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An assessment, by a distinguished panel of experts, on the impact of pragmatism on contemporary thought.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pragmatism Then and Now / Morris Dickstein
What Difference Does Pragmatism Make? The View From Philosophy Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism / Richard Rorty
Pragmatism and Realism / Hilary Putnam
Response to Hilary Putnam’s “Pragmatism and Realism” / Sidney Morgenbesser
The Moral Impulse / Ruth Anna Putnam
What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist? / Stanley Cavell
Pragmatism and the Remaking of Social Thought Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking? / James T. Kloppenberg
Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the Logic of John Dewey’s Faith / Robert B. Westbrook
Community in the Pragmatic Tradition / Richard J. Bernstein
Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical “Race” Theory, and the Politics of Culture / Nancy Fraser
Going Astray, Going Forward: Du Boisian Pragmatism and Its Lineage / Ross Posnock
The Inspiration of Pragmatism: Some Personal Remarks / Hans Joas
The Missing Pragmatic Revival in American Social Science / Alan Wolfe
Pragmatism and Its Limits / John Patrick Diggins
Pragmatism and Law Pragmatic Adjudication / Richard A. Posner
Freestanding Legal Pragmatism / Thomas C. Grey
What’s Pragmatic about Legal Pragmatism? / David Luban
Pragmatism and Law: A Response to David Luban / Richard Rorty
It’s a Positivist, It’s a Pragmatist, It’s a Codifier! Reflections on Nietzsche and Stendhal / Richard H. Weisberg
Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Legal Interpretations: Posner’s and Rorty’s Justice without Metaphysics Meets Hate Speech / Michael Rosenfeld
Pragmatism, Culture, and Art Why Do Pragmatists Want to Be Like Poets? / Richard Poirier
Pragmatists and Poets: A Response to Richard Poirier / Louis Menand
The Novelist of Everyday Life / David Bromwich
When Mind Is a Verb: Thomas Eakins and the Work of Doing / Ray Carney
Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism, Giles Gunn
Afterword
Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life / Stanely Fish
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
About the author
Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His previous books include Double Agent: The Critic and Society and Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties.
Summary
Although long considered the most distinctive American contribution to philosophy, pragmatism - with its problem-solving emphasis and its contingent view of truth - lost popularity in mid-century after the advent of World War II, the horror of the Holocaust, and the dawning of the Cold War. This work provides an introduction to pragmatism.
