Bücher der Reihe American Philosophy Series

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.

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.

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.

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.

Endurance Sport and the American Philosophical Tradition analyzes the relationship between endurance sports and themes from the American philosophical tradition. The contributors write from a scholarly viewpoint but also informed through their own endurance sport participation.

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.

From cultural figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Wendell Berry to philosophers such as Jane Addams and William James, this collection explores the usefulness of theoretical work in American philosophy and pragmatism to resilience practices in ecology, community, rurality, and psychology.

This book highlights, scrutinizes, and deploys Bernstein's philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. The chapters show the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship.

Previous attempts to set up an Ethics based on the writings of Charles S. Peirce have generally begun and ended with the 1898 lecture, Philosophy and the Conduct of Life. It was in that lecture that Peirce famously argued that Theory and Practice should be kept distinct. In this book, Aaron Massecar argues that this lecture opens up a uniquely Peircean Ethics that brings theory into practice through an ethics of intelligently formed habits. This argument is first based on a re-reading of the 1898 lecture, then turns to the evolution of Peirce's Normative Sciences, specifically with reference to the role of Ethics as a Normative Science. Peirce initially leaves Ethics outside the sciences, saying that it is too practical, but he later changes his mind and begins to see the centrality of Ethics for determining right conduct based an appreciation of the ideals of conduct from Aesthetics. The result is a theory of Ethics as critical self-control that unifies the sciences under one general aim, as dictated by Peirce's basic model and his theory of inquiry: the removal of sources of irritation and doubt.The next step is to look at the objects of critical self-control. For that, Massecar looks to Peirce's work on habits: habits function as the bridging point between theory and practice. The book describes how habits can be brought under critical self-control through an active process of deliberative, thoughtful reflection. The end result is a description of intelligently formed habits that not only responds to critics of the 1898 lecture but that opens up a place for a uniquely Peircean Ethics.

Endurance Sport and the American Philosophical Tradition analyzes the relationship between endurance sports and themes from the American philosophical tradition. The contributors write from a scholarly viewpoint but also informed through their own endurance sport participation.

This book highlights, scrutinizes, and deploys Bernstein's philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. This book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship.

This book gives the first complete, fully historicized account of Emersons metaphysics of cause and effect and its foundational position in his philosophy as a whole. Urbas tells the story of the making of a metaphysician and in so doing breaks with the postmodern, anti-metaphysical readings that have dominated Emerson scholarship since his philosophical rehabilitation began in late 1970s. This is an intellectual biography of Emerson the metaphysician but also a chapter in the cultural life-story of a concept synonymous, in the Transcendentalist period, with life itself, the story of the principle at the origin of all being and change. Emersons Metaphysics proposes an account of Emersons metaphysical thought as it unfolds in his writings, as it informs his philosophy as a whole, and as it reflects the intellectual and religious culture in which he lived and moved and had his being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, literary scholars, and students of English, philosophy, and intellectual and religious history who are interested in Emerson and the American Transcendentalist movement.

This book presents a nonstandard approach to epistemology. Where standard epistemology generally focuses on the certain knowledge the Greeks called episteme, the present focus is on some less assured modes of information. Its deliberations focus on such cognitively suboptimal processes as conjecture, guesswork, and plausible supposition.

Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy: The Religious Dimension of Experience examines the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and its relationship to key figures in classical American Philosophy, in particular Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hocking, and Henry Bugbee. Few scholars have taken sufficient note of the fact that Gabriel Marcel's thought is vitally informed by classical American philosophy.Marcel's essays on Royce offer a window into the soul of Marcel's recent philosophical development. The idealism of early Marcel stemmed from an omnipresent sense of a ';broken world'an experience of rent or tear within the tissue of experience similar to what John Dewey referred to as an ';inward laceration of the spirit.' Furthermore, Marcel's intuition concerning the primacy of intersubjective experience can help us understand W. E. Hocking's thought. Finally, Marcel's notion of l exigence ontologique clarifies his relationship to Henry Bugbee. Marcel and Bugbee explore the contour of experiencethe indigenous circuit of associations pertaining to the self as coesse. Through a reflexive act Marcel refers to as ';ingatherdness,' the self undergoes increasing degrees of unification by experiencing ';an act of faith made explicit only in a dialectical act of participation.'David W. Rodick shows that Marcel's relationship to these American philosophers is not coincidental, but rather the philosophical expression of his Christian faith. Marcel's most important legacy is his commitment to unity of Christian philosophizing, a unity derived from both reason and revelation. Its diversity stems from the objective plurality of what is pursued as well as the subjective plurality of those who pursue it. Christian philosophizing seeks a truth that every Christian believes can never be untrue to itself.

Aesthetic Transcendentalism is a philosophy endorsing the qualitative and creative aspects of nature. Theoretically it argues for a metaphysical dimension of nature that is aesthetically real, pluralistic, and prolific. It directs our attention to the rich complexity of immediate experience, the possibility of discovering new aesthetic features about the world, and the transformative potential of art as an organic expression. This book presents the philosophy in its relationship to its historical roots in the philosophic and artistic traditions of nineteenth-century North America. In this multidisciplinary study, Nicholas L. Guardiano brings together a philosophic and literary figure in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientifically minded philosopher Charles S. Peirce, and the plastic arts in the form of American landscape painting. Guardiano evaluates this constellation of philosophers and artists in global perspective as it relates to other historical theories of metaphysics and aesthetics, while simultaneously performing a cultural analysis that identifies an essential feature of the American mind. Aesthetic Transcendentalism thus possesses abiding significance for our vital interactions with nature, daily experiences, and contemplations of great works of art.Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting will be of interest to scholars of American philosophy and American art history, especially specialists of Charles S. Peirce, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Hudson River School painters. It will also appeal to philosophers working on systematic metaphysical theories of nature.

This book integrates pragmatism and transcendental philosophy in examining the most serious problem defining the human condition, death and mortality. Its analysis of human limits and finitude is intended to be relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in, for example, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. Mortality is studied as providing a necessary framework within which questions concerning the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of human life become possible.

Over the course of nearly a decade, Phillip McReynolds conducted a series of interviews with prominent American philosophers including, among others, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Margolis, Richard Bernstein, Bruce Wilshire, John Lachs, Richard Shusterman, and Crispin Sartwell. The American Philosopher: Dialogues on the Meaning of Life and Truth brings these interviews together, bridging a wide variety of topics both personal and professional, and ultimately addressing what it means to be an American philosopher. With interviews that are both philosophical and biographical in nature, this book will be of interest to those who specialize in pragmatism and the history of American philosophy, academics in fields such as comparative literature, history, political science, sociology, and American studies, and to anyone with an interest in ';America' as an idea