By SCOTT F. AIKIN and ROBERT B. TALISSE [3QuarksDaily] – Within the community of contemporary advocates of “classical” pragmatism there is a prevailing narrative according to which Dewey and pragmatism were marginalized, dismissed, or “eclipsed” in the years following Dewey’s death in 1952. According to the Eclipse Narrative post-war professional philosophy in the United States fell under the spell of a style of philosophizing imported from England and championed by Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, a style generally called analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy, with its pretensions to logical rigor and scientific precision, deemed pragmatism “soft” and unserious, driving pragmatist ideas and texts out of the professional mainstream and ultimately underground.
Like many persecution stories, the Eclipse Narrative culminates with a resurrection. It runs as follows: Thanks primarily to Richard Rorty’s influential work, pragmatism saw a renaissance in the 1980s, and is today again considered a major philosophical force. Yet, from the point of view of contemporary classical pragmatists, the resurrection of pragmatism was bittersweet. Rorty had indeed revived pragmatism, but Rorty’s “neo-pragmatism” is, by the Deweyans’ lights, a perverted and emaciated pragmatism, a pragmatism not worth resuscitating. And so, even though pragmatism is now widely recognized as philosophical force, current proponents of classical pragmatism see themselves as marginalized.
And with this sense of marginalization comes resentment.
Continued at 3QuarksDaily | More Chronicle & Notices.
