The American Evasion of Philosophy
Chapters (6)
The long shadow cast by Ralph Waldo Emerson over American pragmatism has been often overlooked and rarely examined. Yet Emerson not only prefigures the dominant themes of American pragmatism but, more important, enacts an intellectual style of cultural criticism that permits and encourages American pragmatists to swerve from mainstream European philosophy.1 Like Friedrich Nietzsche — and deeply adored by him — Emerson is a singular and unique figure on the North Atlantic intellectual landscape who defies disciplinary classification.
American pragmatism can be understood as what happens to the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy when forced to justify itself within the professional perimeters of academic philosophy. The first articulators of American pragmatism — members of the Metaphysical Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts — were learned professionals principally interested in demystifying science and, a few, in modernizing religion.1 Unlike Emerson, they were preoccupied with method, yet their understanding of method was quite Emersonian. Much like Emerson, they were intent on viewing science as continuous with religion — both shot through with moral purpose.
American pragmatism reaches its highest level of sophisticated articulation and engaged elaboration in the works and life of John Dewey. To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx! On the surface, these farfetched comparisons reveal the poverty of the American philosophical tradition, the paucity of intellectual world-historical figures in the American grain. But on a deeper level, these comparisons disclose a distinctive feature of American pragmatism: its diversity circumscribed by the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy and the Emersonian theodicy of the self and America.
The legacy of American pragmatism for mid-century intellectuals was the project of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action. The major proponents of this project and legacy were no longer white Yankees but rather two second-generation Jewish Americans, Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling; a second-generation American of German extraction, Reinhold Niebuhr; an Irish Southwesterner, C. Wright Mills; and a fifth-generation American of African descent, W. E. B. Du Bois. Unlike Emerson, Peirce, James, and Dewey, they neither were born and bred in the world of the northeastern highbrow culture and bourgeois society nor took for granted its privileges and opportunities. American pragmatism had gone native in new and diverse ways.
Although American pragmatism is widely regarded as the distinctive American philosophy, it has never been hegemonic in the academic profession of philosophy. Even during the heyday of James and Dewey, old forms of idealism and new versions of naturalism and realism dominated the major philosophy departments in the country. Moreover, the major followers of James and Dewey tended not to be influential professional philosophers, but rather engaged public philosophers. There indeed were exceptions, most notably Ralph Barton Perry (a realist pupil of James) and C. I. Lewis (a self-styled conceptual pragmatist), both at Harvard. Yet in large measure American pragmatism did not gain a large following in the higher echelons of the academy.
The move from Rorty’s model of fluid conversation to that of the multi-leveled operations of power leads us back to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Emerson is first and foremost a cultural critic obsessed with ways to generate forms of power. For Rorty, these forms are understood as activities of conversation for the primary purpose of producing new human self-descriptions. But for Emerson, conversation is but one minor instance of the myriad of possible transactions for the enhancement of human powers and personalities. Ironically, Rorty’s adoption of Michael Oakeshott’s metaphor of “conversation” reflects the dominant ideal of the very professionalism he criticizes. This ideal indeed is more a public affair than are Emerson’s preferred ideal transactions, e.g., gardening, walking, reading, and yet it also is more genteel and bourgeois.
As anti-colonial and feminist scholars and educators who theorize and work at the intersections of constraint and possibility, we view our students’ critical imaginations as life-giving sources of inspiration for ‘ongoingness’ in a (post)pandemic world. This chapter tells the story of how students with very different backgrounds and histories, across two very different science education contexts, provoke us to rethink the disembodying and desensitizing practices of science, and to ask: Can there be a science of the sacred? In this chapter, we draw from students’ narratives as provocations for challenging spiritual-secular dualities, fostering (re)enchanment with nature, and getting unstuck from underlying heteropatriarchial and colonial onto-epistemologies in science and science education that do not serve us. We begin the chapter by slowing down and listening. We then bring feminist and decolonial theories in conversation with the students to reflect on the role of the sacred in science education for a (post)pandemic world.
Adults in the United States are having fewer biological children in part due to worries about climate change and population growth, yet Christian environmental ethicists frequently avoid or dismiss these “eco‐reproductive” concerns. I argue that these avoidances lead to important limitations in the literature, which I address by employing a pragmatic approach for religious ethics. Learning from environmentalists who are critically engaging with their Christian inheritances, I find that informants draw upon religious repertoires to “kinnovate.” Namely, they expand notions of family beyond biological lineage by taking up vocations as godparents, youth mentors, foster parents, or chosen kin. I claim that these practices of Christian kinnovation are significant because they help to advance creative moral responses to eco‐reproductive concerns in religious contexts—interventions that currently remain underdeveloped in relevant ethical and theological literatures.
Judgment Calls: Sweating the Little Things in Reginald Rose’s and Sidney Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men”: Rhetorical possibilities for literature and criticism were once common concerns, as we know, yet modernist (and even more postmodernist) literary thinkers generally, for all of their interest in matters rhetorical, have not taken up anything they might have wanted to call the “rhetorical rationality” of poetry—usually just the opposite.
The first chapter of this book explores Emerson’s own life in relation to reading. Although he was a persistent journalist throughout his life, writing about his engagements with reading from an early age, he struggled with it as a young child, making his eventual forays into reading relevant to both literary and educational scholars. After overcoming his issues with reading, the topic became a mainstay throughout his writing career, and he described being creative with reading, getting lost in books, and frequently checking out more books from the library than he could read before their respective due dates. This chapter sets the stage for an argument that Emerson was not only an avid reader, he wrote about his reading experiences in ways that speak to novice and veteran professors who are eager to experiment with reading strategies that can engage reluctant readers in their classrooms.
This chapter offers various readings of Emerson over the last two centuries, critics and allies alike, and how his work has been received in scholarly circles. From his earliest publications, Emerson’s writings inspired as well as perplexed his contemporaries, prompting Walt Whitman to shift the tone of his initial criticism from jubilant praise to questionable utility as to how his work should be received. Pioneer in the nascent study of education Matthew Arnold questioned whether Emerson deserved to be called a philosopher at all. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that Emerson’s poems and essays began to experience a revaluation of his legacy in American literature and he became established canon in American literature classrooms throughout the United States. These multiple, oftentimes conflicting critiques of Emerson present a vision of Emerson’s ideas about reading and outline the major themes in his work that contribute to his theories of reading.
This chapter defines an ethical framework for privacy in service design, emphasizing the necessity for such a framework on ethical grounds. The framework is described as ethical, universal, human-centered, heuristic, and evolutionary, serving as a tool to help service designers understand and apply informational privacy in their work. It comprises 10 principles, each elaborated through real and speculative case studies, aimed at creating privacy-protecting and privacy-enhancing products. These principles, while increasingly practice-oriented, are immediately implementable and focus on both the users and stakeholders of service design solutions. Key aspects of the framework include transparency, interactions, security, freedom, moral agency, user experience, usability, and understandability. The chapter concludes by discussing the potential challenges and opportunities associated with implementing this privacy ethical framework for service design.
As a distinctively American philosophy, pragmatism provides the philosophical foundation for many progressive thinkers in the African American intellectual tradition. For some, pragmatism can serve as an instrument for addressing our contemporary racial challenges and the afterlife of slavery in the United States. Ironically, it is challenging to situate Ralph Ellison comfortably in this intellectual lineage—even though several scholars have located and studied him and his work within the context of pragmatism. In fact, Ellison’s polemics and contradictions mirror the problems and paradoxes one often finds among leading pragmatic thinkers in the Progressive Era, including John Dewey and Frederick Winslow Taylor. However, few studies consider what we can learn when Ellison’s work is imagined within the context of Dewey’s and Taylor’s competing appreciations of scientific management. This interdisciplinary survey explores this context by revealing how a recalibration of Ellison’s writing can help us to see how scientific management and its imperative emerge in slavery and later proliferate in American education. Based on this evidence, it becomes more difficult to argue that pragmatism can serve as an effective tool for addressing and transforming our contemporary racial challenges and the afterlife of slavery in the United States.
Do Americans have a right to believe that the country is making racial progress? Conservatives sometimes answer yes and argue that the country is achieving Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a color‐blind society. Afropessimists answer no and point to the continuing problems of police terror, mass incarceration, and poverty among Black Americans. This article unearths King's 1952 term paper on the pragmatists to reveal an early engagement with William James’ notion of the will to believe. The article interprets King as articulating a right to dream of a just and loving world to maximize the chance of the community actualizing it. The conclusion argues that the idea of a right to dream helps people become energized rather than despondent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court case prohibiting race‐conscious college admissions.
À partir des concepts de subjectivation et de désubjectivation mobilisés par Michel Wieviorka et les sociologues de l’action, ce livre développe une réflexion sur les processus de subjectivation dans le contexte historique de la globalisation, du pluralisme culturel et identitaire, d’inégalités croissantes et de vulnérabilité. Cet ouvrage traite de ces enjeux contemporains en se basant sur l’analyse d’expériences et de débats aussi bien français qu’internationaux. Il sera ici question de violence, de l’État social, de multiculturalisme, des droits, d’émancipation ou encore de démocratie, en partant des dynamiques à travers lesquelles se construisent les acteurs. S’appuyant sur des études empiriques portant sur des objets d’une grande diversité, les auteurs analysent la capacité des individus à garder un rapport à soi et à rester acteurs malgré les tumultes sociaux, économiques, politiques et culturels parfois violents de la société globale.
This essay explores the possibility of a civilization oriented around love. One might call it a politics of love, but “politics” almost inevitably points one to political parties, issues, or elections. In this essay, I use the phrase “a loving civilization.” I not only think about love between individuals and communities. I ask about the overall framework – worldview, metaphysic, paradigm, or whatever you like – necessarily for all-encompassing love. The label “loving civilization” will likely sound novel. It will strike my fellow Christians as unfamiliar. Some might think establishing a loving civilization a noble goal but regard it unrealistic, practically speaking. I hope to show that establishing a civilization oriented around love is possible. At the least, we can make actual progress toward its reality. Assuming a particular eschatology, I will argue a civilization oriented around love is realizable.
Nothing has done more to cement William James’s reputation than his unrepentant individualism. In a present marked by the challenge of imagining modes of transformative action worthy of our planetary travails, James’s individualism appears dated, unworthy of the present. Yet such judgement neglects its pragmatic dimension, as well as its political connections to James’s anarchistic pluralism. Situating anarchism at the centre of James’s vision, this article argues that his defence of individuals constitutes no ontological postulate but forms part of a speculative theory of change. Rather than apologia for individual heroism, James’s individualism is better understood in the impersonal voice of the “fourth person singular:” individual lives matter not as originary sources of heroic action but as zones of divergence through which terrestrial forces of mutation and metamorphosis pass. Revisiting connections between James’s individualism, pragmatism, and anarchism, the article offers a radical reappraisal of James’s thought as a vital method for intensifying unruly forces of transformation on an earth unstable and unsafe.
The emotion of admiration and the semantic theory of natural kinds and direct reference are foundational for Linda Zagzebski's exemplarist moral theory and divine motivation theory. Many have examined difficulties that arise from the central role of admiration, while others have engaged her account of the incarnation. Little attention has been given to her semantic theory or philosophy of language. This essay demonstrates the difficulties and problems that arise from this theory, problems that could be avoided with a sociopractical account of language and exemplarity. One set of problems pertain to the “principle of the division of linguistic labor.” Related problems come to light in Zagzebski's attempt to account for radical changes in perceptions of exemplars through social, political, and ethical revolutions. In the end, her semantic theory creates the very epistemological uncertainties that it is meant to forestall. It also fails to account for radical disagreements about exemplars and the role moral exemplars play in sociopolitical and ethical revolutions.
This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.
This paper introduces the life and work of art educator and designer Kurt Rowland (1920–1980) who authored the first set of textbooks on visual education and played a role in the shifting world of art and design education in post‐war Britian. We detail the foundational experiences of his extraordinary life in the first half of the 20th century including surviving the Spanish Civil War and La Retirada , being a ‘friendly enemy alien’, and becoming one of the Dunera boys forced into Australian internment camps. He later went on to develop a new aspect of art and design education he called visual education. We explore Rowland's notion of a visual education, explicating its features, appraising its import, and situating Rowland's ideas to those of his contemporaries. We explore his motivations and how his work advanced art pedagogy. Finally, we argue that Kurt Rowland has been absent in recent literature on art and design education and that his work, which contains elements that have continued relevance today, should not be overlooked.
Codes of governance have mushroomed in contexts operating under a single, dominant institutional logic, such as publicly listed corporations. These codes act as institutional prescriptions that help spread best practices throughout industries. More recently, in some countries, specific codes have been developed for hybrid organizations that integrate multiple, conflicting institutional logics simultaneously, such as cooperative enterprises. Drawing on an extensive set of qualitative data, we ask how such institutional prescriptions may (fail to) address governance challenges in organizations with multiple, conflicting institutional demands. In doing so, we extend current literature on governance of hybrid organizations, which has so far focused on individual and organizational levels, to include institutional-level strategies. While governance codes are often inspired by deontological ethics to solve issues in a single institutional logic, we find that governance codes for hybrid organizations should not prioritize a single institutional logic, nor follow a deontological approach to improving governance, but should, on a more pragmatist take, remain open to continuous learning.
What social factors influence intellectuals’ decisions to affiliate with one intellectual tradition over another? In recent years, many sociologists of ideas have viewed intellectual choice as based on the quest for status within the intellectual field. However, the “ self-narratives “ that thinkers construct to understand who they are as intellectuals are not usually reducible to considerations of status, and the desire to do work resonant with any salient aspect of one's “intellectual self-concept” may influence the intellectual choices one makes. This issue is explored empirically by examining the case of philosophers who have affiliated themselves with the tradition of classical American pragmatism. Data come from interviews and from a nationally representative survey of U.S. philosophers. Results show that the choice to become a pragmatist is best explained by invoking both theories of status-based choice and the theory of intellectual self-concept. Implications for future research are considered.
У статті розкрито зв'язок між епістемологічними теоріями філософів прагматизму та їхніми ліберальними проєктами. За допомогою використання концептуального та компаративного аналізу у дослідженні висвітлено особливості осмислення природи знання та свободи такими представниками прагматизму, як Джон Дьюї та Ричард Рорті. Показано, що для Дьюї натуралістична епістемологія вела до критики традиційного лібералізму з його легітимацією нерівності, як і до реконструкції лібералізму, переосмислення ролі індивіда, спільноти й держави у процесі соціальної зміни. Тоді як Рорті, що потрактував прагматизм у дусі постмодернізму і виступив з деструкцією традиційних концептів, здійснив переопис лібералізму, результатом якого була відмова від приписування цій ідеології інших цілей, крім захисту свободи індивідів та їхньої приватності. У такий спосіб на засадах своїх епістемологічних теорій американські філософи сформовали дві оригінальні лінії прагматичного лібералізму, що став частиною ширших ідеологічних дискусій кінця ХХ і початку ХХІ століття.
texto explora uma contribuição pragmatista à teoria e às ciências sociais. Seu tema é a relação entre procedimentos pragmatistas de pensamento e as maneiras com que manipulamos e lidamos com as instituições. O objetivo é organizar alguns pontos de vista pragmatistas sobre elas. O primeiro sugere uma adesão às instituições convencionais reconhecidas como o repertório exemplar de dispositivos de organização em uma sociedade livre e justa. Por trás disso, repousam as teses epistemológicas quanto ao caráter conservador de nossas crenças. A segunda abordagem pragmatista sugere uma ênfase na transgressão aos arranjos institucionais vigentes. De acordo com ela, qualquer apologia às instituições petrificadas é uma traição ao espírito humano, caracterizado pelos atributos como atividade, vitalidade e divindade. A terceira abordagem indica uma espécie de equilíbrio entre a mobilização individual e coletiva e o modo como as instituições funcionam. Seu foco é posto sobre a força política das sociedades para mudar conteúdos específicos das instituições existentes através de uma agenda de reconstrução de relações e fazeres.
John Dewey’s concept of the “problematic situation” is a core component of his epistemology and his social philosophy, grounding his anti-elitist view of inquiry as initially hunch-guided and aiming toward growth in meaning and control. I consider two novel counterarguments to Dewey’s definition of a situation, the “Cunning Manipulator,” which refutes his delimitation of a problematic situation in terms of qualitative experience, and the “Anxious Compulsion,” in which following one’s hunches causes a downward spiral. Given these challenges, I propose a revised Deweyan epistemology that recognizes the possibility of “qualitative disunity” and of “vigilant inquiry” as a response to it. The concept of “qualitative disunity” sheds light on disagreements on the topic of normativity between classical and neopragmatism.
Pragmatism, as an intellectual tradition developed from philosophy, is reviewed in its historical and contemporary significance for communication theory. The importance of James's psychology, Peirce's logic of scientific inquiry, and pragmatist conceptions of community are discussed in order to situate the “revival” of pragmatism that emerged in the late 1970s. The key contributors to the revival—Bernstein, Rorty, Habermas, Carey—are reviewed, as are contemporary debates in pragmatism and communication theory.
These are the selections I wrote from the book Person: Encounters, Paradigms, Commitment, and Applications. The upload includes the Introduction to the full book, plus my Header Introductions for each section of the book, and the chapter I contributed. The essay explores the thought of two major figures in US race relations history of the twentieth century, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, focusing on the
dialectic between similarity and difference and their philosophical roots. Following from earlier work which sought to identify the philosophical sources of the profound differences in the thought of King and X, this essay aims, by contrast, to draw attention to those philosophical convictions which they shared. In so doing, the author deepens our understanding of the thought of these two men and their inter-relations.
Cornel West is one of the most visible and popular African American public intellectuals in the latter half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty‐first. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1953, West has been teaching religion and African‐American studies at Princeton University since 2008. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Paris. West's works have ranged from the academic to the political to the pop‐cultural. Whether writing about philosophy and Marxism, supporting the presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley, Al Sharpton, or Barack Obama, or recording hip‐hop albums (Sketches of My Culture [2001] and Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations [2007]), West has explicitly advocated for a progressive social justice agenda. In his initial works, West challenged fixed ideas of morality and ideology in an attempt to explore ways of achieving social justice. In The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991) he views Marx's ethical concerns as paramount to his critiques of capitalist exploitation of the working class. He rejects the criticisms of Marx as simultaneously inconsistent and morally nihilistic by embracing the idea of a weak relativism that allows for a shift from one position to another and from one strategy to the next. He sees this as necessary to move beyond a paralysis that results from a reduction of Marxism to epistemic concerns that fail to seek concrete social change. West attempts to snatch Marx away from those who would relegate Marx's work to the philosophical.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that emphasizes the primacy of practice in human knowledge. Although many streams of philosophy fit this description, the moniker usually refers to the approach originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, with important antecedents in Darwin, Emerson, Hegel, and Kant, among others. Pragmatism was an influential movement from its inception down to the World Wars. Its appeal waned with the rise of behaviorism, pluralism, and critical theory. Recently pragmatism has enjoyed a renaissance thanks to the efforts of neopragmatists like Richard Rorty and Cornel West along with fellow travelers like Richard Bernstein, Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth, and now pragmatic perspectives are well established in numerous domains of political thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an essayist, journal‐keeper, lyceum lecturer, and founder of the American transcendentalist school of thought, an idiosyncratic combination of romanticism and transcendental idealism. Emerson is classified alongside American Renaissance writers of the nineteenth century such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, as well as other literary figures localized in his adopted town of Concord, Massachusetts, such as Henry David Thoreau. Given how his 1837 speech “The American Scholar” issued what Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., called “America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence,” Emerson's influence has historically cast a long shadow. For better or worse, Emersonian transcendentalism became a defining category that other writers were seen as sympathizing with or reacting against and his work became the standard against which figures such as Thoreau, Melville, and Hawthorne were measured.
Cornel West is widely regarded as one of the premier public intellectuals in the United States. West's academic career began decades ago at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, an institution he recently returned to after having spent considerable time at Harvard and Princeton Universities, and brief time at the University of Paris. His interdisciplinary political and philosophical project weaves together an astonishing variety of theoretical perspectives, principally from black liberation theology and the Anglo‐American and continental philosophical traditions. Writing both as a Christian and as a philosopher, the sources of West's intellectual inspiration extend from Socrates and Jesus to Marx and Foucault, from the pragmatism of Dewey and Niebuhr, to such divergent European thinkers as Nietzsche and Gramsci. A defining feature of West's scholarly work is his explicit rejection of engaging in the types of depoliticized questions and concerns that occupy professionalized, “epistemology‐based” practitioners of academic philosophy. As a counterpoise to such professionalization, West describes himself as a “prophetic pragmatist,” a vocational identity that serves as a form of critical pedagogy – undertaken on behalf of the oppressed for the purpose of transforming structures of domination – that synthesizes his Afro‐American revolutionary Christianity with his pragmatic faith in the American democratic prospect.
Recent scholarship explores the relevance and canonical status of W. E. B. Du Bois in sociological theory; yet less is said about his contributions to symbolic interactionism. This paper interrogates the emerging meaning of W. E. B. Du Bois for sociology, and the nature of his canonical incorporation. We explore the less “official” dimensions of Du Boisian theory, and in particular two of his contributions to symbolic interactionism: double consciousness and autoethnography. In the last part of the paper, we suggest that Du Bois's incorporation into the sociological canon can be viewed as a process of “centering,” and argue that this form of sponsoring of Du Bois's work can elevate some interpretations of Du Bois to the detriment of others.
To effectively bolster the state’s capacity towards addressing COVID-19, government agencies accelerated ICTs to devise solutions for better policy delivery and give hope to many, including donors. However, the dramatic acceleration of ICTs in improving state capacity to manage healthcare delivery and citizens’ engagement services during the pandemic brought complexities and challenges relating to ethical practices and public integrity. This chapter aims to identify the ethical dilemma and issues related to various innovations and ICT deployed to combat COVID-19 in Africa. A series of technological deployments are classified and examined to identify ethical dilemmas and public integrity conundrums that public administrations confront. We analyse qualitative data from deployed IT solutions in Kenya during COVID-19 and propose ethical dilemma solutions.KeywordsEthical dilemmaPublic administrationInnovationDigital technologiesCOVID-19; Deepfakes; Public ethics
Philosophy and Social Hope contains cogent accounts of Rorty’s core positions on truth, metaphysics, and ethics once hope replaces certainty. On display is his democracy-centered pragmatism’s wide range of application for promoting moral progress, the project of fostering richer and more humane lives of citizens and making communities more inclusive and just. This chapter situates the book’s chief philosophical claims within his larger project and provides an overview of his pragmatism’s emphasis on philosophy as an instrument of change, expanding the reach of our moral community, and pluralism over commensuration. It then sketches his timely efforts to address the neglect of economic injustice.KeywordsDemocracyEthicsKnowledgeResponsibilityTruth
Were it not for Richard Rorty, pragmatism might no longer be a topic on which intellectuals feel obliged to have an informed view. What is it, though, that he endorsed and revived? The movement he championed has various representatives and vague boundaries. The claims he associated with it are numerous and the connections among them are loose, puzzling, and contested. Teasing apart some of the things he referred to as pragmatism permits us to clarify the merits, import, and influence of each. This chapter highlights the concerns that have led some of his closest associates to pit some of Rorty’s pragmatisms against others.KeywordsPragmatismSocial practiceMinimalismDemocracySelf-RelianceRortyBernsteinWestBrandomSchneewindHegelPeirceJamesDewey
This essay makes a distinction between the roles that activists and social critics can play in democratic societies and defends the separate tasks of a non-activist social critic. Drawing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings, I argue that non-activist social critics are better situated than activists to reach certain audiences, cultivate certain democratic capacities, and preserve their audience’s agency while doing so. In Emerson’s case, his concerns about his activist contemporaries led him to craft new ways of critically engaging his peers. At the same time, as Emerson’s life also illustrates, non-activist critics are limited by their roles and must forgo some of their distinctive advantages in order to do activist work. Clarifying the scope of the social critic’s role in this way helps critics to draw on the benefits of their position and avoid overstepping its constraints, thereby allowing them to more effectively promote political reform.
Scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois's understanding of religion is in the midst of a renaissance. Yet, few engage Du Bois's Prayers for Dark People , written over 1909–10 at Atlanta University. As a remedy, I first provide historical context on the production and reception of Prayers . I then delve into the content of Prayers , identifying the tenets of a Du Boisian “sociological spirituality” brought to bear on the study and navigation of “race” and the “color‐line.” Through four strategies, Du Bois blended sociological empiricism and theorization with appeals to spirituality in the form of moral realism, stoicism, hypostasis, and metaphysics: (1) a critical deism that conserves belief in sacred divinity; (2) pedagogical racial uplift strategies that help resolve theodicies; (3) symbolic interactionism that sanctifies the Black self, and; (4) a sociology of knowledge based on otherworldly dimensions. I conclude that Du Bois's Prayers serves as a liturgy for Black liberation. Prayers emphasizes a transgressive rhetoric that exceeds the confines of social theory through a sacralization of sociological knowledge as a prophetic anticipation of moral Black lifeworlds.
Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies are often thought to be at odds. Both disciplines intensively debate modernity, troubling its universalist claims and showing the contradictory nature of its promises. The call to provincialize Europe allows scholars from both disciplines to think, articulate and represent modern experiences beyond Europe and engage critically with traditions of modernity across disciplines, temporalities and geographies. Mapping Sephardi and other minor perspectives on modernity from across the globe in this volume, we are presenting fascinating cases and exploring new terrain where a fruitful encounter between Jewish and Postcolonial Studies can happen. With contributions by Yael Attia | Priyam Goswami Choudhury | Jonathan Hirsch | Yonathan Listik | Anthony Obst | Kathleen Samson | Alina Schittenhelm | Željka Oparnica | Rachel Pafe
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.