Pragmatism

Abstract

American pragmatism has undergone numerous transformations through 150 years of its history. Founded by Ch. S. Pierce in the 1870s, it gained recognition as a philosophical movement only three decades later due to W. James and J. Dewey. During 1930–40s pragmatism was gradually replaced on the American scene by logical empiricism and linguistic philosophy, “exported” from Europe. Among academic philosophers, Deweyan and Jamesian pragmatism was viewed as excessively “tender-minded” – fuzzy, unsystematic, without a firm theoretical core and methodology. Some champions of pragmatic approach tried to popularize the ideas of paleopragmatists by simplifying them for mass consumption. Such efforts did little to bolster the prestige of the tradition among American intellectuals, and even worse, vastly spoiled its image and reputation. Under these circumstances appeared M. White’s book “Toward Reunion in Philosophy” (1956) with a sharp criticism of “epistemological formalism” and an outline of a new philosophical synthesis of positivism and ethically oriented pragmatism. This program was partly realized in the doctrines of W. Quine and W. Sellars. Along with the ideas of Pierce, rediscovered in the mid-20th century, Quine’s and Sellars’s philosophy became one of the sources of contemporary neo-pragmatism (R. Rorty, H. Putnam, R. Brandom, etc.). Many scholars associate the perspectives of American philosophy in foreseeable future with pragmatism in its various incarnations and combinations with other philosophical approaches.