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This paper builds on Robert Talisse’s interpretation of a “crisis” in mid-century pragmatism to examine the overlooked contributions of Charles Morris and Morton White. Against the metaphilosophical overreach of Deweyan pragmatism, Morris and White advanced a distinct effort toward philosophical synthesis: unifying diverse traditions on a pragmatist basis while rejecting doctrinal reductionism or triumphalism along with any hierarchy of vocabularies. This pluralistic ethos, grounded in the socio-cultural embeddedness of science and the centrality of practice, counters both the insularity of forms of inquiry and the separation between categories of meaning, shaping a holistic approach to philosophical engagement. By challenging dualisms at the philosophical and metaphilosophical levels, Morris and White’s approach widens the scope of pragmatism while fostering a freer yet also more rigorous relationship with their intellectual lineage. By challenging the “eclipse” narrative, this paper highlights continuities within the pragmatist tradition, positioning Morris and White as early representatives of a neopragmatist current, with significant resonances in contemporary trends following its “revival” in the 1980s.

This paper defends a Peircean account truth in politics and ethics. It also sets out a novel epistemic conception of democracy. Roughly, if we are to aim at truth, we must take into account all the relevant experience and sustain the conditions under which prevailing arrangements may be contested, an idea which is aligned with democratic politics. Along the way, it identifies a mistake inspired by Dewey and one by Peirce and shows how these mistakes are manifest in contemporary political philosophy.

This review essay critically discusses Robert Talisse’s account of democracy and polarization. I argue that Talisse overstates the degree to which polarization arises from the good-faith practice of democratic citizenship and downplays the extent to which polarization is caused by elites and exacerbated by social structures; this leads Talisse to overlook structural approaches to managing polarization and leaves his account of how citizens should respond to polarization incomplete. I conclude that Talisse’s insights should nevertheless be integrated into a broader agenda for thinking about the causes and solutions to polarization.

Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition , edited by Robert B. Talisse, Paniel Reyes Cárdenas, and Daniel Herbert, is the eighth title in the Routledge Studies in American Philosophy book series. According to the contributors, Hookway’s oeuvre has offered, first and foremost, a foundational interpretation and invaluable framework for the study of Charles Sanders Peirce, his philosophy of science, and pragmatist epistemology. For the explicit purposes of this review essay, therefore, I follow a single inquiry road through the intellectual landscape of this edited volume: To what extent, and in what ways, is a pragmatic model of scientific methods characterized by its temporalities ? And how is temporality necessary and significant for the methods of the sciences, their utility, and value? The road of inquiry , to apply the metaphor first introduced by Peirce and further utilized by Hookway, I model across five modes: affect , belief , community , doubt , and hope . The various chapters of this edited volume each more or less center around one of these modes. Ultimately, as I infer here, the inquiry of Peirce, as interpreted by Hook-way, and illustrated by Talisse, Cárdenas, Herbert, and the contributors to their volume, affords for the unifying modelling of our scientific methodologies based upon neither stages nor phases of linear time but modes of lived temporality. In this way, this model is therefore both pragmatically realist and radically psychological.

Over the last decade, Robert Talisse has developed a devastating argument against reviving John Dewey's democratic ideal. In his book, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, and in other essays, Talisse has argued that Deweyan democracy fails to accommodate Rawls' conception of “the fact of reasonable pluralism” because it is committed to a perfectionist conception of the good. In response, this article offers a Rawlsian rebuttal to Talisse by drawing on Rawls' own characterisation of perfectionism to show that Dewey's conception of the good is not perfectionist on Rawls' account and thus can reasonably accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. This article thus begins by exposing and explaining Talisse's argument, before articulating Shane Ralston's rejection of the Berlinian and Rawlsian filters presupposed by Talisse's argument. Then, it develops its central argument by showing that, even if we accept the Rawlsian filter, Deweyan democracy does not fail to accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism, because it only relies on a thin (not a full) theory of the good, before considering some foreseeable Talissean objections. Ultimately, the article concludes by showing that these objections fail because Deweyan democracy does not rely on a ‘full’ theory of the good.

John Rawls argued that democracy must be justifiable to all citizens; otherwise, a democratic society is oppressive to some. In A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (2007), Robert B. Talisse attempts to meet the Rawlsian challenge by drawing from Charles S. Peirce's pragmatism. This article first briefly canvasses the argument of Talisse's book and then criticizes its key premise concerning (normative) reasons for belief by offering a competing reading of Peirce's \"The Fixation of Belief\" (1877). It then proceeds to argue that Talisse's argument faces a dilemma: his proposal of epistemic perfectionism either is substantive and can be reasonably disagreed about or is minimal but insufficient to ground a democratic society. Consequently, it suggests that the Rawlsian challenge can only be solved by abandoning Rawls's own notion of reasonableness, and that an interesting alternative notion of reasons can be derived from Peirce's \"Fixation.\"

Thinking about Logic is an accessible and thought-provoking collection of classic articles in the philosophy of logic. An ideal companion to any formal logic course or textbook, this volume illuminates how logic relates to perennial philosophical issues about knowledge, meaning, rationality, and reality.

Robert B. Talisse'sA Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracyis a genuinetour de force. His aim is both to defend a particular view of pragmatism originating with the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and, at the same time, argue in favour of a new view of deliberative democracy developed from Talisse's Peircean pragmatism. The result is a stunning achievement with real persuasive power. In this article, I will focus on one worry, namely, that the picture of democracy on offer is incomplete. While Talisse correctly argues that democracy is about more than elections, democracy is also about more than deliberation between citizens. Talisse's deliberative democracy is problematic to the degree its view of deliberation fails to account for democracy. If my analysis is correct, then I do not aim to demonstrate that Talisse's Peircean pragmatism is incorrect, onlyincomplete. Thus, the hope of this article is to help develop this pragmatism further.

\"Secular humanists don't care what you believe,\" he said. \"That's on you. But don't bring that into public policy.\" \"[Thomas Jefferson] has a very pragmatic position,\" [Thomas Kidd] said. \"He doesn't want any more established churches, but he doesn't think that separation of church and state means religion will cease to have a role in public life.\" \"When the government forces us to do something, it's got to be able to explain to us why we have to do those things,\" he said. \"The government can't say 'The Bible says this' or 'Jesus says do this.' \"