Pragmatism's Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century

194 Pages·2010·1.14 MB·English

by  Joseph Margolis

Pragmatism’s Advantage

Pragmatism’s Advantage
American and European Philosophy
at the End of the Twentieth Century
Joseph Margolis
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Margolis, Joseph, 1924–
Pragmatism’s advantage : American and European philosophy at the end of the
twentieth century / Joseph Margolis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-6268-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8047-7046-0 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Pragmatism—History—20th century. 2. Philosophy, American—20th
century. 3. Philosophy, European—20th century. 4. Analysis (Philosophy)
5. Continental philosophy. I. Title.
b944.p72.m268 2010
144'.3—dc22
2009035622
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/15.5 Adobe Garamond
for camaraderie among contested views

Contents
Preface ix
1 Pragmatism’s Advantage 1
2 Reclaiming Naturalism 49
3 Vicissitudes of Transcendental Reason 93
Epilogue: Pragmatism and the Prospect of a
Rapprochement within Eurocentric Philosophy 131
Notes 145
Index 167

Preface
In the seCond hAlf of the lAst Century, American philoso-
phy yielded three unusually influential, heterodox, more or less lopsidedly
doctrinaire texts that caught up the subterranean intuitions of an other-
wise undistinguished academy and now count as the vanguard of its great-
est surge of influence to date within the whole of Eurocentric philosophy.
Their convergence is also clear, though it seemed like scatter when each
book appeared in turn, and their shared instruction and promise came
into focus only by reviewing the drift of Western philosophy against the
piecemeal manifestos each favored in its time. All three authors are now
gone, though they were marvelously alive when I began to put the pres-
ent story together. I’ve benefited from knowing them somewhat, possibly
because I came to see that each was much more intuitive than deliberate,
in spite of seeming evidence to the contrary, and that none of them was
entirely clear about the fuller meaning of the exclusionary direction each
chose to champion. Moreover, their optimisms were eccentrically off the
mark, yet they were always close to the center of the energy that, at the end
of the century, began to take explicit form—or so it seems to me.
They were on their way, it’s now clear, to offering pragmatism new
options of an unexpected kind, though they had cast themselves initially
as opponents of successful orthodoxies. Looking back, most discussants
would now accept their being characterized as pragmatists of a new kind,
or conceptual cousins at least. In fact, Richard Rorty explicitly claimed
that when, early in the second half of the twentieth century, American phi-
losophy took “the linguistic turn,” pragmatism’s career seemed no longer
ix