The British tended to deny that Darwinism had anything to say to philosophy, epistemology, or ethics. The Americans were far more appreciative of Darwinism, which supported strongly their approach to epistemology – Pragmatism. Today, on both sides of the Atlantic, there are enthusiasts for a Darwin-influenced philosophy, for instance one promoting a naturalistic Kantianism in epistemology and ethical nonrealism in moral discourse.

This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

This chapter explores some central features of morality in terms of what are commonly regarded as virtues. A virtue is a disposition that is an important feature of one’s character. As such, a virtue endures over an extended period of time, not just for a brief moment. Still, a virtue such as honesty implies its regular exercise. However, one can occasionally behave dishonestly without this undermining its standing as one’s virtue. The notion that some emphasis on basic moral virtues should be included in K-12 and college education has long received strong public support. However, there has also been widespread disagreement about just how this should be done and with what ends in mind. Presumably, some general uncertainty, if not disagreement, about the nature and foundation of morality accounts for much of this. This uncertainty is discussed in terms of reasonableness.

This chapter centers on early American Pragmatist philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, and the abundance of essays they produced, outlining the fundamental tenets of pragmatism. From the beginning, the Pragmatists showed a special affinity for the essay. This genre of writing proved to be the perfect vehicle not simply to fashion and explore provisional truths but to drive home the case that truth is inherently provisional. James and other pragmatists saw thinking as a mode of action in the world, quite different from the standard dualism that separates “mind” from “matter.” Just as the noun essay calls to mind the verb form – to essay, attempt, or try – so pragmatism was for James less a philosophical position or ideology than a method or practice. For James and Dewey in particular, pragmatism helped explain how we use ideas and beliefs to achieve our aims and how we modify and adapt those ideas and beliefs as we test them in the contexts of our daily living and engagement with others. The chapter dwells on the most important pragmatist essays and shows the many ways these influenced later pragmatist-oriented philosophers, even up to today.

This chapter offers a real-world engagement with a pragmatist approach to moral education. In this, the work of this chapter proceeds across multiple subsections. First, the intellectual tradition of pragmatism is described in a historical and conceptual context. Having established the tradition’s bedrock commitments and relationships, the chapter turns its focus to morality. By tracing the general contours of morality for the pragmatist, the chapter connects pragmatist morality to more general pragmatist concerns, indicating how these relate to notions of education and growth. The chapter then focuses on pragmatist moral education, demonstrating ways it might engage with present-day concerns and frustrations. The chapter asserts that pragmatism provides a useful approach to addressing moral education in the contemporary time. Finally, the chapter concludes by considering and responding to potential hesitations regarding its offered analyses.

Publications on citizenship, democracy, and disability tend to focus almost exclusively on the labor market, the political system, as well as assistance and support, and not on education. The same holds true in reverse. Democracy in relation to education and schooling is often discussed in a restricted manner. Disability is not treated with specific interest in this context. This chapter addresses this gap with a specific focus on John Dewey’s theoretical considerations. It first outline key aspects of Dewey’s theoretical framework before turning to the issue of disability and the specific risks it entails for democratic life in general and democratic participation in particular. It then explores the question of whether Dewey’s pragmatist approach can be used to make progress for disabled people’s education. It particularly discusses tensions and dilemmas that disability poses for democratic and inclusive education.

Chapter 6, “Emma and Other Minds,” discusses Austin’s critique of certainty in “Other Minds,” and his account of the pluralities of verbal action in the essays “Pretending” and “A Plea for Excuses.” Austin’s arguments in these essays possess not only cognitive and epistemological dimensions; they are supremely rich investigations of moral thought and sociality: dimensions of life that produce endless opportunity for mistake. Illuminating Austen’s Emma, Austin’s rejection of the exclusive dimension of certainty driving so much modern theory of knowledge goes hand in hand with his recognition of the epistemological character of social responsibility. The novel’s famous scene at Box Hill enacts these dynamics in a tour de force of recursive layers. The ordinary-language philosophical topics treated in this chapter include moral luck, pretending, and the self-problematizing division (made famous by Paul de Man’s reading of Rousseau) between exculpatory confessions and pleasure-taking excuses. The chapter begins with Austin’s and Austen’s joint critique of certainty. It ends by dislodging omniscience as a placeholder of philosophical value.

This chapter reflects on the ongoing scientific revolution as a metaphysical and even theological revolution, whose unarticulated presuppositions about being, nature, knowledge and truth have governed the so-called dialogue between science and religion. The essence of this revolution is captured in the Baconian triumph of art over nature, which conceives of nature mechanistically and knowledge pragmatically in advance of scientific inquiry and has produced a scientific and technological civilization that exceeds even Bacon’s utopian imagination in the New Atlantis and offers both promise and peril for the human future. Simultaneously challenging and conceding the stunning triumph of this utopian vision, and in dialogue with John Milbank’s poetic and ‘magical’ proposal to enfold its genuine achievements within a radically creational ontology, Hanby attempts to set forth some principles for any genuine dialogue in the future and for any conception of being, nature, knowledge and truth adequate to the Christian doctrine of God and the Christian vision of creation.

This chapter analyzes how the concept of community was brought back in by theorists such as John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Robert M. MacIver, in response to the problem of social order opened up by pluralists and theorists of process. The chapter considers different ways of making the complexity and diversity of modern society dovetail with the perceived need for community as a source of social order and demonstrates how the problem of social order remained unresolved through these efforts.

Having endorsed expansive exercises of government power to regulate the economy, the Court’s more liberal members had to figure out how to justify limiting that power in connection with civil rights and civil liberties. Here they were assisted by their conservative colleagues' sensibilities, an inchoate blend of libertarianism with the civil rights legacy of the Republican Party. Progrssive political theory, as articulated by John Dewey, provided the liberals with few resources, but they too had sensibilities and sympathies that made them comfortable with enforcing civil rights and civil liberties against governments even as they withdraw from doing the same in conneciton with economic regulation.

In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two radical, fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social justice and democratic politics. At the same time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home in northwest New Jersey. Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his “Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encounters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthean moments” in which he felt “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.” Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthean moments.” Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he seemed to slough them off. Why? My argument is that even acknowledging having had such moments (which he rarely did) seemed to him to pose a threat to his antifoundationalism, to his remarkably extreme view of human autonomy, and to his resolutely anti-authoritarian temperament. Alas.

Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.

Pragmatism arose in response to the dominant philosophical ideas of the time, one of which was neo-Kantianism. Present approaches in cognitive science often derive from basic neo-Kantian ideas, notably the notion that social life and language depend on shared “frames.” Pragmatism rejected these neo-Kantian ideas, and instead relied on an extended notion of habit. But the extension required a response to some core neo-Kantian concerns. Pragmatism provided some psychological thinking, especially in William James, and in the critique of the reflex arc concept. This was paralleled and extended by Russian psychologists. They developed a research program which supported alternative accounts of the key problematics of neo-Kantianism, such as the nature of categories and of abstraction. This bears directly on social theory, which uncritically adopted ideas of shared frameworks as an explanatory shortcut, without providing a psychological or cognitive account of how this kind of sharing was possible.

This chapter draws upon John Dewey's habit ontology in order to spell out the metaphysical commitments of social reproduction feminism. First, it outlines the current feminist debates around social reproduction (SR) in order to show where and to what extent this notion demands further conceptualization. It then presents an account of SR that hinges on Dewey's concept of habituation, which can be characterized as a spiral of second and first nature. It goes on to show how this conception of habit can help articulate SR's role in the production of persons, the maintenance of social groups and even in the reproduction of society. This discloses a perspective on the role of SR as enabling both social domination and transformation. Finally, we recapitulate and conclude by noting some implications of the resulting habit ontology of SR for feminist political thought.

This chapter develops the basic outlines of a social ontology inspired by pragmatism and social interactionism, and explores the status of habits within it. It contends that bare social interactions provide the basic building blocks of such an ontology, and that habits, patterns of interaction, and institutional form provide the basic infrastructure through which bare social interactions obtain the stability required by social life.

This paper and the one that follows it exemplify Rorty’s use of his early metaphilosophical insights to take on then-prominent topics in linguistic philosophy. “The Paradox of Definitism” critiques modern philosophy’s pervasive privileging, in metaphysics and epistemology, of sharp-edged definiteness over fuzzy indefiniteness, where the latter is deemed a function of human “ignorance and confusion,” rather than, with Aristotle, seen as something existing in nature. Dubbing this bias “definitism,” Rorty characterizes it as “the view that there is nothing which can reasonably be called a statement which is neither true nor false.” A “resurrection’ of pragmatism, he argues, with its contextualism, creates problems for definitists. But he also invites definitists into the pragmatist camp to avoid the paradox they face by recognizing Dewey’s insight that “every transaction will involve both fuzzy and non-fuzzy elements” and Peirce’s view of logic “as a normative rather than a descriptive discipline.”

“The Objectivity of Values” assesses Plato’s contributions to Western philosophy and culture. It posits that among the most lasting of those contributions are the idea of the world of absolute truth beyond time and chance, and the idea that unless such a world exists there is no way to answer Socrates’s questions. But then it posits that these ideas should be abandoned. Recognizing that there are no knock-down philosophical arguments against them, it resorts to the historical argument that they have done more harm than good. Finally, the paper proposes that a good alternative to those ideas may be found in John Dewey’s view that the point of Socratic questioning is not to arrive at absolute truths but to keep the conversation of humanity going.