Tibor Solymosi

Over the past three decades, cognitive science has been making a turn towards pragmatism. Here we outline steps towards completing this turn. As a handful of cognitive scientists and philosophers have been arguing more recently, the insights of William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead are not only being re-discovered, they are also provin...

Pragmatism has resurged explicitly in neopragmatism and implicitly in neurophilosophy. Neopragmatists have focused primarily on ideals, like human freedom, but at the expense of science. Neurophilosophers have focused primarily on scientific facts, but with an eye toward dismissing aspects of our self-conception like free will as illusory. In both...

Recent work in neurophilosophy has either made reference to the work of John Dewey or independently developed positions similar to it. I review these developments in order first to show that Dewey was indeed doing neurophilosophy well before the Churchlands and others, thereby preceding many other mid-twentieth century European philosophers’ views...

I address Shusterman’s challenge to develop a more inclusive and progressive ars erotica by relating it to Malabou’s challenge to recognize the bodily effects practicing philosophy has on identity. I frame these challenges in neuropragmatic terms, specifically its evolutionary conceptions of experience, inquiry, and intelligence. Through this frami...

In recent work, Mark Johnson has argued that a scientifically updated version of John Dewey’s pragmatism affords human beings the opportunity to feel at home in the world. This feeling at home, however, is not fully problematized, nor explored, nor resolved by Johnson. Rather, Johnson and his collaborators, Don Tucker (2021) and Jay Schulkin (2023)...

We articulate a conception of resilience via allostasis and the free energy principle to augment Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s conception of antifragility. Creative resilience is resilience 3.0, after robustness (1.0) and antifragility (2.0), because creative resilience is the deliberate effort to construct ecological niches toward a more caring and thus...

Some consequences of direct realism and William James’s philosophy of mind are considered in terms of American naturalism as seen in the debate between John Dewey and Roy Wood Sellars. Sellars’s critical realism and evolutionary naturalism is compared and contrasted with Dewey’s pragmatic realism and emphatically evolutionary naturalism. Though the...

Neuropragmatism offers a non-dualistic conception of experience from which scientific inquiries can provide resources for sociocultural critique. This reconstructive effort addresses what Emma Dowling calls the care crisis without succumbing to what Mike W. Martin calls therapeutic tyranny. This tyranny relies on problematic dualisms, between mind/...

William James’s lead continues to provide a balancing act of inquiry and truth with plurality and conflict. First, this article considers this balancing act in neuroscience, both what we have been learning since James published The Principles of Psychology and in how neuroscience is done. As pragmatists have long argued against dualisms and absolut...

I address the problem of caring for our body-mind through neuropragmatism, cybernetics, and Larry Hickman’s work on John Dewey and the philosophy of technology. The problems of body-mind health are related to Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis . I address this crisis by drawing on Jay Schulkin’s conception of viability as the creative tension between s...

We address Mark Tschaepe’s response to Tibor Solymosi, in which Tschaepe argues that neuropragmatism needs to be coupled with humility in order to redress “dopamine democracy,” Tschaepe’s term for our contemporary situation of smartphone addiction that undermines democracy. We reject Tschaepe’s distinction between humility and fallibility, arguing...

The relationship between pragmatism and Darwinism is complex. On the one hand, pragmatism is the first philosophical tradition to take seriously Darwin’s theory of evolution. On the other hand, how seriously and in what way(s) a pragmatist takes the theory varies significantly. Furthermore, a distinction must be maintained between Darwin’s theory o...

The classical pragmatists were the first philosophers to actively engage the modern science of the brain. Peirce was »perhaps the first experimental psychologist in America« (Schulkin 2015, 18–19). James not only studied with German physiologists but was to become the author of the majestic Principles of Psychology. »Dewey knew personally several p...

I discuss Rorty's view of philosophy as cultural politics in order to do cultural politics to challenge Rorty's cultural political rejection of ontology in favor of cultural politics. My primary source for this challenge is Patricia Churchland's neurophilosophy, which is itself in part a product of cultural politics. In drawing on resources in neur...

Central to Dewey's treatment of the nervous system throughout his work is its import for ameliorative action. Dewey's theory of mentation has its origins in his early thought in which he draws on contemporary physics and biology to incorporate the nascent understanding of the nervous system. This interdisciplinary approach continues through his car...

Roy Scranton argues for a new philosophical humanism as the best response to the existential crisis of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch for which human industrial activity is responsible. This threat from climate change, Scranton argues, is better met through what he calls photohumanism than by science, technology, engineering, and mathem...

I propose we discuss pluralistic humanism as an alternative to both atheism and traditional theism in an effort to establish a democratic faith to which we, despite our differences, can bind ourselves. I draw on the thought of American pragmatists (James, Dewey, Rorty, and Kitcher) to articulate a constructive criticism of new atheists (Dawkins, De...

The initial and continual identification of risk groups is an ethical decision at all levels of discourse. Because of the normative aspect of identifying risk groups, especially within the biomedical sciences, we recommend considering reconstruction of the identification of risk groups that acknowledges community as preceding individuality before i...

Pragmatism's historical relationship to the sciences (especially those of life and mind) has been neglected, if not undercut in its Rortian revival of the past three and a half decades. This neglect has many roots, from the linguistic turn in professional philosophy to the Kuhnian and postmodern subversion of scientific authority. A thorough exeget...

I This volume brings together some pragmatist philosophers vitally interested in neuroscience and the brain sciences generally. Pragmatism is a perennial philosophy precisely because its core views on experience, cognition, learning, knowledge, values, psychological and education development, inter-personal relationships, and social organization en...

Neurophilosophical pragmatism, or neuropragmatism, is a scientifically informed treatment of cognition, knowledge, the body-mind relation, agency, socialization, and further issues predicated on sound judgments about these basic matters. Neuropragmatism is capable of grappling with philosophical questions arising at many levels, from synapse to soc...

The rise of neuroscience brings hope to many people because its proponents and practitioners promise to resolve — somehow, at some time — many, if not most, of the ailments with which human experience is constantly consumed. From dealing with the horrors of cognitive debilitation to reveling in the wonder of understanding the most complex entity in...

Cognitive science and its philosophy have been far too long consumed with representation. This concern is indicative of a creeping Cartesianism that many scientists and philosophers wish to evade. However, their naturalism is often insufficiently evolutionary to fully appreciate the lessons of pragmatism. If cognitive neuroscience and pragmatism ar...

The science of consciousness has much to gain from philosophical pragmatism. However, the state of both the science and philosophy of consciousness is dire. The two main metaphors for thinking about consciousness – John Searle ' s digestion model and Alva Nöe ' s dancing model – continue the creeping Cartesianism that inevitably and irrevocably set...

The philosophy of pragmatism has much to offer mind and life scientists in their thinking about the origins and nature of experience. In this chapter, I provide an introduction to neurophilosophical pragmatism by reviewing how classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey, reconceived concepts like experience, mind, and consciousness in light of the ad...

Le neuropragmatisme et la culture de l’enquête : dépasser le cartésianisme rampant. Le travail récent en psychologie de Daniel Kahneman sur le système 1 et le système 2, l’intérêt récent pour une reconsidération du représentationnalisme en sciences cognitives, et l’usage récent du concept d’information dans les sciences de la conscience souffrent t...

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 That character of everyday experience which has been most systematically ignored by philosophy is the extent to which it is saturated with the results of social inter-course and communication. Because this factor has been denied, meanings have either been denied all objective validity, or have been treated...

There is an underappreciated affinity between the Daniel C. Dennett’s account of the evolution of intelligence and design and the theory of inquiry developed by American pragmatists, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey. This pragmatic theory of inquiry has its basis in homeostasis and allostasis. This biological basis serves as a dynamic...

The tension between naturalism and humanism is at its greatest when it comes to ethics and morality. By drawing on the affinity between the evolutionary humanistic philosophies of classical pragmatist John Dewey and contemporary pragmatist Daniel Dennett, I modify Dennett's ethical technology, Moral First Aid, to include a kit as well as Dennett's...

Since the publication of On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution has been of significant debate. Among the greatest concerns over Darwinian evolution is its implications on notably human characteristics such as the mind, meaning, free will, morality, and religion. Many h...