the lifeworld: a criticism of Rorty's naturalism
    In Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer & Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński (eds.), Rorty and Beyond, Lexington Books. 2019.
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    Histoires pragmatiques
    with Tullio Viola, Yves Cohen, and Simona Cerutti
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 8 (2). 2016.
    Roberto Gronda & Tullio Viola – Your work is frequently referred to as “pragmatic history.” This notion, however, is by no means a new one: Polybius spoke of pragmatikê historia, Germany had pragmatische Geschichte in the tradition of Kantian anthropology. Can you tell us something about how you understand this label, and about your own encounter with “pragmatic history”? Simona Cerutti – Personally, I had quite an idiosyncratic introduction to pragmatic history, although this encounter was n...Read more
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    Pragmatismo e filosofia della scienza (edited book)
    Pisa University Press. 2017.
  • Rethinking the notion of public : a pragmatist account
    In Pierluigi Barrotta & Giovanni Scarafile (eds.), Science and democracy: controversies and conflicts, John Benjamins. 2018.
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    James Scott Johnst
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2). 2015.
    In the last fifteen years, John Dewey’s early philosophy received considerable attention. John Shook’s Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality, Jim Good’s The Search for “Unity in Diversity”: the “Permanent Deposit” of Hegel in John Dewey’s Philosophy, Donald Morse’s Faith in Life: John Dewey’s Early Philosophy, on the top of many articles, critical editions, and reviews: all these texts have contributed to a better understanding of many important aspects of Dewey’s early thought. T...
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    Intelligence and scientific expertise
    Synthese 200 (2): 1-19. 2022.
    In this article we develop a pragmatist-inspired notion of intelligence that should lead to a better understanding of the notion of scientific expertise. The notion of intelligence is drawn from Dewey and is therefore used here in its technical sense. Our thesis is that scientific knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient condition for scientific expertise; intelligence should also be added. Conceived of as the capacity to apply general knowledge to particulars, we reach the conclusion that in…Read more
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    Introduction to Pragmatism and Common-Sense
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 9 (2). 2017.
    The topic of common sense is central to pragmatism, both classical and contemporary. In different ways, Peirce, James and Dewey all wrote extensively on this idea, highlighting its theoretical complexity as well as its heuristic function in philosophical inquiry. In more recent times, to give only one noteworthy example, Nicholas Rescher published a book titled Common Sense (2005) in which he argues against those philosophical approaches that downplay the epistemological importance of common...
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    Donald Morse
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5 (2). 2013.
    Donald Morse’s Faith in Life. John Dewey’s Early Philosophy is an important and controversial book. As the author openly claims, his is the first attempt to offer a comprehensive account of Dewey’s early thought which does not simply consist in a teleological interpretation of his philosophical development. Traditionally, Dewey’s early writings have been considered interesting only because, and insofar as, they are believed to reveal something about Dewey’s particular version of empirical nat...
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    In Pragmatism. The Restoration of Its Scientific Roots (P) and The Pragmatic Vision. Themes in Philosophical Pragmatism (PV) Rescher continues the work of analysis and assessment of the pragmatist tradition that he started more than thirty years ago with the publication of his The Primacy of Practice (1973). The thirty essays that compose the two books (some of them already published elsewhere) deal with a large number of issues, ranging from axiology to epistemology, from art to religion. Th...
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    Symposium on Dewey’s Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5 (1). 2013.
    The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy is pleased to host a symposium on Dewey’s “new” book Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. To speak of Dewey’s new book will seem strange to anyone who is not well-acquainted with the history of the text, which is rather adventurous and unique. In the summer 1941 Dewey started working on a book in which he purported to present a comprehensive view of his philosophical position. The work kept Dewey busy for more than a year. At th...
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    J. R. Shook and J. A. Good (eds.), John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (2). 2011.
    The book reviewed here makes available an important lecture on Hegel’s philosophy of spirit that Dewey delivered at the University of Chicago in 1897. Less than one hundred pages long, the lecture aimed to introduce students to a critical understanding of the third part of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science. It is preceded by two introductory essays written by the editors – namely, Shook’s Dewey’s Naturalized Philosophy of Spirit and Religion and Good’s Rereading Dewey’s “Permanent...
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    Roberto Frega, Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4 (2). 2012.
    The book reviewed here, Roberto Frega’s Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement, is an important and ambitious book. It is ambitious because it addresses the problems at stake in contemporary philosophical debates without any kind of awkwardness and shyness. Frega believes pragmatism to be a theoretically viable option, and tries to prove its soundness by adopting it as the conceptual framework of a theory of moral objectivity alternative to the ones formulat...
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    Natura e storia
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 11 (2). 2019.
    The article deals with John Hermann Randall’s theory of history, namely, the philosophical account of what it takes for an object to be a historical object. The goal of the article is to highlight the deep connections existing between Randall’s philosophical views on history and the writing of history, heavily indebted to Dewey’s and Woodbridge naturalism (the so-called Columbia Naturalism), and his historiographical work. In the first section, I briefly sketch some major aspects of originality …Read more
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    On The Pragmatic Content of Science and Common Sense
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 9 (2). 2017.
    In our paper we aim to update and revise the pragmatist conception of the relationship between science and common sense. First of all, we introduce two technical notions (MI and SI), with which we identify the normative spaces of the manifest and the scientific image, and we highlight the differences between these two notions and their Sellarsian cognates. Secondly, within each normative space we investigate the connections between languages and practices: we ground linguistic contents on the no…Read more
  •  8
    Nature and Thought
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4 (2). 2012.
    Among many other things, Margolis’ new book, Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, A Touch of Prophecy, is a successful attempt to articulate in a thoroughly naturalistic way the fundamental tenet of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy – that is, the idea that idealism and realism are not two alternative metaphysical options, but rather two ways of dealing with the very same thing, the concrete experience that human beings have of their world. One of the most characteristic errors of tra...
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    Dewey’s Lectures in China 1919–1920 is a highly controversial text. For many years, scholars have been suspicious about its reliability as a source: the book is an English translation of the Chinese translation of two series of lectures that Dewey held in China during the first year of his two year stay. For this reason, Deweyan scholars have tended to dismiss the text: they believed that Dewey’s speeches had been manipulated by Chinese translators driven less by textual fidelity than by a parti…Read more
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    Normativity and Objectivity
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (1). 2015.
    In this paper, I address the question of the nature and ground of objectivity, with the aim to develop a pragmatist account of its distinctive features. Traditionally, pragmatism has been considered as an alternative to Kantian approaches. The aim of the paper is to argue that, contrary to the received view, a consistent pragmatist theory of objectivity should preserve many insights of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. My thesis is that Kantian notions of spontaneity, activity and objectivity…Read more
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    From Mythology to Logic
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 5 (1). 2013.
    When Dewey started working on Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy (UPMP), he was well aware that the main aim of his new book should have been that of providing a clear and comprehensive exposition of the philosophical views that he had formulated in his previous works. At that time – around 1939 – Dewey was in his eighties and he had already published almost all the great books that contributed to establish his reputation as the most distinguished American philosopher. However, his tho...
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    Sami Pihlström & Henrik Rydenfelt “Pragmatist Perspectives” (review)
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 2 (1): 156-163. 2010.
    The present volume is a collection of the papers presented at the First Nordic Pragmatism Conference, Pragmatism in Science, Religion, and Politics, organized in Helsinki by the Nordic Pragmatism Network (nordprag.org), the Philosophical Society of Finland, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, and the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, in June 2008. The overall picture that can be drawn from reading the book testifies to both th...
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    What Does China Mean for Pragmatism?
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2). 2015.
    This paper aims to investigate the transformations undergone by Dewey’s philosophy in the period from 1916 to 1921. By analyzing three different problematic situations with which Dewey found himself confronted (German militarism; the effects of propaganda on American society; the experience of a two-year stay in China), the paper seeks to show the various lines of development at work in his thought. The thesis of the paper is that in the war and immediately post-war years Dewey was concerned wit…Read more
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    SummaryThe idea of interdisciplinarity can be articulated in different ways. The aim of the article is to criticise the view that interdisciplinarity is to be treated as a quality of the historian's approach to his subject-matter, and to argue for a constructivist interpretation of that notion. A constructivist account of interdisciplinarity relies on the thesis that the latter is one of the manifold ways in which it is possible to give sense to the historical records of which the historian want…Read more