Pragmatism Cybrary
Visit the Cybrarian John Shook
Pragmatism is a movement in American philosophy
which began in the 1870s with the Metaphysical Club. Read about the history of pragmatism and get introductions to pragmatism and pragmatists.
cybrary halls
Cybrary Home
Research Center
Pragmatism Genealogy
Centers and
Societies
Find Pragmatists
pragmatists
organizations
Society for the Advancement of
American Philosophy
Institute for American Thought
Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism
Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana
Frederick L. Will
All his books and related materials about his pragmatic realism have been posted by Kenneth Westphal here:http://illinois.academia.edu/FrederickLWill
Contemporary Pragmatism Book Reviews
These books are available for reviewing. Book reviews are typically 1,000 to 1,500 words in length, and longer reviews for volumes of collected chapters are welcome. To receive a book review assignment, contact assistant editor Daniel Brunson at [email protected] to obtain the style guidelines and make your promise to him that you will submit your review within 60 days. Past 60 days, your review may be published alongside another review on the same book. We are open to suggestions of books not on this list, although they may have already been assigned. Visit the journal's homepage at Brill: www.brill.com/products/journal/contemporary-pragmatism
Baldacchino, John. John Dewey: Liberty and the Pedagogy of Disposition. Berlin: Springer, 2014. book information from publisher
Bowden, Sean, Simone Bignall, and Paul Patton, eds. Deleuze and Pragmatism. London: Routledge, 2014. book information from publisher
Bricklin, Jonathan. The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James's Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Curtis, William M. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Eddy, Beth. Evolutionary Pragmatism and Ethics. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016. book information from publisher
Grube, Dirk-Martin, and Robert Sinclair, eds. Pragmatism, Metaphysics and Culture: Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatic Network, 2015. book information from publisher
Halliwell, Martin, and Joel Rasmussen. William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. book information from publisher
Hare, Peter. Pragmatism with Purpose: Selected Writings, ed. Joseph Palencik, Douglas R. Anderson, and Steven A. Miller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Johnston, James Scott. John Dewey's Earlier Logical Theory. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2014. book information from publisher
Lee, Mordecai. The Philosopher-Lobbyist: John Dewey and the People's Lobby, 1828-1940. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Maattanen, Pentti. Mind in Action: Experience and Embodied Cognition in Pragmatism. New York: Springer, 2015. book information from publisher
McClean, David. 2014. Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and Cosmopolitanism. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014. book information from publisher
McMahon, Jennifer A. Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant's Pragmatist Legacy. New York and London: Routledge, 2014. book information from publisher
Oleksy, Mateusz. Realism and Individualism: Charles S. Peirce and the Threat of Modern Nominalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. book information from publisher
Romanini, Vinicius, and Eliseo Fernandez, eds. Peirce and Biosemiotics - A Guess at the Riddle of Life. Berin and New York: Springer, 2014. book information from publisher
Skowronski, Krzysztof Piotr, ed. Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism. Leiden: Brill, 2015. book information from publisher
Shook, John R., and Tibor Solymosi. Pragmatist Neurophilosophy: American Philosophy and the Brain. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. book information from publisher
Solymosi, Tibor, and John R. Shook. Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. book information from publisher
Slater, Michael R. Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. book information from publisher
Thellefsen, Torkild, and Bent Sorensen, eds. Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words: 100 Years of Semiotics. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014. book information from publisher
White, Ryan. The Hidden God: Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Whitehead, Deborah. William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. book information from publisher
Zackariasson, Ulf. Action, Belief and Inquiry: Pragmatist Perspectives on Science, Society and Religion. Helsinki: Nordic Studies in Pragmatism, 2015. book information from publisher
events
See the Peirce Society calendar and the SAAP calendar.Conference on Pragmatism and the Brain
University of North Carolina at Asheville - Thursday June 2, Friday June 3, and Saturday June 4, 2016
*workshops on Thursday & Friday
**main program on Friday evening and Saturday
DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS IS NOW APRIL 1, 2016 - submit to Brian Butler at [email protected]
-- download the flier --
INVITED SPEAKERS
Dr. Anthony Chemero is Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. His research is both philosophical and empirical, focused on questions related to dynamical modeling, ecological psychology, artificial life, and complex systems. He is the author of the books Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) and, with Stephan K�ufer, Phenomenology: An Introduction (2014). He is editing the second edition of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.
Dr. James Giordano is Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics, and Professor in the Department of Neurology and Department of Biochemistry, at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. He has authored and edited many books on neuroscience, neurophilosophy and neuroethics, including Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics (2011) and Neurotechnology: Premises, Potential and Problems (2012).
Dr. Jay Schulkin is a Research Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University. He studied philosophy and also earned a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books about the intersections of brain science, psychology, and philosophy, such as Naturalism and Pragmatism (2012) and Pragmatism and the Search for Coherence in Neuroscience (2015).
We invite abstract submissions (600 words) to read a 30-minute paper on the Main Program. If you can arrive Thursday or Friday, join us for workshops with selected presenters along with John Shook (Bowie State) and Tibor Solymosi (Mercyhurst), who recently edited Pragmatist Neurophilosophy: American Philosophy and the Brain (2014) and Neuroscience, Neurophilosophy, and Pragmatism: Brains at Work with the World (2014). Contact [email protected] for assistance accessing those books. Workshops are open for discussing your ongoing writing projects or new research ideas. The local host is Brian E. Butler, Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Philosophy Department at UNC Asheville. He is collecting the 600-word abstracts for committee consideration at [email protected] He can also answer questions about local accommodations. Come on down a day or two early � Asheville is beautiful in early June!
editorial
The Eclipse of pragmatism?
There has been much talk of pragmatism's "eclipse" during analytic philosophy's greatest dominance from 1950 to 1990. The myth must be corrected: pragmatism was never eclipsed. While pragmatism was a prominent competitor with rival neo-idealisms and new realisms during the first two decades of the 20th century, pragmatism had few representatives across the top twenty philosophy departments. Already quite marginalized in the 1920s and 1930s, the handful of pragmatist professors such as Dewey at Columbia and Mead at Chicago encouraged many of their students to go into psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, education, and economics. Many of the best new minds favorable towards pragmatism strongly influenced the social sciences during the 1940s - 1980s.
In philosophy departments, pragmatism remained marginalized. However, Harvard and Columbia were still fairly pragmatic and carried on the debate. C.I. Lewis, Morton White, and W.V. Quine at Harvard, along with Ernest Nagel, Signey Morgenbesser, and Isaac Levi at Columbia, each pursued some pragmatist themes. Many of their students have in turn defended selected pragmatist views, much diluted and transformed, but still consistent with pragmatic naturalism (eg. views seen in Putnam, Davidson, Dennett, Churchland, etc). Supplemented by the efforts of renegade analytic philosophers such as Richard Rorty, pragmatism remained marginalized, yet very potent and defended by a few major figures at prominent philosophy departments. Visit The Genealogy Center for details. When philosophy became more interdisciplinary in the 1990s, its encounters with linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, semiotics, etc., brought it back into contact with flourishing pragmatist views.
In summary, pragmatism has been a small but potent philosophy before and after WW II. Its contemporary vitality is enhanced by philosophy's re-engagement with the social and cognitive sciences. --J.S.
Where do Pragmatists Come From?
Nearly 300 scholars are included in the Cybrary's lists of philosophy professors whose research and teaching interests include pragmatism. Where did they come from? Which doctoral programs turn out graduates who learned about pragmatism and maintained that interest in their careers? The Pragmatism Cybrary won't rate PhD programs for quality or job placement, but these numbers let you draw your own conclusions. Note that most of these programs have turned out pragmatists for generations.
Columbia University, 19. Fordham University, 14. Southern Illinois University, 13. Vanderbilt University, 12. Pennsylvania State University, 11. University of Chicago, 11. Saint Louis University, 10. SUNY at Stony Brook, 10. University of Notre Dame, 10. Yale University, 10. Boston University, 9. Harvard University, 9. Princeton University, 8. University of Pennsylvania, 8. Emory University, 7. Purdue University, 6. University of Texas, 6. Boston College, 5. Claremont Graduate University, 5. Loyola University, Chicago, 5. University of Miami, 5. University of Oregon, 5. City University of New York, 4. Tulane University, 4. Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 4. University of Michigan, 4. University of Western Ontario, 4.
Spotlight: Pragmatism in Philosophy of Mind
Pragmatism was the original functional psychology and cognitive science that (1) explains intelligence in terms of deliberate purposive conduct, and (2) explains knowledge as successful predictions about manipulating nature. Experience and mind are not limited to, or reducible to, brain events -- experience, mind, and the like are evolving natural systems of organism-environment transactions.
You can read defenses of some or all of these principles in the recent works of
Andy Clark (Edinburgh,
UK), Susan Hurley (Bristol, UK),
Alva Noë (UC Berkeley,
USA), Mark Rowlands
(Hertfordshire, UK), Robert Wilson
(Alberta, CAN), and Teed Rockwell
(Sonoma, USA).
--J.S.
points of interest
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was the most prominent "neo-pragmatist" for three decades, teaching at Princeton, Virginia, and Stanford. His best known books include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Philosophy and Social Hope.
Click here to find out more.
Contemporary Pragmatism is an interdisciplinary, international journal for discussing pragmatism, and applying pragmatism to current topics.
Click here to find out more.