•  117
    Pragmatism
    In C. Van den Akker (ed.), Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, . pp. 129-146. 2021.
    Overview of the pragmatist philosophy of history
  •  101
    Rorty and Literature
    In Alan Malachowski (ed.), A Companion to Rorty, Wiley. 2020.
    This chapter addresses the relationship between Rorty's pragmatist philosophy and his view of literature and literary writing. It begins by examining the relationship between philosophy and literature, construed by Rorty in terms of the opposition between “normal,” professionalized, argument‐centered philosophical discourse and the kind of cultural criticism which emphasizes human finitude and contingency, seeking through the use of irony and literary inventiveness to transform our prevalent vis…Read more
  •  125
    Literature
    In Alan Malachowski (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Rorty. pp. 413-426. 2020.
    This chapter addresses the relationship between Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy and his view of literature and literary writing. It begins by examining the relationship between philosophy and literature, construed by Rorty in terms of the opposition between “normal,” professionalized, argument-centered philosophical discourse and the kind of cultural criticism which emphasizes human finitude and contingency, seeking through the use of irony and literary inventiveness to transform our prevalent vi…Read more
  •  195
    History, Informally Speaking: Margolis’ Cultural Pragmatism
    Contemporary Pragmatism 19 (2): 113-125. 2022.
    This essay aims to adumbrate the relationship between ordinary language, history, and cognition in Joseph Margolis’ pragmatist account of the historical constitution of the human, cultural world. It emphasizes the important connections between his arguments for the essentially practical grounding of all forms of cognitive activity; the existential primacy of the historically evolved ordinary language in the formation of aptly socialized human persons as well as of productively functioning human …Read more
  •  8
    Peirce on the Uses of History, written by Tullio Viola
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 16 (2): 242-245. 2022.
  •  179
    History Will Judge: Hume's General Point of View in Historical Moral Judgment
    Journal of Political Philosophy 29 (1): 94-116. 2021.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  31
    RÉSUMÉ : Même s’il formule à diverses reprises sa thèse controversée de l’indétermination de la traduction, Quine n’a jamais examiné de près le lien entre l’indétermination et la conception de la signification qu’il aurait développée à partir des travaux de Peirce et de Duhem. Cet article esquisse le plan d’une telle conception de la signification dans sa relation à la thèse de l’indétermination et évalue les avantages et les implications de cette conception dans le contexte du programme philoso…Read more
  •  105
    Beyond Radical Interpretation: Individuality as the Basis of Historical Understanding
    European Journal of Philosophy 17 (4): 489-503. 2008.
    Owing in part to Rorty’s energetic promotional efforts, Davidson’s philosophy of language has received much attention in recent decades from quarters most diverse, creating at times a sense of an almost protean versatility. Conspicuously missing from the rapidly growing literature on the subject is a sustained discussion of the relationship between Davidson’s interpretive theory and history: an omission all the more surprising since a comparison between Davidson and Gadamer has been pursued at s…Read more
  •  306
    A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History
    Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 110 95-115. 2017.
    The paper begins by introducing a heuristic distinction between the “dogmatist” and the “pragmatist” approaches to philosophy of history. Dogmatists tend to use history to exemplify and shore up their pre-existing philosophical convictions. Pragmatists, on the other hand, construe philosophy of history as a form of critical reflection on the actual historical practice, with epistemic criteria of proper practice emerging in the course of the research itself, not antecedently deduced from genera…Read more
  •  78
    Theory and Fiction: Rorty's View of Philosophy as Literature
    The European Legacy 16 (1): 13-26. 2011.
    Richard Rorty was one of the most committed and respected critics of the distinction between philosophy and literature. He urged philosophers to adapt an ironist stance, characterized by a double commitment to historicism and nominalism, thereby simultaneously abandoning their inveterate representationalism as well as their predilection for hypostasizing abstract concepts. The ensuing return to the individual and contingent was also supposed to facilitate the absorption of philosophy into the re…Read more
  •  724
    Dewey: A Pragmatist View of History
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2): 173-194. 2012.
    Despite the centrality of the idea of history to Dewey's overall philosophical outlook, his brief treatment of philosophical issues in history has never attracted much attention, partly because of the dearth of the available material. Nonetheless, as argued in this essay, what we do have provides for the outlines of a comprehensive pragmatist view of history distinguished by an emphasis on methodological pluralism and a principled opposition to thinking of historical knowledge in correspondence…Read more
  •  445
    PHILOSOPHY IN TRANSITION: JOHN DEWEY’S “LOST” MANUSCRIPT
    History and Theory 53 (3): 372-386. 2014.
    The intention of this essay is to offer a reading of John Dewey’s recently found manuscript (considered lost for decades), Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, as a kind of philosophical history leading up to the formulation of the key problems to be addressed by the general framework of Dewey’s cultural naturalism. I argue, first, that cultural naturalism has direct implications for the way that we think about history, and that Dewey’s recently recovered manuscript reflects this in its co…Read more
  •  3
    Brill Online Books and Journals
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 119-137. 2008.
    It is sometimes suggested that Collingwood’s philosophy of history is decidedly anti-naturalist and argues for a complete separation between history and the natural sciences. The purpose of this paper is to examine this suggestion and to argue that Collingwood’s conception of the relationship between history and natural sciences is much more subtle and nuanced than such a view would allow for. In fact, there is little in Collingwood to offend contemporary naturalistic sensibilities reasonably co…Read more
  •  789
    Rorty, religion, and humanism
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (3): 187-201. 2011.
    This article offers a review of Richard Rorty’s attempts to come to terms with the role of religion in our public and intellectual life by tracing the key developments in his position, partially in response to the ubiquitous criticisms of his distinction between private and public projects. Since Rorty rejects the possibility of dismissing religion on purely epistemic grounds, he is determined to treat it, instead, as a matter of politics. My suggestion is that, in this respect, Rorty’s position…Read more
  •  465
    Continuity of the rational: Naturalism and historical understanding in Collingwood
    Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 119-137. 2008.
    It is sometimes suggested that Collingwood's philosophy of history is decidedly anti-naturalist and argues for a complete separation between history and the natural sciences. The purpose of this paper is to examine this suggestion and to argue that Collingwood's conception of the relationship between history and natural sciences is much more subtle and nuanced than such a view would allow for. In fact, there is little in Collingwood to offend contemporary naturalistic sensibilities reasonably co…Read more
  •  14
  •  390
    MEANING AS HYPOTHESIS: QUINE’S INDETERMINACY THESIS REVISITED
    Dialogue: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. 49 (3): 395-411. 2010.
    Despite offering many formulations of his controversial indeterminacy of translation thesis, Quine has never explored in detail the connection between indeterminacy and the conception of meaning that he supposedly derived from the work of Peirce and Duhem. The outline of such a conception of meaning, as well as its relationship to the indeterminacy thesis, is worked out in this paper; and its merits and implications are assessed both in the context of Quine’s own philosophical agenda, and also …Read more
  •  17
    Roger Scruton: The Philosopher on Dover Beach
    The European Legacy 19 (4): 505-506. 2014.
  •  568
    Chauncey Wright: Theoretical Reason in a Naturalist Account of Human Consciousness
    Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (4): 559-582. 2012.
    Chauncey Wright was an early intellectual follower of Darwin, and a mentor to American pragmatists, C.S. Peirce and William James. Starting with the discussion of Wright’s interpretation of natural selection, the paper proceeds to outline the distinction he draws between theoretical (scientific) and practical consciousness and the way that this distinction plays out in his account of the development of human consciousness within the context of natural selection. Formulating the problem of reco…Read more
  •  452
    Normativity and Reality in Peirce’s Thought
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (1): 88-106. 2014.
    The purpose of the essay is to explore some points pertaining to Peirce’s conception of reality, with a special emphasis on the themes developed in his later writings (such as normativity, common sense, and the logic of signs). The resulting proposal advances a preliminary reading of some key issues (arising in connection with Peirce’s discussions of reality and truth), configured with a view to the socially sustainable, coordinated practices of inquiry that are intrinsically embedded in the bio…Read more
  •  730
    Perception, Empiricism, and Pragmatist Realism
    Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1): 191-210. 2011.
    The essay compares Peirce's pragmatist approach to the problem of perceptual experience as a fallible foundation of knowledge to a sophisticated empiricist take on the issue. The comparison suggests that, while empiricism can accommodate the idea of perception as fallible, theoretically laden, and containing conjectural elements, the cardinal difference between pragmatism and empiricism consists in the pragmatist insistence on the intrinsic intelligibility of experience, which also serves as t…Read more