Böcker i American Philosophy Series-serien

The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. examines the varied categories scholars have used to describe the philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. These include, "Jobbist," Nihilist, Realist, Social Darwinist, Utilitarian, Positivist, Natural Law Theorist, and Pragmatist.

John Dewey was the most celebrated and publicly engaged American philosopher in the twentieth century. His naturalistic theory of ';experience' generated new approaches to education and democracy and re-grounded philosophy's search for truth in the needs of life as it is shared and lived. However, interpretations of Dewey after the linguistic turn have either obscured or rejected the considerable role that he gives to the non-discursive dimension of experience. In Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience, Bethany Henning argues that much classical American philosophy implicitly recognizes an unconscious dimension of mind that is distinct from Freud's theory. Although the unconscious that emerges within American thought has never been treated systematically, it found its fullest expression in Dewey's work, particularly in his theory of aesthetic experience. This dimension of mind illuminates the continuity between nature and culture, and it provides us with an account of why artwork is often successful at communicating meanings from the ecological and intimate dimensions of life, where discourse often fails. If the relationship between the human and the organic world has emerged as the definitive question of twenty-first century life, then the aesthetic unconscious stands as a resource for our ecological and intimate well-being.

In Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion: Melioristic Case Studies, Ulf Zackariasson argues for the fruitfulness of pragmatic philosophy of religion by bringing it to bear on a number of classical topics within the contemporary philosophy of religion. Zackariasson first outlines a version of pragmatic philosophy of religion that takes the pragmatic insistence on the primacy of practice to heart. Here, he shows that religious traditions and their secular counterparts transmit a number of paradigmatic responses that adherents can draw on in their encounters with human life's existential contingencies. He further discusses the upshot of this approach for how we think of miracles, religious diversity, and what it is to be religiously mistaken. In each case, Zackariasson shows that a pragmatic approach offers important novel perspectives and insights that contemporary (primarily analytic) philosophy of religion tends to neglect. By relating to debates and well-known positions within the contemporary philosophy of religion, he also makes these novel perspectives and insights concrete for those who are not already committed pragmatists. The case studies thus serve as invitations to constructive dialogue within an increasingly pluralistic philosophy of religion.

This book examines the contributions of William James, John Dewey, F.C.S. Schiller, C.S. Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams to a case for a pragmatist philosophy of history. Together, they expand our understanding on how we process the past, which impacts our present and our future.

W. V. Quine's occasional references to his ';pragmatism' have often been interpreted as suggesting a possible link to the American Pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction argues that the influence of pragmatism on Quine's philosophy is more accurately traced to his teacher C.I. Lewis and his conceptual pragmatism from Mind and the World Order, and his later An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. Quine's epistemological views share many affinities with Lewis's conceptual pragmatism, where knowledge is conceived as a conceptual framework pragmatically revised in light of what future experience reveals. Robert Sinclair further defends and elaborates on this claim by showing how Lewis's influence can be seen in several key episodes in Quine's philosophical development. This not only highlights a forgotten element of the epistemological backdrop to Quine's mid-century criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction, but Sinclair further argues that it provides the central epistemological framework for the form and content of Quine's later naturalized conception of epistemology.

Arguing, humanistically, that we live in a "human world" inescapably colored by meaning, this book shows why the pursuit of meaningfulness is not ethically innocent but must be subjected to critique. Pragmatist critique of meaning both embraces critical humanism and rejects theodicies postulating ultimate meaning in suffering.