International Perspectives on Pragmatism

Peter H. Hare · J.K. Swindler · Michel Weber

Dec 2008 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

International Perspectives on Pragmatism combines, in a very appealing manner, a pragmatist approach of democracy with practical politics and history of ideas. The result is a meditation on contemporary society, while in the background there is a continuous debate on the concept of democracy, as defining mark of Western culture. Both its critics and its supporters talk about a decay of democracy, which would not justify an idealist perspective anymore. Arguments for this transpire from both the practical politics section of the volume, as well as from the second part that focuses more on the theoretical side of the discussion on democracy. On a more practical direction, there are contributors maintaining the idea that democracy is corrupt (and examples from today’s world are offered), while the theoretical perspective brings up the Rortian view, manifested through the well-known debate between the foundationalist and the anti-foundationalist perspectives.

There’s also a very interesting debate on community and art, from a pragmatist point of view, which offers the volume a special serenity.

About the author

Peter Hewitt Hare (1935-2008) was Emeritus SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and Co- editor (with Randall Dipert) of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. Recent publications of Dr. Hare: “Problems and Prospects in the Ethics of Belief” in Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, John R. Shook (ed); “Dewey, Analytic Epistemology and Biology” in Dewey, Pragmatism and Economic Methodology, Elias L. Khalil (ed.), “What Kind of God Does This . . .?, in The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill Therefore I am, Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze (eds), “Photography, Popular Epistemology, Flexible Realism and Holistic Pragmatism”, in Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, William Irwin and Jorge J. E. Gracia (eds.), “Misunderstandings between Poet and Philosopher: Wallace Stevens and Paul Weiss” in Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, No. 5, 2006.

He also served as president of several philosophical organizations, including the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (1988-90), which gave him its highest honour, the Herbert W. Schneider Award in 1996.

Michel Weber is Director of the Centre for philosophical practice “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes”; . He has published, e.g., La dialectique de l’intuition chez A. N. Whitehead (Ontos Verlag, 2005), Whitehead’s Pancreativism (Ontos Verlag, 2006), L’épreuve de la philosophie (Éditions Chromatika, 2008) and Éduquer (à) l’anarchie (Éditions Chromatika, 2008).

J. K. Swindler, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Illinois State University, works at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics and social philosophy.  He is the author of Weaving: An Analysis of the Constitution of Objects (Romwan and Littlefield) and has recently published "Normativity" (The Journal of Social Philosophy) and "Social Intentions" (The Philosophy of the Social Sciences).

He has taught at Westminster College, the University of Miami and Wittenberg University.  He served as editor of Southwest Philosophy Review and has held fellowships with the Eccles Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.

Oana Pastae is Assistant professor at “Constantin Brancusi University” Targu-Jiu, and Ph.D. candidate at the “University of Bucharest”, Romania, working on a dissertation that focuses on the lexical- semantic analysis of a cognitive structure: happiness in contemporary French. Among her publications - Bilinguisme et diglossie, (Mirton Edition 2004), La joie dans la classe des noms, (Annales Universitatis Apulensis, 2005), L’adjectif joyeux en français contemporain (www.central.ucv.ro/litere/activ_st/publicatii.htm, 2005), Un survol historique de la notion de champ sémantique, (Targu Jiu, 2006), Les stéréotypes dans la langue, (Annales Universitatis Apulensis, 2006), Le champ onomasiologique de la joie, (Politehnica Press Edition, 2007), Cognition et émotions, (Targu Jiu, 2008), Prototyplicalité et étude du sens sémantique, (Politehnica Press Edition, 2008).

Cerasel Cuteanu, former faculty of Plymouth State University (USA) and of “Constantin Brancusi” University from Targu-Jiu, Romania, has a Ph.D. in Modern Philosophy and is presently researching on Pragmatism and Richard Rorty. He is the author of three books – “Nietzsche’s Europe”, “Modern Europe as Philosophy of Perpetual Peace” and “Letters of Leibniz, Pellisson and Bossuet in favor of the reunification of Protestants and Catholics”.