Tara Mastrelli

In Spring 2022, Richard Bernstein taught his final graduate seminar on American Pragmatism at the New School for Social Research. As I mentioned in the Introduction to this issue, during the semester, a colleague from the Politics Department, Deva Woodly, published her book _Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements_. In it, she codifies her observations of the Movement for Black Lives, tracking both the influence of Deweyan pragmatism and Black feminism on the movement’s guiding philosophy. Dick read it immediately and enthusiastically added the chapter on “Radical Black Feminist Pragmatism” to our syllabus, saying he felt it was written for us, as it was exactly what he had hoped to achieve with the course—seeing how pragmatic themes were being taken up creatively and productively toward emancipatory social and political action. He invited Woodly for a separate session, and she generously joined our class for a discussion on her work and its relationship to Deweyan pragmatism more broadly. In that discussion, Woodly said she thought she would get pushback for putting “radical” and “pragmatism” together, or that it would at least be controversial. At the time, it seemed an absolutely natural pairing to me—though I was not yet able to express exactly why it was I felt that way. This paper has been percolating ever since.

A long time ago, as an aspiring philosopher, I, Mark Sanders, did not know much about what graduate school in philosophy entailed, but I knew that I wanted to study with Richard Bernstein. After reading Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, I believed that the author of that book was the person I wanted to help guide me through the perplexing yet captivating terrain of philosophy. I consider myself to be extremely fortunate for having had the opportunity to work with Bernstein, to take classes with him, to talk to him about ideas in his office, to stay in touch with him over the years and correspond over email about teaching pragmatism, when I was teaching a course on it myself, to chat with him in his... Read More.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Richard J. Bernstein (1932–2022)Tara Mastrelli and Mark SandersRemembrance for Richard J. BernsteinMy name is Tara Mastrelli. I am a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.1 Dick Bernstein was my teacher and my friend. I was also the TA for his final seminar on American Pragmatism this past spring, an experience that I want to share with you today.In the months leading up to this seminar, Dick said something shifted for him in the way he understood pragmatism—a sort of awakening on his part. He redesigned his syllabus into two parts—the first, working through the classical pragmatists, namely, Peirce, James, and Dewey, as he had done for sixty-eight years. And then the second half would—in Dewey's words—turn toward "the problems of men" (though Dick would always say human beings), engaging with themes and texts from Black and feminist thinkers. To be clear, for Dick, this was not an expansion of the canon or an exercise in who should or should not count as a pragmatist. Rather his aim was something different altogether—to see if we could begin to understand pragmatism not as a canon at all, but rather as a living, evolving movement.Now the point is not that this was the perfect syllabus—it wasn't. The point is what redesigning his syllabus can tell us about the type of person and teacher that Dick was. At almost 90 years old, teaching a subject he had taught for almost seventy years, he did not sit back and say that he knew everything. He wanted to learn more—from his colleagues, his students, the world around him—to experience more, to challenge his assumptions, to understand more. [End Page 103]Beyond the syllabus, another factor that made this seminar unique was Dick's health. His illness started at the beginning of the semester. He taught our first class from an emergency room in New York City during the Omicron wave of COVID-19. He was wearing a mask and breathing tubes. Machines were beeping all around him. Nurses came in from time to time to check on him. Nonetheless … his enthusiasm was not remotely diminished. Laying out his aims and ambitions for the course, he referred to it as "an exciting adventure"—for him and for us.The syllabus was not perfect, and Dick's health ebbed and flowed throughout, and yet—as the course itself progressed—it evolved into the very thing he was hoping for, which was pragmatism as a living, evolving movement. He read and added new work from a colleague examining Black feminist pragmatism and its relationship to the Movement for Black Lives, adding a full session dedicated to it. On certain days, when his breath was weak, he asked me to lead our discussions, which took on more of an almost jazz-like character—my classmates and I riffing off each other as we tried to wrestle with concepts such as DuBois's color line against the backdrop of gentrification in our own neighborhoods. When I decided to run a progressive stack for our discussions on feminism, Dick replied, "Good for you!" and enthusiastically used the hand-raising function, patiently waiting his turn.At the end of the semester, he seemed to be feeling better—his voice was strong and his eyes were bright during our final session. He conveyed his sense that, despite his recurring lament that we did not have more time (he had always envisioned the course as two semesters, or sometimes two full years), the seminar had achieved what he had wanted to achieve: "Philosophy has come alive." A return to philosophy, "not just as a discipline to master, but something to be caught up in; the excitement of dealing with life—a return to a genuine Socratic conception of philosophy."I am sure many of you may know that Dick wrote his dissertation on Dewey. What you may not know is that he originally wanted to write it on Plato. (Phaedrus was his favorite.) But once he sat down, he realized he did not want to write something about Plato that, as he said...