Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Rekindling Pragmatism’s Fire

241 Pages·2014·1.32 MB·English

by  Judith M. Green (eds.)

Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in
Contemporary Philosophy
Also by Judith M. Green
DEEP DEMOCRACY: Community, Diversity, and Transformation (1999)
PRAGMATISM AND SOCIAL HOPE: DEEPENING DEMOCRACY IN GLOBAL
CONTEXTS (2008)
PRAGMATISM AND DIVERSITY: DEWEY IN THE CONTEXT OF LATE TWENTIETH
CENTURY DEBATES (c o-edited with Stefan Neubert and Kirsten Reich 2012)
Richard J. Bernstein and
the Pragmatist Turn in
Contemporary Philosophy
Rekindling Pragmatism’s Fire
Edited by
Judith M. Green
Fordham University, USA
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Judith M. Green 2014
Chapters © Respective authors 2014
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35269-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries
ISBN 978-1-349-46934-5 ISBN 978-1-137-35270-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137352705
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing
processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the
country of origin.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Judith M. Green
Prelude to a Critical Conversation with Fellow Pragmatists 32
Richard J. Bernstein
Part I Contemporary Engagements with
the Classical Pragmatists
1 Hegel and the Classical Pragmatists: Prolegomenon to
a Future Discussion 39
Michael J. Baur
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 53
2 The Inferences That Never Were: Peirce, Perception, and
Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn 55
Richard Kenneth Atkins
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 68
3 Peirce’s Theory of Truth and Fallibilism 71
Hugh McDonald
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 76
4 Bernstein’s Deployment of Jamesian Democratic Pluralism:
The Pragmatic Turn and the Future of Philosophy 78
Judith M. Green
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 95
5 The Turn within the Pragmatic Turn: Recovering
Bernstein’s Democratic Dewey 98
Shane J. Ralston
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 110
6 Dewey as a Radical Democrat and a Liberal Democrat:
Considerations on Bernstein on Dewey 112
Colin Koopman
Richard J. Bernstein’s Response 126
v
vi Contents
Part II Pragmatist Engagements with
Contemporary Philosophy
7 D emocratic Community Participation: Bernstein between
Dewey and an Achieved Deeply Democratic Future 1 31
D avid W. Woods
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 146
8 I deals after the “Pragmatic Turn” 1 48
S . Joshua Thomas
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 161
9 A bstract Objectivity: Richard J. Bernstein’s Critique of
Hilary Putnam 1 63
B rendan Hogan and Lawrence Marcelle
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 174
10 P ragmatism’s Constructive Project 1 76
P hilip Kitcher
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 188
11 T ruth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn:
Bernstein on Habermas’s “Kantian Pragmatism” 1 90
J effrey Flynn
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 208
12 N ow What? Richard J. Bernstein and Philosophy after Rorty 210
D avid E. McClean
R ichard J. Bernstein’s Response 220
Index 2 23
Notes on Contributors

Richard Kenneth Atkins teaches at Iona College. He holds a Ph.D. from
Fordham University and is currently an elected member of the Charles S.
Peirce Society Executive Committee. He won the Charles S. Peirce Society
Essay Contest in 2010–11 for his essay, “ ‘This Proposition Is Not True’:
C.S. Peirce and the Liar Paradox,” published in the Transactions of the
Charles S. Peirce Society 47:4. He is also the author of “Pragmatic Scruples
and the Correspondence Theory of Truth” (Dialogue 49:3), “Toward an
Objective Phenomenological Vocabulary: How Seeing a Scarlet Red Is
Like Hearing a Trumpet’s Blare (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,
forthcoming), “Broadening Peirce’s Phaneroscopy” (published in two
parts in The Pluralist 7:2 and 8:1), “The Pleasures of Goodness: Peircean
Aesthetics in Light of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment” (Cognitio
9:1), among other essays.
Michael Baur is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor
of Law at Fordham University. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the
University of Toronto and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is Secretary
of the Hegel Society of America and Associate Editor of The Owl of
Minerva: Journal of the Hegel Society of America. He has published thinkers
(including Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger) and
on a wide variety of topics (including German Idealism, philosophy of
law, American pragmatism, and contemporary continental thought).
Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List Professor of Philosophy at the New
School for Social Research. His books include John Dewey (1966), Praxis
and Action (1971), The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (1976),
Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983), Hannah Arendt and the Jewish
Question (1996), Freud and the Legacy of Moses (1998), Radical Evil (2002),
and The Pragmatic Turn (2010). His most recent book is Violence: Thinking
without Banisters (2013).
Jeffrey Flynn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University.
He works mainly in social and political philosophy and has published
essays on Habermas, human rights, and democracy. He is the author
of The Intercultural Dialogue on Human Rights: A Philosophical Reframing
(forthcoming) and is currently working on a new book titled Saving
Distant Strangers: Humanitarianism in History, Morality, and Contemporary
Practice.
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Judith M. Green is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of Women’s
Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Deep Democracy:
Community, Diversity, and Transformation (1999) and Pragmatism and
Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts (2008), as well as
many philosophical essays. In addition to serving as editor of this
volume, she is co-editor of Pragmatism and Diversity: Dewey in the Context
of Late Twentieth Century Debates (2012). She is currently working on a
book titled Pragmatist Political Economy: Deep Democracy, Economic Justice,
Positive Peace.
Brendan Hogan is Master Teacher in New York University’s Global
Liberal Studies Program, spending this academic year at NYU Florence.
His publications include “Hegemony, Social Science, and Democracy,”
in Persuasion and Compulsion in Democracy (2013), as well as “Agency,
Political Economy, and the Transnational Democratic Ideal” in The Journal
of Ethics and Global Politics (3:1, 2010), “The Imaginative Character of
Pragmatic Inquiry” in Cognitio Estudos (5:2, 2009), and “Towards a Truly
Pragmatic Philosophy of Social Science” in Human Studies (32:1, 2009).
Hogan is currently co-editing an interdisciplinary volume of essays,
Democratic Representation in Crisis: What Kinds of Theories for What Kinds
of Research, and to What Ends?
Philip Kitcher is John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia
University. He is the author of many philosophical articles and books.
His most recent books are The Ethical Project (2011), Science in a Democratic
Society (2011) and Preludes to Pragmatism: Toward a Reconstruction of
Philosophy (2012). His book Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von
Aschenbach will appear in 2013.
Colin Koopman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Oregon. He is the author of two books, Pragmatism as Transition:
Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (2009) and Genealogy as
Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (2013). He has published
articles in Critical Inquiry, Constellations, Metaphilosophy, The Review of
Metaphysics, Contemporary Pragmatism, and elsewhere. He has recently
completed co-editing a forthcoming volume of essays on the work of
Richard Rorty.
Lawrence Marcelle is Adjunct Professor in the Liberal Studies Program
at NYU, teaching social and political thought. He holds a Ph.D. in
philosophy from the New School for Social Research. He has delivered
papers at a variety of conferences on subjects in American philosophy,
philosophy of social science, and philosophy of language. He recently
Notes on Contributor s ix
completed a manuscript exploring the debate over a “new” interpreta-
tion of Wittgenstein’s work initiated by Cora Diamond, Alice Crary, and
James Conant, and others.
David E. McClean teaches philosophy at Rutgers University (Newark, NJ)
and Molloy College (Rockville Centre, NY). He holds a Ph.D. in philos-
ophy from the New School for Social Research, where he is a member
of the Board of Governors. McClean has published a number of articles
and book reviews in peer-reviewed journals, including The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophia
Africana, and he has contributed chapters to books on subjects ranging
from business ethics to race theory. He has been principal of a busi-
ness consultancy he founded in 1992, which addresses enterprise risk,
governance, and regulatory issues for financial services firms.
Hugh P. McDonald is Professor of Philosophy at the New York
City College of Technology (CUNY), where he was elected Scholar
on Campus in 2009. He has a Ph.D. from the New School for
Social Research and is the co-founder of the New York Pragmatist
Forum. He is the author of Political Philosophy and Ideology (1996),
Radical Axiology, a First Philosophy of Values (2004), John Dewey and
Environmental Ethics (2004), Creative Actualization, A Meliorist Theory
of Values (2011) and Speculative Evaluations, Essays on a Pluralistic
Universe (2012). McDonald is co-editor, with John Shook, of F. C. S.
Schiller on Pragmatism and Humanism: Selected Writings, 1891-1937
(2007), and editor of Pragmatism and Environmentalism (2012). He
is also the founder of the Calochortus Society, a group devoted to a
beautiful family of native American wildflowers, and past editor of
its newsletter. He has also written articles in botany and horticulture
journals. An avid wildflower photographer, he maintains a web site of
his published and unpublished photographs.
Shane Ralston is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Penn State
University Hazleton. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University
of Ottawa. He is currently the book review editor for Education and
Culture: The Journal of the John Dewey Society. He has published arti-
cles on pragmatism, democratic theory, education, environment and
public policy, as well as books on pragmatism’s history (John Dewey’s
Great Debates – Reconstructed (2011)), environmental activism (Pragmatic
Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-justice (2013)), and interna-
tional affairs (Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations: Essays
for a Bold New World (2013)).