The Theory of Universal Genesis - the semantics co-axiology

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While identifying any non-trivial common factor in all these schools of thought is bound to be controversial, Michael E. Rosen has hypothesized a few common Continental themes: The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl , sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology.

The psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud , Jacques Lacan , Julia Kristeva , and others has also been influential in contemporary Continental thought. Conversely, some philosophers have attempted to define and rehabilitate older traditions of philosophy. Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, [42] [43] shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.

Their influence, however, has extended beyond existentialist thought. Transcendental idealism, advocated by Immanuel Kant , is the view that there are limits on what can be understood, since there is much that cannot be brought under the conditions of objective judgment. Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason — in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and to establish a new groundwork for studying metaphysics.

Although Kant held that objective knowledge of the world required the mind to impose a conceptual or categorical framework on the stream of pure sensory data—a framework including space and time themselves—he maintained that things-in-themselves existed independently of human perceptions and judgments; he was therefore not an idealist in any simple sense. Kant's account of things-in-themselves is both controversial and highly complex.

Continuing his work, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling dispensed with belief in the independent existence of the world, and created a thoroughgoing idealist philosophy. The most notable work of this German idealism was G. Hegel 's Phenomenology of Spirit , of Hegel admitted his ideas were not new, but that all the previous philosophies had been incomplete.

His goal was to correctly finish their job. Hegel asserts that the twin aims of philosophy are to account for the contradictions apparent in human experience which arise, for instance, out of the supposed contradictions between "being" and "not being" , and also simultaneously to resolve and preserve these contradictions by showing their compatibility at a higher level of examination "being" and "not being" are resolved with "becoming".

This program of acceptance and reconciliation of contradictions is known as the "Hegelian dialectic ". Philosophers influenced by Hegel include Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach , who coined the term projection as pertaining to humans' inability to recognize anything in the external world without projecting qualities of ourselves upon those things; Karl Marx ; Friedrich Engels ; and the British idealists , notably T. Few 20th-century philosophers have embraced idealism. However, quite a few have embraced Hegelian dialectic. Immanuel Kant's "Copernican Turn" also remains an important philosophical concept today.

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis, originating from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It analyzes class relations and societal conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and a dialectical view of social transformation. Marxist analyses and methodologies influenced political ideologies and social movements. Marxist understandings of history and society were adopted by academics in archaeology, anthropology, media studies, political science, theater, history, sociology, art history and theory, cultural studies, education, economics, geography, literary criticism, aesthetics, critical psychology and philosophy.

Edmund Husserl 's phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. Phenomenology later achieved international fame through the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger formerly Husserl's research assistant , Maurice Merleau-Ponty , and Jean-Paul Sartre. Through the work of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of existentialism. Inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure , structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible.

Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought. This led Continental thought away from humanism, and toward what was termed the decentering of man: Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by post-structuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, for example, but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines.

While the distinction between the signifier and signified was treated as crystalline by structuralists, poststructuralists asserted that every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible. Post-structuralism came to predominate from the s onwards, including thinkers such as Michel Foucault , Jacques Derrida , Gilles Deleuze and even Roland Barthes ; it incorporated a critique of structuralism's limitations.

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around Since the usefulness of any belief at any time might be contingent on circumstance, Peirce and James conceptualised final truth as something established only by the future, final settlement of all opinion. Pragmatism attempted to find a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight revelation or reference to some metaphysical realm. It interpreted the meaning of a statement by the effect its acceptance would have on practice.

Inquiry taken far enough is thus the only path to truth. For Peirce commitment to inquiry was essential to truth-finding, implied by the idea and hope that inquiry is not fruitless. The interpretation of these principles has been subject to discussion ever since.

Pragmatism

Peirce's maxim of pragmatism is, "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. Critics accused pragmatism falling victim to a simple fallacy: Pragmatism was later worked on by neopragmatists Richard Rorty who was the first to develop neopragmatist philosophy in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , [59] Hilary Putnam , W.

Quine , and Donald Davidson. Neopragmatism has been described as a bridge between analytic and Continental philosophy. Process philosophy is a tradition beginning with Alfred North Whitehead , who began teaching and writing on process and metaphysics when he joined Harvard University in Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in Continental departments.

Largely Aristotelian in its approach and content, Thomism is a philosophical tradition that follows the writings of Thomas Aquinas. His work has been read, studied and disputed since the 13th century, especially by Roman Catholics. Aquinas enjoyed a revived mainstream interest beginning in contemporary philosophy, among both atheists Philippa Foot and theists Elizabeth Anscombe. They claim that humans are rational animals whose good can be known by reason that can be achieved by the will.

Thomists argue that soul or psyche is real and immaterial but inseparable from matter in organisms. Soul is the form of the body. Thomists accept Aristotle's causes as natural, including teleological or final causes. In this way, although Aquinas argued that whatever is in the intellect begins in the senses, natural teleology can be discerned with the senses and abstracted from nature through induction.

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Contemporary Thomism encompasses multiple variants, from neo-scholasticism to existential Thomism. The so-called new Natural lawyers like Grisez and George applied Thomistic legal principles to contemporary ethical debates, while Freeman proposed that Thomism's cognition was most compatible with neurodynamics. Analytical Thomism Haldane encourages dialogue between analytic philosophy and broadly Aristotelian philosophy of mind, psychology and hylomorphic metaphysics.

Western philosophers have often been divided into some major branches, or schools, based either on the questions typically addressed by people working in different parts of the field, or notions of ideological undercurrents. In the ancient world, the most influential division of the subject was the Stoics ' division of philosophy into logic , ethics , and physics conceived as the study of the nature of the world, and including both natural science and metaphysics.

In contemporary philosophy, specialties within the field are more commonly divided into metaphysics , epistemology , ethics and aesthetics the latter two of which together comprise axiology , or value theory. Logic is sometimes included as a main branch of philosophy, sometimes as a separate science philosophers happen to work on, and sometimes just as a characteristically philosophical method applying to all branches of philosophy.

Within these broad branches there are now numerous sub-disciplines of philosophy. At the broadest level there is the division between analytic the English-speaking world and Nordic countries and Continental philosophy in the rest of Europe. For Continental philosophy subdividing philosophy between "experts" is problematic for the very nature of the interdisciplinary task of philosophy itself; however, for most of analytic philosophy further divisions simplify the task for philosophers in each area. The interest in particular sub-disciplines waxes and wanes over time; sometimes sub-disciplines become particularly hot topics and can occupy so much space in the literature that they almost seem like major branches in their own right.

Over the past 40 years or so philosophy of mind —which is, generally speaking, mainly a sub-discipline of metaphysics—has taken on this position within analytic philosophy, and has attracted so much attention that some suggest philosophy of mind as the paradigm for what contemporary analytic philosophers do. Originally the term "philosophy" was applied to all intellectual endeavours. Aristotle studied what would now be called biology , meteorology , physics , and cosmology , alongside his metaphysics and ethics. Even in the eighteenth century physics and chemistry were still classified as " natural philosophy ", that is, the philosophical study of nature.

Today these latter subjects are popularly referred to as sciences , and as separate from philosophy. More recently, psychology , economics , sociology , and linguistics were once the domain of philosophers insofar as they were studied at all, but now have only a weaker connection with the field. In the late twentieth century cognitive science and artificial intelligence could be seen as being forged in part out of " philosophy of mind. Philosophy is done primarily through self-reflection and critical thinking. It does not tend to rely on experiment. However, in some ways philosophy is close to science in its character and method; some analytic philosophers have suggested that the method of philosophical analysis allows philosophers to emulate the methods of natural science; Quine holds that philosophy does no more than clarify the arguments and claims of other sciences.

This suggests that philosophy might be the study of meaning and reasoning generally; but some still would claim either that this is not a science, or that if it is it ought not to be pursued by philosophers. All these views have something in common: It does not depend as much on experience and experiment, and does not contribute as directly to technology. It clearly would be a mistake to identify philosophy with any one natural science; whether it can be identified with science very broadly construed is still an open question.

This is an active discipline pursued by both trained philosophers and scientists. Philosophers often refer to, and interpret, experimental work of various kinds as in philosophy of physics and philosophy of psychology , but such branches of philosophy aim at philosophical understanding of experimental work. Philosophers do not perform experiments and formulate scientific theories qua philosophers.

Like philosophy, most religious studies are not experimental. Parts of theology , including questions about the existence and nature of gods, clearly overlap with philosophy of religion. Aristotle considered theology a branch of metaphysics , the central field of philosophy, and most philosophers before the twentieth century have devoted significant effort to theological questions.

So the two are not unrelated. But other parts of religious studies, such as the comparison of different world religions, can be easily distinguished from philosophy in just the way that any other social science can be distinguished from philosophy. These are closer to history and sociology, and involve specific observations of particular phenomena, here particular religious practices. The empiricist tradition in modern philosophy often held that religious questions are beyond the scope of human knowledge, and many have claimed that religious language is literally meaningless: Some philosophers have felt that these difficulties in evidence were irrelevant, and have argued for, against, or just about religious beliefs on moral or other grounds.

The philosophy of mathematics is a branch of philosophy of science ; but in many ways mathematics has a special relationship to philosophy. This is because the study of logic is a central branch of philosophy, and mathematics is a paradigmatic example of logic. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, logic made great advances, and mathematics has been proven to be reducible to logic at least, to first-order logic with some set theory. The use of formal, mathematical logic in philosophy now resembles the use of mathematics in science, although it is not as frequent.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Part of a series on Philosophy Plato Kant Nietzsche. Ancient Greek philosophy , Hellenistic philosophy , and Roman philosophy. Christian philosophy and Medieval philosophy. Renaissance philosophy and 16th-century philosophy. Desmond Henry, in Edwards , pp. David Luscombe, Medieval Thought Oxford University Press, , dates medieval philosophy from the conversion of Constantine in to the Protestant Reformation in the s. Christopher Hughes, in A.

Gracia , p. Thomas in the seventeenth century. The American Historical Review. Further through the Subject. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. University of Chicago Press. Moral and Political Philosophy". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he has set the terms of debate about the fundamentals of political life right into our own times.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Kenny , p. A Contemporary Introduction , Routledge, , p. Descartes to Kant , Routledge, , p. Scott Fitzgerald; in political theory from Plato to Hobbes and Locke […] The texts or authors who fill in the blanks from A to Z in these, and other intellectual traditions, constitute the canon, and there is an accompanying narrative that links text to text or author to author, a 'history of' American literature, economic thought, and so on.

The most conventional of such histories are embodied in university courses and the textbooks that accompany them. John Shook has said, "Chauncey Wright also deserves considerable credit, for as both Peirce and James recall, it was Wright who demanded a phenomenalist and fallibilist empiricism as an alternative to rationalistic speculation. Peirce developed the idea that inquiry depends on real doubt, not mere verbal or hyperbolic doubt , [12] and said, in order to understand a conception in a fruitful way, "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception.

Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object", [2] which he later called the pragmatic maxim. It equates any conception of an object to the general extent of the conceivable implications for informed practice of that object's effects. This is the heart of his pragmatism as a method of experimentational mental reflection arriving at conceptions in terms of conceivable confirmatory and disconfirmatory circumstances—a method hospitable to the generation of explanatory hypotheses, and conducive to the employment and improvement of verification.

Typical of Peirce is his concern with inference to explanatory hypotheses as outside the usual foundational alternative between deductivist rationalism and inductivist empiricism, although he was a mathematical logician and a founder of statistics. Peirce lectured and further wrote on pragmatism to make clear his own interpretation. While framing a conception's meaning in terms of conceivable tests, Peirce emphasized that, since a conception is general, its meaning, its intellectual purport, equates to its acceptance's implications for general practice, rather than to any definite set of real effects or test results ; a conception's clarified meaning points toward its conceivable verifications, but the outcomes are not meanings, but individual upshots.

Peirce in coined the new name pragmaticism "for the precise purpose of expressing the original definition", [13] saying that "all went happily" with James's and Schiller's variant uses of the old name "pragmatism" and that he nonetheless coined the new name because of the old name's growing use in "literary journals, where it gets abused".

Yet in a manuscript he cited as causes his differences with James and Schiller. Peirce in any case regarded his views that truth is immutable and infinity is real, as being opposed by the other pragmatists, but he remained allied with them on other issues. Pragmatism enjoyed renewed attention after Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used a revised pragmatism to criticize logical positivism in the s.

Inspired by the work of Quine and Sellars, a brand of pragmatism known sometimes as neopragmatism gained influence through Richard Rorty , the most influential of the late twentieth century pragmatists along with Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom. Contemporary pragmatism may be broadly divided into a strict analytic tradition and a "neo-classical" pragmatism such as Susan Haack that adheres to the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Inspiration for various pragmatists [ citation needed ] included:. A few of the various but interrelated positions often characteristic of philosophers working from a pragmatist approach include:.

Dewey, in The Quest For Certainty , criticized what he called "the philosophical fallacy": This causes metaphysical and conceptual confusion. Various examples are the " ultimate Being " of Hegelian philosophers, the belief in a " realm of value ", the idea that logic, because it is an abstraction from concrete thought, has nothing to do with the act of concrete thinking, and so on. Hildebrand sums up the problem: From the outset, pragmatists wanted to reform philosophy and bring it more in line with the scientific method as they understood it.

They argued that idealist and realist philosophy had a tendency to present human knowledge as something beyond what science could grasp. They held that these philosophies then resorted either to a phenomenology inspired by Kant or to correspondence theories of knowledge and truth. Pragmatism instead tries to explain the relation between knower and known. In , [16] C. Peirce argued that there is no power of intuition in the sense of a cognition unconditioned by inference, and no power of introspection, intuitive or otherwise, and that awareness of an internal world is by hypothetical inference from external facts.

Introspection and intuition were staple philosophical tools at least since Descartes. He argued that there is no absolutely first cognition in a cognitive process; such a process has its beginning but can always be analyzed into finer cognitive stages. That which we call introspection does not give privileged access to knowledge about the mind—the self is a concept that is derived from our interaction with the external world and not the other way around De Waal , pp. At the same time he held persistently that pragmatism and epistemology in general could not be derived from principles of psychology understood as a special science: Richard Rorty expanded on these and other arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in which he criticized attempts by many philosophers of science to carve out a space for epistemology that is entirely unrelated to—and sometimes thought of as superior to—the empirical sciences.

Quine, instrumental in bringing naturalized epistemology back into favor with his essay Epistemology Naturalized Quine , also criticized "traditional" epistemology and its "Cartesian dream" of absolute certainty. The dream, he argued, was impossible in practice as well as misguided in theory, because it separates epistemology from scientific inquiry. Hilary Putnam has suggested that the reconciliation of anti-skepticism [19] and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism.

Peirce insisted that 1 in reasoning, there is the presupposition, and at least the hope, [20] that truth and the real are discoverable and would be discovered, sooner or later but still inevitably, by investigation taken far enough, [2] and 2 contrary to Descartes' famous and influential methodology in the Meditations on First Philosophy , doubt cannot be feigned or created by verbal fiat to motivate fruitful inquiry, and much less can philosophy begin in universal doubt.

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Genuine doubt irritates and inhibits, in the sense that belief is that upon which one is prepared to act. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Note that anti-skepticism is a reaction to modern academic skepticism in the wake of Descartes. The pragmatist insistence that all knowledge is tentative is quite congenial to the older skeptical tradition. Pragmatism was not the first to apply evolution to theories of knowledge: Schopenhauer advocated a biological idealism as what's useful to an organism to believe might differ wildly from what is true.

Here knowledge and action are portrayed as two separate spheres with an absolute or transcendental truth above and beyond any sort of inquiry organisms used to cope with life. Pragmatism challenges this idealism by providing an "ecological" account of knowledge: Real and true are functional labels in inquiry and cannot be understood outside of this context.

It is not realist in a traditionally robust sense of realism what Hilary Putnam would later call metaphysical realism , but it is realist in how it acknowledges an external world which must be dealt with. Many of James' best-turned phrases— truth's cash value James , p. It is high time to urge the use of a little imagination in philosophy.

The unwillingness of some of our critics to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into our statements is as discreditable to their imaginations as anything I know in recent philosophic history. Schiller says the truth is that which "works. Dewey says truth is what gives "satisfaction"! He is treated as one who believes in calling everything true which, if it were true, would be pleasant. The role of belief in representing reality is widely debated in pragmatism. Is a belief valid when it represents reality? Copying is one and only one genuine mode of knowing, James , p. Are beliefs dispositions which qualify as true or false depending on how helpful they prove in inquiry and in action?

Is it only in the struggle of intelligent organisms with the surrounding environment that beliefs acquire meaning? Does a belief only become true when it succeeds in this struggle? In Pragmatism nothing practical or useful is held to be necessarily true , nor is anything which helps to survive merely in the short term. For example, to believe my cheating spouse is faithful may help me feel better now, but it is certainly not useful from a more long-term perspective because it doesn't accord with the facts and is therefore not true.

While pragmatism started out simply as a criterion of meaning, it quickly expanded to become a full-fledged epistemology with wide-ranging implications for the entire philosophical field. Pragmatists who work in these fields share a common inspiration, but their work is diverse and there are no received views. In the philosophy of science, instrumentalism is the view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments and progress in science cannot be couched in terms of concepts and theories somehow mirroring reality.

Instrumentalist philosophers often define scientific progress as nothing more than an improvement in explaining and predicting phenomena. Instrumentalism does not state that truth does not matter, but rather provides a specific answer to the question of what truth and falsity mean and how they function in science. Lewis ' main arguments in Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge was that science does not merely provide a copy of reality but must work with conceptual systems and that those are chosen for pragmatic reasons, that is, because they aid inquiry.

Lewis' own development of multiple modal logics is a case in point. Lewis is sometimes called a proponent of conceptual pragmatism because of this. Another development is the cooperation of logical positivism and pragmatism in the works of Charles W.

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Morris and Rudolf Carnap. The influence of pragmatism on these writers is mostly limited to the incorporation of the pragmatic maxim into their epistemology. Pragmatists with a broader conception of the movement do not often refer to them. Quine 's paper " Two Dogmas of Empiricism ", published , is one of the most celebrated papers of twentieth-century philosophy in the analytic tradition. The paper is an attack on two central tenets of the logical positivists' philosophy. One is the distinction between analytic statements tautologies and contradictions whose truth or falsehood is a function of the meanings of the words in the statement 'all bachelors are unmarried' , and synthetic statements, whose truth or falsehood is a function of contingent states of affairs.

The other is reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience. Quine's argument brings to mind Peirce's insistence that axioms are not a priori truths but synthetic statements. Later in his life Schiller became famous for his attacks on logic in his textbook, Formal Logic. By then, Schiller's pragmatism had become the nearest of any of the classical pragmatists to an ordinary language philosophy.

Schiller sought to undermine the very possibility of formal logic, by showing that words only had meaning when used in context. The least famous of Schiller's main works was the constructive sequel to his destructive book Formal Logic. In this sequel, Logic for Use , Schiller attempted to construct a new logic to replace the formal logic that he had criticized in Formal Logic.

What he offers is something philosophers would recognize today as a logic covering the context of discovery and the hypothetico-deductive method. Schiller dismissed the possibility of formal logic, most pragmatists are critical rather of its pretension to ultimate validity and see logic as one logical tool among others—or perhaps, considering the multitude of formal logics, one set of tools among others. This is the view of C. Peirce developed multiple methods for doing formal logic. Stephen Toulmin 's The Uses of Argument inspired scholars in informal logic and rhetoric studies although it is an epistemological work.

James and Dewey were empirical thinkers in the most straightforward fashion: They were dissatisfied with ordinary empiricism because in the tradition dating from Hume, empiricists had a tendency to think of experience as nothing more than individual sensations. To the pragmatists, this went against the spirit of empiricism: Radical empiricism , or Immediate Empiricism in Dewey's words, wants to give a place to meaning and value instead of explaining them away as subjective additions to a world of whizzing atoms.

The two were supposed, he said, to have so little to do with each other, that you could not possibly occupy your mind with them at the same time. The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it.

Schiller 's first book, Riddles of the Sphinx , was published before he became aware of the growing pragmatist movement taking place in America. In it, Schiller argues for a middle ground between materialism and absolute metaphysics. These opposites are comparable to what William James called tough-minded empiricism and tender-minded rationalism. Schiller contends on the one hand that mechanistic naturalism cannot make sense of the "higher" aspects of our world.

These include freewill, consciousness, purpose, universals and some would add God. On the other hand, abstract metaphysics cannot make sense of the "lower" aspects of our world e. While Schiller is vague about the exact sort of middle ground he is trying to establish, he suggests that metaphysics is a tool that can aid inquiry, but that it is valuable only insofar as it does help in explanation. In the second half of the twentieth century, Stephen Toulmin argued that the need to distinguish between reality and appearance only arises within an explanatory scheme and therefore that there is no point in asking what "ultimate reality" consists of.

More recently, a similar idea has been suggested by the postanalytic philosopher Daniel Dennett , who argues that anyone who wants to understand the world has to acknowledge both the "syntactical" aspects of reality i. Radical Empiricism gives interesting answers to questions about the limits of science if there are any, the nature of meaning and value and the workability of reductionism.

These questions feature prominently in current debates about the relationship between religion and science , where it is often assumed—most pragmatists would disagree—that science degrades everything that is meaningful into "merely" physical phenomena.

Both John Dewey in Experience and Nature and half a century later Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argued that much of the debate about the relation of the mind to the body results from conceptual confusions. They argue instead that there is no need to posit the mind or mindstuff as an ontological category. Pragmatists disagree over whether philosophers ought to adopt a quietist or a naturalist stance toward the mind-body problem. The former Rorty among them want to do away with the problem because they believe it's a pseudo-problem, whereas the latter believe that it is a meaningful empirical question.

Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values. Both facts and values have cognitive content: Pragmatist ethics is broadly humanist because it sees no ultimate test of morality beyond what matters for us as humans. Good values are those for which we have good reasons, viz.

The pragmatist formulation pre-dates those of other philosophers who have stressed important similarities between values and facts such as Jerome Schneewind and John Searle. William James' contribution to ethics, as laid out in his essay The Will to Believe has often been misunderstood as a plea for relativism or irrationality. On its own terms it argues that ethics always involves a certain degree of trust or faith and that we cannot always wait for adequate proof when making moral decisions. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof.

A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. The Will to Believe James Of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey wrote most extensively about morality and democracy.

Edel In his classic article Three Independent Factors in Morals Dewey , he tried to integrate three basic philosophical perspectives on morality: He held that while all three provide meaningful ways to think about moral questions, the possibility of conflict among the three elements cannot always be easily solved. Dewey also criticized the dichotomy between means and ends which he saw as responsible for the degradation of our everyday working lives and education, both conceived as merely a means to an end.

He stressed the need for meaningful labor and a conception of education that viewed it not as a preparation for life but as life itself. Dewey [] ch. Dewey was opposed to other ethical philosophies of his time, notably the emotivism of Alfred Ayer. Dewey envisioned the possibility of ethics as an experimental discipline, and thought values could best be characterized not as feelings or imperatives, but as hypotheses about what actions will lead to satisfactory results or what he termed consummatory experience. A further implication of this view is that ethics is a fallible undertaking, since human beings are frequently unable to know what would satisfy them.

During the late s and first decade of , pragmatism was embraced by many in the field of bioethics led by the philosophers John Lachs and his student Glenn McGee , whose book "'The Perfect Baby: A Pragmatic Approach to Genetic Engineering'" see designer baby garnered praise from within classical American philosophy and criticism from bioethics for its development of a theory of pragmatic bioethics and its rejection of the principalism theory then in vogue in medical ethics.

An anthology published by The MIT Press, "'Pragmatic Bioethics'" included the responses of philosophers to that debate, including Micah Hester, Griffin Trotter and others many of whom developed their own theories based on the work of Dewey, Peirce, Royce and others. Lachs himself developed several applications of pragmatism to bioethics independent of but extending from the work of Dewey and James.

Lekan argues that morality is a fallible but rational practice and that it has traditionally been misconceived as based on theory or principles. Instead, he argues, theory and rules arise as tools to make practice more intelligent. John Dewey's Art as Experience , based on the William James lectures he delivered at Harvard , was an attempt to show the integrity of art, culture and everyday experience IEP.

Art, for Dewey, is or should be a part of everyone's creative lives and not just the privilege of a select group of artists. He also emphasizes that the audience is more than a passive recipient. Dewey's treatment of art was a move away from the transcendental approach to aesthetics in the wake of Immanuel Kant who emphasized the unique character of art and the disinterested nature of aesthetic appreciation. A notable contemporary pragmatist aesthetician is Joseph Margolis. He defines a work of art as "a physically embodied, culturally emergent entity", a human "utterance" that isn't an ontological quirk but in line with other human activity and culture in general.

He emphasizes that works of art are complex and difficult to fathom, and that no determinate interpretation can be given. Both Dewey and James investigated the role that religion can still play in contemporary society, the former in A Common Faith and the latter in The Varieties of Religious Experience. From a general point of view, for William James, something is true only insofar as it works. Thus, the statement, for example, that prayer is heard may work on a psychological level but a may not help to bring about the things you pray for b may be better explained by referring to its soothing effect than by claiming prayers are heard.

As such, pragmatism is not antithetical to religion but it is not an apologetic for faith either. James' metaphysical position however, leaves open the possibility that the ontological claims of religions may be true. As he observed in the end of the Varieties, his position does not amount to a denial of the existence of transcendent realities. Quite the contrary, he argued for the legitimate epistemic right to believe in such realities, since such beliefs do make a difference in an individual's life and refer to claims that cannot be verified or falsified either on intellectual or common sensorial grounds.

Joseph Margolis , in Historied Thought, Constructed World California, , makes a distinction between "existence" and "reality". He suggests using the term "exists" only for those things which adequately exhibit Peirce's Secondness: In this way, such things which affect us, like numbers, may be said to be "real", although they do not "exist". Margolis suggests that God, in such a linguistic usage, might very well be "real", causing believers to act in such and such a way, but might not "exist".

Neopragmatism is a broad contemporary category used for various thinkers that incorporate important insights of, and yet significantly diverge from, the classical pragmatists. This divergence may occur either in their philosophical methodology many of them are loyal to the analytic tradition or in conceptual formation.

Quine , and Donald Davidson. Brazilian social thinker Roberto Unger advocates for a radical pragmatism , one that "de-naturalizes" society and culture, and thus insists that we can "transform the character of our relation to social and cultural worlds we inhabit rather than just to change, little by little, the content of the arrangements and beliefs that comprise them". Neopragmatist thinkers who are more loyal to classical pragmatism include Sidney Hook and Susan Haack known for the theory of foundherentism. Many pragmatist ideas especially those of Peirce find a natural expression in the decision-theoretic reconstruction of epistemology pursued in the work of Isaac Levi.

Nicholas Rescher advocates his version of methodological pragmatism , based on construing pragmatic efficacy not as a replacement for truths but as a means to its evidentiation. Not all pragmatists are easily characterized. With the advent of postanalytic philosophy and the diversification of Anglo-American philosophy, many philosophers were influenced by pragmatist thought without necessarily publicly committing themselves to that philosophical school.

Daniel Dennett , a student of Quine's, falls into this category, as does Stephen Toulmin , who arrived at his philosophical position via Wittgenstein , whom he calls "a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind" foreword for Dewey in the edition, p. Another example is Mark Johnson whose embodied philosophy Lakoff and Johnson shares its psychologism, direct realism and anti-cartesianism with pragmatism.

Conceptual pragmatism is a theory of knowledge originating with the work of the philosopher and logician Clarence Irving Lewis. The epistemology of conceptual pragmatism was first formulated in the book Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge. It is often seen as opposed to structural problems connected to the French critical theory of Pierre Bourdieu. In the twentieth century, the movements of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy have similarities with pragmatism. Like pragmatism, logical positivism provides a verification criterion of meaning that is supposed to rid us of nonsense metaphysics, however, logical positivism doesn't stress action as pragmatism does.

The pragmatists rarely used their maxim of meaning to rule out all metaphysics as nonsense. Usually, pragmatism was put forth to correct metaphysical doctrines or to construct empirically verifiable ones rather than to provide a wholesale rejection. Ordinary language philosophy is closer to pragmatism than other philosophy of language because of its nominalist character and because it takes the broader functioning of language in an environment as its focus instead of investigating abstract relations between language and world.

Pragmatism has ties to process philosophy. Much of their work developed in dialogue with process philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead , who aren't usually considered pragmatists because they differ so much on other points. Douglas Browning et al. Behaviorism and functionalism in psychology and sociology also have ties to pragmatism, which is not surprising considering that James and Dewey were both scholars of psychology and that Mead became a sociologist.

Utilitarianism has some significant parallels to Pragmatism and John Stuart Mill espoused similar values. Pragmatism emphasizes the connection between thought and action. Applied fields like public administration , [27] political science , [28] leadership studies, [29] international relations , [30] conflict resolution, [31] and research methodology [32] have incorporated the tenets of pragmatism in their field. Often this connection is made using Dewey and Addams's expansive notion of democracy.

Symbolic interactionism , a major perspective within sociological social psychology, was derived from pragmatism in the early twentieth century, especially the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley , as well as that of Peirce and William James. Increasing attention is being given to pragmatist epistemology in other branches of the social sciences, which have struggled with divisive debates over the status of social scientific knowledge.

Enthusiasts suggest that pragmatism offers an approach which is both pluralist and practical. Scholars claim classical pragmatism had a profound influence on the origin of the field of public administration. Public administrators are also responsible for the day-to-day work with citizens.

Dewey's participatory democracy can be applied in this environment. Dewey and James' notion of theory as a tool, helps administrators craft theories to resolve policy and administrative problems. Further, the birth of American public administration coincides closely with the period of greatest influence of the classical pragmatists. Which pragmatism classical pragmatism or neo-pragmatism makes the most sense in public administration has been the source of debate. The debate began when Patricia M. Shields introduced Dewey's notion of the Community of Inquiry.

Miller [47] and Shields [48] [49] also responded.

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