SUNY in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought

Argues that out of the confrontation between Rorty and Habermas, we might be able to find a new way to think about the kind of politics we need today. The Rorty-Habermas debate has been written on widely, but a full treatment of its importance had to wait until now. We have some historical distance from this exchange, which extended over three decades, and which touches upon the central concerns of numerous fields of study and of social organization. From law, to politics, to philosophy and communication theory, and including the basics of action, these two towering figures compare their forms of pragmatism. Marcin Kilanowski sets the debate in its historical and multilayered context, comparing it with criticism and commentary from his own viewpoint and from that of other important thinkers who observed and participated in the famous exchange. This book not only provides background in the history of philosophy for a general reader but also will be useful to those who need an abbreviated narrative and compendium of relevant sources for their own thinking and research. Kilanowski shows the points of convergence between Rorty and Habermas, and also examines the meaning of the outcome of their long exchange. Does the result get us any closer to a viable idea of freedom? Of responsibility? The book suggests some answers to these and other related questions.

A study of the development of Dewey's logic from 1916-1937 leading up to his final 1938 book on the subject. By 1916, Dewey had written two volumes on logical theory. Yet, in light of what he would write in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry much remained to be done. Dewey did not yet have an adequate account of experience suitable to explain how our immediate experiencing becomes the material for logical sequences, series, and causal relations. Nor did he have a refined account of judging, propositions, and conceptions. Above all, his theory of continuity-central to all of his logical endeavors-was rudimentary. The years 1916—1937 saw Dewey remedy these deficiencies. We see in his published and unpublished articles, books, lecture notes and correspondence, the pursuit of a line of thinking that would lead to his magnum opus. John Dewey's Later Logical Theory follows Dewey through his path from Essays in Experimental Logic to the publication of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, and complements James Scott Johnston's earlier volume, John Dewey's Earlier Logical Theory.

Illustrates how William James's philosophical pragmatism can help to resolve issues in everyday contemporary life. William James, one of America's most original philosophers and psychologists, was concerned above all with the manner in which philosophy might help people to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, James experienced firsthand, much as we do now, the impact upon individuals and communities of rapid changes in extant values, technologies, economic realities, and ways of understanding the world. He presented an enormous range of practical recommendations for coping and thriving in such circumstances, arguing consistently that prospects for richer lives and improved communities rested not upon trust in spiritual or material prescriptions, but rather on clear thinking in the cause of action. This volume seeks to demonstrate how James's astonishingly rich corpus can be used to address contemporary issues and to establish better ways for thinking about the moral and practical challenges of our time. In the first part, James's theories are applied directly to issues ranging from gun control to disability, and the ethics of livestock farming to the meaning of "progress" in race relations. The second part shows how James's theories of ethics, experience, and the self can be used to "clear away" theoretical matters that have inhibited philosophy's deployment to real-world issues. Finally, part three shows how individuals might apply ideas from James in their personal lives, whether at work, contemplating nature, or considering the implications of their own habits of thought and action.

Presents strikingly original and contemporary answers to the most traditional philosophical problems in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory. A work of maximally ambitious scope with a foundation in humility, Entanglements sets out a philosophical system of the sort rarely seen over the past century. In a discipline marked by greater and greater specialization and the narrowing of increasingly insular traditions and approaches, Crispin Sartwell has spent his career engaging widely across philosophical topics and texts. Here he brings together his philosophical positions in a unified system that is coherent across the issues and subdisciplines in the field. In addition to presenting his own theories of truth, knowledge, free will, beauty, and the political state, Sartwell's criticisms of other figures and movements provide an overview of the history of philosophy. The project of presenting an overarching philosophical system is a resolutely old-fashioned one, and in undertaking it, Sartwell is not only encapsulating an extraordinarily unique and productive career but also nudging philosophy back to its broader aims of explaining the world and our place in it. Crispin Sartwell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College. He is the author of many books, including The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions; Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality; End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History; Extreme Virtue: Truth and Leadership in Five Great American Lives; Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory; and How to Escape: Magic, Madness, Beauty, and Cynicism, all published by SUNY Press.

Presents a new and unique method for developing principles to be applied in creating and increasing value. In this innovative work, Marc M. Anderson presents an account of value and value creation, which both defines value and introduces a method to manipulate value practically. Using this new methodology, Anderson first explores where value lies in experience, both human and otherwise, uncovering tendencies in human action and the natural world that create and destroy value. From that analysis, he generates practical principles to be applied in creating value in any region or discipline of human experience, at any scale, including corporate organization and product design, economics, the sciences, the arts, urban and architectural design, and sustainable development. He tests this methodology by focusing on the organization and production of commercial corporations in particular, suggesting ways to rethink and transform organization, product creation, and the contemporary currency system. He considers the implications for the many intersections of corporate production with human life, from urban planning, medicine, and food production to pornography, weaponry, and environmental engagement, with corresponding suggestions for transformation toward value. Throughout, Hyperthematics examines complexity, the nature of objects, the inevitable future intermingling of science and ethics, and assumptions driving the contemporary culture wars.

Proposes a distinctly American approach to aesthetic judgment and practice. Although there are distinctly American artists-Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Grandma Moses, Thomas Hart Benton, and Andy Warhol, for example-very little attention has been devoted to formulating any distinctively American characteristics of aesthetic judgment and practice. This volume takes a step in this direction, presenting an introductory essay on the possibility of such a distinctly American tradition, and a collection of essays exploring particular examples from a variety of angles. Some of the essays in this collection extend pragmatist and process insights about the important place aesthetics has in molding and assessing experience. Other essays examine the place of American aesthetics in relation to such particular forms of art as painting, literature, music, and film. Three essays attend to the aesthetic aspects of a flourishing life. In each of the essays, American aesthetics is understood to arise out of deeply felt personal, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Consequently, not only are such relatively abstract notions as harmony, fit, elegance, proportion, and the like involved in aesthetic judgment, but also religious, political, and social factors become embroiled in aesthetic discernment. Thus the ongoing pattern of American aesthetics is shown to be distinguishable from such other varieties of aesthetic thought as analytic aesthetics, New Criticism, and postmodern approaches to aesthetics. Walter B. Gulick is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Humanities, and Religious Studies at Montana State University Billings. Gary Slater is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at St. Edward's University and the author of C.S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation.

Uncovers long-ignored political themes-ideology, propaganda, mind-control, and Orwellian history-at work within the pages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The Politics of Paradigms shows that America's most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn's political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America's McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn's well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries-on campus and in the public sphere-about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world.

A holistic reinterpretation of Santayana's thought in terms of a dramatic philosophy of life. In this book, Katarzyna Kremplewska offers a thorough analysis of Santayana's conception of human self, viewed as part of his larger philosophy of life. Santayana emerges as an author of a provocative philosophy of drama, in which human life is acted out. Kremplewska demonstrates how his thought addresses the dynamics of human self in this context and the possibility of sustaining self-integrity while coping with the limitations of finite life. Focusing on particular aspects of Santayana's thought such as his conception of the tragic aspect of existence, and the role of the doctrine of spirit in his philosophical anthropology and critique of culture, this book also sets Santayana's thought in substantial dialogue with other thinkers, such as Heidegger, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Like Santayana's philosophy, this book seeks to build passages between theoretical reflection and practical life with the possibility of a good life in view.

Argues that a pluralistic understanding of truth can foster productive conversations about common concerns involving religion, science, ethics, politics, economics, and ecology without falling into relativism. In this book, Donald A. Crosby defends the idea that all claims to truth are at best partial. Recognizing this, he argues, is a necessary safeguard against arrogance, close-mindedness, and potentially violent reactions to differences of outlook and practice. Crosby demonstrates how "partial truths" are inevitably at work in conversations and debates about religion, science, morality, economics, ecology, and social and political progress. He then focuses on the concept in the discipline of philosophy, looking at a number of distinctions that are taken to be strictly binary-those between fact and value, continuity and novelty, rationalism and empiricism, mind and body, and good and evil-and demonstrates how in all of these cases, each on its own can offer only an incomplete picture. Partial Truths and Our Common Future invites ongoing dialogue with others for the sake of mutual enlargements of understanding rather than mere civility, and provides incentive for continuing open-minded and shared inquiries into the important issues of life.

This critical reader covers Joseph Margolis's controversial views of mind, truth, science, and reality, along with his revolutionary theories about culture, art, language, personhood, and morality. Pragmatism's revival since 1980 can be credited to several thinkers, among them the longtime professor of philosophy at Temple University, Joseph Margolis. The Critical Margolis collects within one volume more than a dozen of his essential writings, allowing readers to become familiar with his important contributions to core areas of philosophy, where he has controversially challenged scientistic, analytic, and continental traditions. During a period when sharp divides animate intellectual debates-realism or idealism, matter or mind, causality or freedom, machines or persons, facts or values, cognition or emotion, and the like-Margolis dissolves false dichotomies and reconstructs philosophy itself. Prominent philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century, from Quine, Danto, and Putnam to Derrida, Rorty, and Brandom, along with a host of similarly significant thinkers, are targets of Margolis's critiques. If there could be a comprehensive volume of pragmatism for today and tomorrow, The Critical Margolis shall serve. Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. Russell Pryba is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at Northern Arizona University.

Philosophers, social scientists, and natural scientists argue over whether a natural scientific account of human being is compatible with uniquely human norms like ethics, justice, art, and the concern for truth. Many attempts at such an account have been tried and failed; others, like evolutionary psychology, have tried but stumbled. “The Emergence of Value” argues that a broad enough understanding of nature and human nature can incorporate human values and norms, without reducing them to inhuman processes. Lawrence Cahoone advances the position that nature includes values as well as facts, and human uniqueness is therefore compatible with nature, as it must be. To demonstrate this, we must consider multiple sciences and recent philosophical traditions and their impact on our notions of truth, morality, justice, and beauty.

Demonstrates the extent to which Josiah Royce's ideas about race were motivated explicitly in terms of imperial conquest. Another white Man's Burden performs a case study of Josiah Royce's philosophy of racial difference. In an effort to lay bare the ethnological racial heritage of American philosophy, Tommy J. Curry challenges the common notion that the cultural racism of the twentieth century was more progressive and less racist than the biological determinism of the 1800s. Like many white thinkers of his time, Royce believed in the superiority of the white races. Unlike today however, whiteness did not represent only one racial designation but many. Contrary to the view of the British-born Germanophile philosopher Houston S. Chamberlain, for example, who insisted upon the superiority of the Teutonic races, Royce believed it was the Anglo-Saxon lineage that possessed the key to Western civilization. It was the birthright of white America, he believed, to join the imperial ventures of Britain-to take up the white man's burden. To this end he advocated the domestic colonization of Blacks in the American South, suggested that America's xenophobia was natural and necessary to protecting the culture of white America, and demanded the assimilation and elimination of cultural difference for the stability of America's communities. Another white Man's Burden reminds philosophers that racism has been part of the building blocks of American thought for centuries, and that this must be recognized and addressed in order for its proclamations of democracy, community, and social problems to have real meaning.

A full account of the Metaphysical Club, featuring the members' philosophical writings and four critical essays. The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James-appear in the book, alongside other thinkers who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains the important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought of the Metaphysical Club.

We encounter in our lives things and situations that elicit from us special forms of attention. They affect and inform us in various ways, drawing us in and holding us in their grasp or turning us away. Works of art of all sorts, and nature in its myriad manifestations, exemplify these luring and repelling qualities and potencies. Dimensions of Aesthetic Encounters explores central perceptual, interpretative, and semiotic dimensions of these encounters, combining a wide range of examples and intellectual resources from pragmatist, hermeneutical, and semiotic frameworks. Practicing a kind of "method of rotation" Robert E. Innis breaks down barriers in aesthetic theory and shows their complementary powers. Recurring themes link each chapter, throwing a powerful light on aesthetic encounters by foregrounding such pivotal notions as play, fundedness and the role of memory, the defining quality of an artwork, energies of objects, potencies, rhythm, form, presentational abstraction, medium, symbolization, intuition, role of the body, and the non-argumentative nature of art.

Human Landscapes works out a pragmatist anthropology which the Classical Pragmatists never put together in a comprehensive form-despite the many insights on the topic to be found in Dewey's, James's, and Mead's texts. Roberta Dreon retrieves and develops this material in its astonishing modernity concerning current debates on the mind as embodied and enacted, philosophy of the emotions, social theory, and studies about the origins of human language. By assuming a basic continuity between natural developments and human culture, this text highlights the qualitative, pre-personal, habitual features of human experience constituting the background to rational decision-making, normativity, and reflection. The book rests on three pillars: a reconceptualization of sensibility as a function of life, rather than as a primarily cognitive faculty; a focus on habits, understood as pervasive features of human behaviors acquired by attuning to the social environment; and an interpretation of human experience as "enlanguaged," namely as contingently yet irreversibly embedded in a linguistic environment that has important loop effects on human sensibility and habitual conduct.

Argues that the path to the good life does not consist in working toward some abstract concept of the good, but rather by ameliorating the problems of the practices and institutions that make up our practical life.

We members of settler colonial culture-the latest form of what novelist and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls Taker culture-are constrained by myriad institutions that leave us with little choice, but to engage in practices that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to ourselves. Our path to living otherwise, Andrew Frederick Smith argues, lies in the threefold struggle, which is inspired by Quinn's focus on the interweaving roots of ecological, social, and personal wellbeing. These three forms of wellbeing are co-implicated. We cannot enjoy one without equally enjoying the others, they are a package deal. As such, what works for people individually and collectively works for the planet, and vice versa. Reclaiming our lives and revitalizing our human and more-than-human communities are salient acts of resistance against Taker culture. They offer means of escape from our cultural captivity and an opportunity for full-spectrum wellbeing.

This book examines the ideas and influences of a nearly forgotten Swedish-American philosopher, John Elof Boodin (1869—1950). A friend and student of William James and protégé of Josiah Royce at Harvard, Boodin combined Jamesian pragmatism and Roycean idealism in developing original scholarship (nearly sixty articles and eight books) from 1900 to 1947, in addition to a volume of posthumous papers published in 1957. Although he is seldom remembered today, the enduring importance of pragmatism and the rising influence of process theology today suggests that his close reading of early to mid-twentieth-century science and vast grasp of philosophical issues warrants a renewed interest in his work that can be a valuable antidote to the sterile and constricting effects of reductionism and dogmatic materialism prevalent today in both those fields.

The once-lost introduction to the philosophy of science by Philipp Frank (1884-1966), a leading member of the Vienna circle of philosophers and biographer of Albert Einstein. Philipp Frank (1884—1966) was an influential philosopher of science, public intellectual, and Harvard educator whose last book, The Humanistic Background of Science, is finally available. Never published in his lifetime, this original manuscript has been edited and introduced to highlight Frank's remarkable but little-known insights about the nature of modern science-insights that rival those of Karl Popper and Frank's colleagues Thomas Kuhn and James Bryant Conant. As a leading exponent of logical empiricism and a member of the famous Vienna Circle, Frank intended his book to provide an accessible, engaging introduction to the philosophy of science and its cultural significance. The book is steadfastly true to science; to aspirations of peace, unity, and human flourishing after World War II; and to the pragmatic philosophies of Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey that Frank embraced in his new American home. Amidst the many recent surveys and retrospective analyses of midcentury philosophy of science, The Humanistic Background of Science offers an original, first-hand view of Frank's post-European life and of intellectual dramas then unfolding in Chicago, New York City, and Boston.

Starting with an appreciation of the practical realizations that move us to assume responsibility, Full Responsibility develops an ontologically-grounded model of different forms of responsibility and the challenges and fulfillments found in each. Special attention is given to pragmatic and political responsibility, highlighting considerations for right action that are not accurately recognized by universalizing ethics. Issues in abortion decisions, providing for responsible work, and immigration and refugee policy are examined in the complex frame of political responsibility. Moving past the standoff between political moralism and political realism, Steven G. Smith offers an account of political responsibility as an unstable combination of all modes of responsibility. The book concludes by reviewing different approaches to the impossible but compelling ideal of full responsibility. The distinctive natures of ethical, historical, and religious forms of responsibility are discussed in appendices.

Don Ihde is one of the world's foremost thinkers on the place of technologies in our lives. Over the course of a long career, he has built a unique and useful perspective by expanding on phenomenological and American pragmatist philosophy and has developed wide-ranging insights and conceptual tools for describing the details of our experience across the various areas of human activity, including scientific practice, anthropological history, computer interface, design, art history, and the technologies of everyday life. “The Critical Ihde” brings together many of Ihde's most influential writings, as well as a number of under-recognized gems. Across these works are examples of his influential contributions to the phenomenology of human auditory and visual experience, his foundational work on the phenomenology of technology, and his thoughts on the technologies of scientific practice, including laboratory and medical imaging. Further, these chapters reveal the development of "postphenomenology," Ihde's original philosophical perspective, one that continues to flourish today across the work of a growing interdisciplinary and international collective of scholars.

William James (1842–1910) authored some of America's most original and evocative philosophy and psychology. Until recently, however, his work in ethics attracted little interest, despite suggestions from such distinguished peers as John Dewey that ethical themes suffused his writings. Taking those suggestions seriously, Clifford S. Stagoll provides an original and rigorous interpretation of James's ethics as a response to the socio-economic circumstances of his day, derived from key themes in his metaphysics, philosophical psychology, philosophy of religion, and pedagogical theory. By considering these apparently disparate projects together, Stagoll shows how James's recommendations for pursuing a richer, more rewarding life-an ethics in the classical sense-are justified by intricate and sophisticated analyses of how we think, act, and conceive of ourselves. For James, making a habit of experimenting with life's myriad opportunities is not just a way to counter thinking that has grown too rigid, but a crucial precondition for making the most of one's life and self.

“Action, Embodied Mind, and Life World” combines embodied consciousness research, existential phenomenology, Gendlin's "focusing" concept, and recent self-organizational work on basic emotions (e.g., Panksepp, Frijda), to explore the way patterns of motivated action shape our interpretations of reality-personally, biologically, and within a sociopolitical community. Like a bat projecting sonar, we understand our world by sensing patterns of resistance against our own self-initiated actions. If hammering is the action, we find "nails" and "non-nails." Actions in turn express a self-organizing process rooted in motivational structures that presuppose values. These patterns of motivation therefore prefigure the shape of what we think or perceive. But the emotions, feelings, "sensings" through which we discern motivation are never just about what they seem, especially given ample incentives to distortion and self-deception. The "trigger" is the tip of an iceberg. This book works toward a coherent method for getting at the basement level of the action trajectories that motivate exploration, selective attention, and thus interpretations of reality-a crucial question in an age of motivated disinformation.