Pragmatism Ascendent by Margolis Joseph;

Author:Margolis, Joseph;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

3

Pragmatism’s Future

A Touch of Prophecy

Pragmatism’s recovery from its near demise in the 1940s and 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. It’s a completely gratuitous reprieve, without warrant or explicit purpose, now exploited in a thousand insouciant ways worldwide. It may be the most improbable philosophical recovery of its kind in recent academic memory since it has no manifesto to proclaim that could account for its newfound attraction. In this regard, its recovery cannot compare with W. V. Quine’s ingeniously pared-down retrieval of the remnant forces of logical positivism’s failed vision, reconfigured transatlantically around the innovative spark of Quine’s own “Two Dogmas” paper and freed (by Quine’s wit) from the overly strenuous, now impossible ambitions of the Fregean, positivist, and unity of science visions that once joined hands to command analytic philosophy’s sprawling empire in the first half of the twentieth century.

Quine extended analytic philosophy’s hegemony another fifty years, though not robustly enough to improve the viability of the programs of its most daring progenitors. They’ve lost their triumphal edge, possibly forever, and now betray the impoverished results of the narrow strategies of analysis they once demanded. Failing there, analytic philosophy has lost its original fluency and speculative breadth, which might have kept its practice in touch with the best of pragmatist and continental ventures. Its reputation still rests with its rigor; but rigor is doubtful wherever its best efforts are too slow to admit the failure of its reductionisms, supervenientisms, eliminativisms, axiomatizations, systems of causal closure, or the rest of its utopian projects. Also, Quine’s initiative arose to meet the willing responses of the faithful in support of his frontal attack on the canonical distinction (Rudolf Carnap’s) between the “analytic” and the “synthetic” so essential to the faltering claims of the positivists themselves. The pragmatists never had such a cause; yet their own cause, hardly much improved over the past sixty years, now seems remarkably secure.

The most plausible explanation has it that the revival of pragmatism reflects a sense of the continuing respectability and limited gains of its original program—despite its obviously faded fortunes—when compared with the more precipitous decline of the boldest analytic programs of the whole of the twentieth century and the no-more-than-tepid interest on the part of the dominant moiety of the Anglo-American academy to draw any strength at all from the best work of post-Kantian “continental” philosophy. If pragmatism could but find a plausible new source of conceptual invention to “complete” the insufficient articulation of its classic trajectory, it would, I foresee, move to incorporate within that new vision selected intuitions from the best of the analytic and continental movements it’s now well-placed to outdistance. That may explain both the unearned recovery of pragmatism’s prospects and the contorted, oblique efforts among recent pragmatists and analytic philosophers to test the waters to fathom just how much of Hegel and Heidegger they dare risk absorbing without contamination. I would say the saving themes have already been accessible, however neglected, for a longish time: namely, historicity and the irreducible emergence of the cultural world.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.