DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY PHIL 320 PRAGMATISM Autumn SEMESTER 2012 Chris Hookway Email [email protected] Office Hours: Monday 11am., Friday 11 pm. Lecture times Monday 2 pm Hicks – LTD Wednesday 11 am. Hicks - LT4 Seminar times Tues 3-4, BA SR AG14 Wed 12pm, BA SR AG14 PHI6500: seminar times to be arranged early in the course. Short Essay deadline: Thursday 29th November (Thursday week 10) Long essay deadline 25 January, 4pm Plan for long essay must be submitted by Wednesday November 14th There will be a MOLE site for this course. If you are registered for the course, you will automatically be registered to use this site and there should be a link on your MUSE page. Other people attending the course should ask me to give them the right to use this. I. INTRODUCTION I. Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition which emerged in the United States in the later years of the nineteenth century. The three major 'Classical Pragmatists' were Charles Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952). James and Dewey took further some ideas about truth, inquiry and pragmatism which Peirce defended in the 1870s, often taking them in directions of which Peirce would have disapproved. During the last decade, pragmatism has become an important player on the philosophical stage once again. In part, this reflects our growing understanding of the subtlety and interest of the work of these 'classical pragmatists'. In part, it involves a recognition that Pragmatism was linked to other philosophical movements of the time: they joined with Nietzsche, existentialists like Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (for example) in questioning traditional philosophical ideas and forging a philosophical understanding of human life which emphasized the fact that knowers were agents and emphasized the role of values and interests in shaping our knowledge. And in part it reflects the fact that a number of currently influential contemporary philosophers have begun to describe themselves as 'pragmatists' again: the most notable of these is Richard Rorty. The first part of the course aims to understand the work of the classical pragmatists, selecting some fundamental themes in the work of Peirce, James and (to a lesser extent) Dewey for close attention. The second part will look at what is living in pragmatism by examining uses of pragmatist ideas by some recent philosophers. This section will primarily examine some writings by Richard Rorty, but I hope to have time to discuss other thinkers too. II. TEXTS: THE CLASSIC PRAGMATISTS All three classical pragmatists wrote extensively, and there are multi-volume editions of the works of all of them. I shall rely primarily upon the papers contained in: H.S.Thayer (ed) Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, Hackett, 1982. The bookshop will have copies of this collection. Other useful anthology is: Susan Haack (ed) Pragmatism, Old and New. Prometheus Books This contains more material than the first collection, but it is also more expensive. I shall also need to refer to some other works by these thinkers. In the case of James and Dewey multi volume editions of their works are available in the library (published by Harvard University Press and Southern Illinois University Press respectively). The new edition of Peirce's writings (Indiana University Press) is still at an early stage (7 out of 30 volumes are available). There is an older eight-volume collection, which contains a lot of important material although its organization now seems rather eccentric: The Collected Papers of Charles S Peirce (eds. Hartshorne, Weiss and Burks), Harvard University Press. You can access this edition on line through the library: click on ‘Library’ in Muse, and then go to ‘Access the Library's subject databases’. Click on Peirce in the alphabetic list. Some other useful texts N.Houser and C. Kloesel (eds) Essential Peirce (two volumes), Indiana University Press, 1992 - 1999 (An excellent collection with good introductions by Nathan Houser (vol 1), (vol2)) K.Ketner and H Putnam (eds) Reasoning and the Logic of Things, Harvard University Press, 1992 contains an interesting and useful series of lectures. William James, Selected Writings, (ed Graham Bird), Everyman. Larry Hickman (ed) The Essential Dewey (two volumes). Indiana University Press, 1999. III. WEB ACCESS For those with access to the web, quite a lot of this material is available online. The best place to start is probably http://www.pragmatism.org/, "The pragmatism cybrary". This has links to a number of other relevant sites. http://members.door.net/arisbe/ar-main.htm is the best site devoted to Peirce"s work. It contains a link to "Papers by C. S. Peirce" as well as other useful links. http://www.emory.edu/EDUCATION/mfp/james.html is a site devoted to William James. The first page contains links to many of the Jamesian texts that we will discuss. It includes complete texts of James's important books Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. http://www.pragmatism.org/genealogy/dewey/dewey.htm is a site devoted to John Dewey. It contains a list of "Significant Works" by Dewey with links to a number of electronic copies. See also ‘Pragmatism’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy IV. COMMENTARIES: THE CLASSIC PRAGMATISTS Some useful general books:; Richard Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn. Polity Press, 2010 Howard Mounce, The Two Pragmatisms Routledge, 1997 E. C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Peirce, James and Dewey, Columbia University Press, 1961 John Smith, Purpose and Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1984. Israel Scheffler, Four Pragmatists, Routledge, 1986. Robert Talisse, Pragmatism for the Perplexed. Continuum Press, 2008 H.S.Thayer, Meaning and Action, Hackett, 1981. Cornelius de Waal. Pragmatism, Wadsworth, 2002. Works on particular thinkers: (A selection: many others are available) As well as the listed, you can consult Encylopedia entries on these figures in: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Available in the library and through the University's cd rom server. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (See articles on Peirce, James,) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on the internet). (See articles on Peirce, Peirce's logic, William James, Peirce’s theory of signs Dewey’s political Philosophy, Rorty Peirce: Douglas Anderson, Strands of System, Purdue University Press, 1995. Karl Otto Apel, Charles S. Peirce: from Pragmatism to Pragmaticism University of Massachusetts Press, 1981, (Hard) Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: a Life, Indiana University Press, 1993 (entertaining and controversial) C.F.Delaney, Science. Knowledge and Mind, Notre Dame 1993. E. Freeman (ed) The Relevance of C. S. Peirce, Open Court. W.B.Gallie, Peirce and Pragmatism, Penguin, 1952 T. Goudge, The Thought of C.S.Peirce, Dover, 1969 Carl Hausman, The Evolutionary Philosophy of Charles S Peirce, Cambridge University Press, 1993 Christopher Hookway, Peirce, Routledge, 1985, 1992, 2010 ------------- Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism: Themes from Peirce, Oxford University Press, 2000. Kenneth Ketner (ed) Peirce and Contemporary Thought, Fordham University Press, 1995. Cheryl Misak, The End of Inquiry, Oxford, 1991 (second expanded edition 2004) Cheryl Misak (ed) Cambridge Companion to Peirce. Cambridge University Press, 2004. E. C. Moore (ed) Charles S. Peirce and the Philosophy of Science, University of Alabama Press, 1993. Nicholas Rescher, Peirce’s Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame, 1978. Peter Skagestad, The Road of Inquiry, Columbia University Press, 1981. William James: Graham Bird, William James, Routledge, 1987 Richard Gale, The Divided Self of William James. Cambridge University Press. 1999. Ellen Suckiel, The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James, University of Notre Dame Press, 1983. Gerald E Myers, William James: His Life and Thought, Yale University Press, 1986. Ruth Anna Putnam, (ed) The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge University Press, 1997 Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam, 'William James's Ideas", in Putnam, Realism with a Human Face. Doris Olin (ed) Pragmatism in Focus (As well as the text of James’s Pragmatism, this reprints several useful critical papers.) John Dewey: Matthew Festenstein 1997. Pragmatism and Political Theory: From Dewy to Rorty Paul Schilpp (ed) The Philosophy of John Dewey, Open Court. Ralph Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, Yale University Press, 1986 H.S.Thayer, The Logic of Pragmatism, Greenwood, 1970 Jim Tiles. Dewey, Routledge, 1989. Jim Tiles, (ed) John Dewey: Critical Assessments, Routledge, four volumes. Tom Burke. Dewey’s New Logic. V. MODERN USES OF PRAGMATIST IDEAS Robert Brandom, Making things Explicit, Harvard University Press, 1994 Articulating Reasons, Harvard University Press, 2000 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge University Press, Realism with a Human Face, Harvard University Press, 199 Renewing Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1993 The Many Faces of Realism, Open Court, 1987 Pragmatism, Blackwell, 1994 The Threefold Cord, Columbia University Press, 1999 Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason, MIT Press, 19 Robert Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. Routledge. 2007 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, 1999 The Consequences of Pragmatism, Harvester, 1982. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, Cambridge University Press, 1991 Rorty and his Critics, Blackwells, 2000. (edited by Robert Brandom) R Goodman (ed) Pragmatism, Routledge, 1995: contains several interesting essays in which contemporary thinkers make use of pragmatist ideas, as well as a few