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Contemporary Western alternatives to anthropocentrism – such as sentientism or biocentrism – rely on the scope of human knowledge exceeding its realistic limitations. As a corollary, although these models continue to be helpful in discerning ethical conduct, additional resources are going to be required. Initially arguing from within a representationalist paradigm, this paper shows that besides our inability reliably to assess the capacities of non-human species, we have also yet to learn what other factors, besides capacity, may be relevant to a non-human’s moral considerability. Subsequently arguing from within a participationalist paradigm, this paper shows that we cannot preconceive all we may be in the process of co-creating. This leaves any model grounded solely in the already existing open to finding itself incapable of relating to the new. It is in the co-creativity of the latter that a potential starting point for resolution begins to emerge: drawing upon Indigenous conceptions of performative knowledge processes in non-objectifying relationality, this paper shows dynamics of inter-species kinship, at times partially traceable through evolutionary relationship, to be a source of non-propositional learning relevant to ethical concerns.

Abraham Flexner's 1910 report on medical education is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of modern medicine in the US and beyond. Most commentators focus on its administrative and managerial impact, despite Flexner dedicating a sizeable portion of his report to a theoretical account of the kind of medicine that he seeks to implement. Close attention to these sections reveals a surprisingly coherent account of medicine that, based on a Deweyan Pragmatist philosophy of science, unites scientific investigator and medical practitioner in a new experimental paradigm of science. Flexner can develop an account that goes beyond a mere epistemic redefinition of medicine, providing the profession with a social, cultural, and ethical identity that avails itself of the extremely wide purview that Dewey granted to modern science. Due to the subsequent narrowing of philosophy of science to a delimited academic subdiscipline, these broad Pragmatist philosophical commitments at the roots of Flexner's scientific medicine remained a largely unexplored intellectual legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our goal of effective agency. On the version of the argument I defend, the great good for human life of control over our empirical circumstances renders our goal of effective agency reasonable. But only if our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true—and only if we accept that this is so, assuming it as a premise for inference and a guide for action—will the success of our actions be due to our effective agency, not mere luck. Since we’re warranted in taking the necessary means to our reasonable ends, we’re warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are generally justified, and so that skepticism about empirical justification is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the notion of territorialization, the text traces connecting points between classical American pragmatism and contemporary Latin American philosophy as an effort to counter the usual criticism that states that because of its origins in the north of the continent pragmatism has nothing to offer to the construction of any sound philosophy in the south, while recognizing that its history, that of pragmatism, can be read in parallel of the history of the ways in which Latina American philosophies were built since the beginning of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the striking affinities of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric with the pragmatist/interactionist analysis of the situated negotiation of reality and its profound relevance for the analysis of human group life more generally, few contemporary social scientists are aware of the exceptionally astute analyses of persuasive inter­change developed by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Having considered the analyses of rhetoric developed by Aristotle (384-322 BCE) and Cicero (106-43 BCE) in interactionist terms (Prus 2007a; 2010), the present paper examines Quintilian’s (35-95 CE) contributions to the study of persuasive interchange more specifically and the nature of human knowing and acting more generally. Focusing on the education and practices of orators (rhetoricians), Quintilian (a practitioner as well as a distinc­tively thorough instructor of the craft) provides one of the most sustained, most systematic analyses of influence work and resistance to be found in the literature. Following an overview of Quintilian’s “ethnohistorical” account of Roman oratory, this paper concludes by draw­ing conceptual parallels between Quintilian’s analysis of influence work and the broader, transcontextual features of symbolic interactionist scholarship (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; Prus and Grills 2003). This includes “generic social processes” such as: acquiring perspectives, attending to identity, being involved, doing activity, en­gaging in persuasive interchange, developing relationships, experiencing emotionality, attaining linguistic fluency, and partici­pating in collective events. Offering a great many departure points for comparative analysis, as well as ethnographic examinations of the influence process, Quintilian’s analysis is particularly instructive as he addresses these and related aspects of human knowing, acting, and interchange in highly direct, articulate, and detailed ways. Acknowledging the conceptual, methodological, and analytic affinities of The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with symbolic interactionism, an epilogue, Quintilian as an Intellectual Precursor to American Pragmatist Thought and the Interactionist Study of Human Group Life, addresses the relative lack of attention given to classical Greek and Latin scholarship by the American pragmatists and their intellectual progeny, as well as the importance of maintaining a more sustained transcontextual and transhistorical focus on the study of human knowing, acting, and interchange.

The first part of this article discusses the specificity of Kacper Bartczak’s work, determined by the interdependence of his poetic, literary and translation activities. At the same time, the reasons for the lack of interest of critics writing about Bartczak in the issue of autobiography are indicated. The second part of the article, focused on a comparative analysis of two versions of a fragment of the autobiographical essay The Law of the Poem and the poem In Love I Have an Access to My Father’s Body from the book Naworadiowa (2019), shows that Bartczak’s purpose in including autobiographical material in his texts is not to point to the biographical underbelly of his work, but to gain new access to the matter of his own biography, allowing him to develop new techniques or forms of writing.

In 1995, the UN Commission on Global Governance published their "Our Global Neighbourhood" report and the academic journal "Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations" was launched. Both events in retrospect play a significant role in the emergence of global governance thinking and practice in world politics. Despite inherent ambiguities, this idea since then gained massive traction and became both a modality and a heuristic of world politics. Advancing a pragmatist framework, we unpack global governance in terms of the beliefs which underline and guide it. These beliefs are important since they, as rules for action, define the scope of global governance as a theoretical and a political concept. Reconstructing these beliefs directly from the 1995 report, the article highlights the inherent conflations of normative and analytical commitments indicative of global governance. As a projection surface of all kinds, we believe such a reconsideration of global governance is important to (a) reveal the baselines of its thinking and practice, (b) indicate how its normative and analytical ambitions overlap and conflate, and (c) contribute to a more reflective discussion on the idea which explicitly considers its inherent normativity. At the same time, we hope to show the value of a pragmatist framework on beliefs for the study of world politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior‐mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between "minds" and "nature," along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist‐constructivist antirepresentationalism in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and "4E" (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among Rorty's most admired essays, and probably his most autobiographical, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" made its first appearance as a column in Common Knowledge during the journal's inaugural year. Here it is reprinted, thirty years later, in a symposium called "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" He explains in this essay that, as a child, he loved things that would seem to others contradictory, for example the Trotskian socialism to which his family was committed and the wild orchids that he would search for in the local mountains. Finding his own way between what appeared to others contrary kinds of demand or appeal, he never settled, as a philosopher and public intellectual, on syntheses that made good sense to his contemporaries. They were unable to locate him on their intellectual and political maps. As he writes, "If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape.... The left's favorite word for me is 'complacent,' just as the right's is 'irresponsible.' " The editors of Common Knowledge, a venue that Rorty helped to found, have reprinted this essay as a way of stating their view that nothing has "happened to Richard Rorty" in the past three decades that did not happen as well when he was active in his own self‐defense. He was misconstrued but indispensable when alive, and has remained so in the decades since. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers' interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result was to define a pragmatism saturated with nominalism and suppressing the most original qualities of the sources that he celebrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the striking affinities of classical Greek and Latin rhetoric with the pragmatist/interactionist analysis of the situated negotiation of reality and its profound relevance for the analysis of human group life more generally, few contemporary social scientists are aware of the exceptionally astute analyses of persuasive interchange developed by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Having considered the analyses of rhetoric developed by Aristotle (384-322 BCE) and Cicero (106-43 BCE) in interactionist terms (Prus 2007a; 2010), the present paper examines Quintilian’s (35-95 CE) contributions to the study of persuasive interchange more specifically and the nature of human knowing and acting more generally. Focusing on the education and practices of orators (rhetoricians), Quintilian (a practitioner as well as a distinctively thorough instructor of the craft) provides one of the most sustained, most systematic analyses of influence work and resistance to be found in the literature. Following an overview of Quintilian’s “ethnohistorical” account of Roman oratory, this paper concludes by drawing conceptual parallels between Quintilian’s analysis of influence work and the broader, transcontextual features of symbolic interactionist scholarship (Mead 1934; Blumer 1969; Prus 1996; 1997; 1999; Prus and Grills 2003). This includes “generic social processes” such as: acquiring perspectives, attending to identity, being involved, doing activity, engaging in persuasive interchange, developing relationships, experiencing emotionality, attaining linguistic fluency, and participating in collective events. Offering a great many departure points for comparative analysis, as well as ethnographic examinations of the influence process, Quintilian’s analysis is particularly instructive as he addresses these and related aspects of human knowing, acting, and interchange in highly direct, articulate, and detailed ways. Acknowledging the conceptual, methodological, and analytic affinities of The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with symbolic interactionism, an epilogue, Quintilian as an Intellectual Precursor to American Pragmatist Thought and the Interactionist Study of Human Group Life, addresses the relative lack of attention given to classical Greek and Latin scholarship by the American pragmatists and their intellectual progeny, as well as the importance of maintaining a more sustained transcontextual and transhistorical focus on the study of human knowing, acting, and interchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay overcomes the division between "principled" and "strategic" approaches to nonviolence studies by demonstrating that ethical analysis is key to understanding movement strategy. I show how the moral phenomenologies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmanuel Lévinas, figures usually treated by scholars of principled nonviolence, possess genuine insight for nonviolent strategists. With reference to each thinker and supporting evidence from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, I argue that nonviolent resistance makes a moral appeal through the medium of the body to the conscience of those bearing witness. Analysis of the way King combined moral reflection and strategic action recovers his legacy for the pragmatic tradition of social thought, while Lévinas's theory of the face offers additional considerations for nonviolent practitioners aiming for moral transformation at the local level. Studies that elucidate the complex moral dynamics by which nonviolent movements either succeed or fail will make the field a greater asset to practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heterodox economics emerged because of dissatisfaction with the high level of abstraction of neoclassical economics and its excessive reliance on mathematical modelling. Instead of ontological and epistemological references to the natural sciences, heterodox economists turn their attention to the social sciences and biology. The article aims to contribute to the discussion of methodology of heterodox economics and original institutionalism in particular. It explores the potential of content analysis for empirically oriented research in heterodox economics. Content analysis is widely used in the social sciences (sociology, linguistics, political sciences, legal studies) to analyze qualitative data (texts, images, videos) but is relatively unknown to heterodox economists. Content analysis takes several forms: qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods. It is argued that content analysis is not only compatible with the methodology of heterodox economics through critical realism but has a potential to contribute to its further development. With the help of content analysis, heterodox economists would be better equipped to collect and process qualitative data that prevail in social realms. A content analysis of a sample of articles published in Journal of Economic Issues (N = 763) in 1967–1969 and 2010–2019 informs the discussion of applications of content analysis to heterodox economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Autobiografia is the property of University of Szczecin Press / Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecinskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article challenges the theoretical "sectoral model" of civil society through a historical case study and offers an alternative actor-centered approach inspired by American pragmatism. First, three separate strands of research are identified that each conceptualize civil society as a sector with institutional independence, a single normative logic, and fixed roles. Building on archival material on the Danish temperance organization the Blue Cross, the article then compares the theory to the empirical case. It is argued that the CSO exposes three types of "awkwardness" in the sector model, as the Blue Cross (1) de-differentiated and became part of the public system of treatment for alcoholism, (2) applied multiple logics depending on the audience it addressed, and (3) acted in the role of "interpreter" rather than "antenna"—and specifically interpreted the needs of alcoholics in mutual understanding with state authorities. Finally, an alternative approach to the study of CSOs is proposed: a historically sensitive approach that differently from an ahistorical model analyzes collective actors historically, affirmatively, and situationally through their application of contentious and non-contentious repertoires of civic action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects impact commitments in many areas of philosophy―not just metaphysics, but also language, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. In this book, Remhof presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche's material object metaphysics. He argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial constructivist view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading Nietzsche as a constructivist, Remhof contends, provides fresh insight into Nietzsche's views on truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. The book also investigates how Nietzsche's view of objects compares with views offered by influential American pragmatists and explores the implications of Nietzsche's constructivism for debates in contemporary material object metaphysics. Nietzsche's Constructivism is a highly original and timely contribution to the steadily growing literature on Nietzsche's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading the contemporary novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson as participating in the tradition of American pragmatism, as formulated by the nineteenth-century American philosopher William James, brings a coherence to her essays and novels that religious arguments alone do not. As a practicing Christian, Robinson is invested less in trying to convince readers of any particular religious truth than she is in illustrating why there is no basis for eliminating such experiences from discussion of the world's qualities, which to her are inextricably and pragmatically tied to the nature of being human. Robinson is a unique figure in American letters today for her depth of pragmatic understanding and arguments that traverse with equal insight the fields of literature, philosophy, theology, and science, all which speak to her pluralism and political view of democracy as an ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no grand narrative or master plan for historical progress. Contemporary discussions of progress and enlightenment reflect an improved version of an old debate, which has progressed beyond older debates about metaphysical optimism and pessimism. Responding to recent work by John Gray, Steven Pinker, and others, this paper describes meliorism as a middle path between optimism and pessimism. Meliorism is pragmatic, humanistic, secular, and historically grounded. The epistemic modesty of meliorism develops out of understanding the long history of debates about progress and enlightenment, including the history of meliorism itself. The paper provides a historical account of the development of meliorism, while arguing that understanding this history helps us make progress in thinking about progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore knowledge sharing in light of a pragmatist understanding of organizational learning. This takes us beyond knowledge as cognition and into an encompassing understanding of what it means to share knowledge. We draw upon a case study on knowledge sharing amongst management consultants, and transcend the idea that knowledge sharing is a matter of either codification or personalization. We do so through an understanding of learning that begins in the embodied experiences of work, and in which inquiry into uncertainties is the pathway to learning and knowing. This also means that we widen the issue of knowledge sharing beyond participation in practice, because we include an explicit learning aspect on participation. In the concrete case of management consultancy, some of the impeding issues were working alone, tight time schedules and insufficient knowledge sharing systems while some of the facilitating issues included social gatherings, play and working together on projects.

When William James published Pragmatism, he gave it a subtitle: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. In this article, I argue that pragmatism is an epistemological method for articulating success in, and between, a plurality of practices, and that this articulation helped James develop radical empiricism. I contend that this pluralistic philosophical methodology is evident in James's approach to philosophy of religion, and that this method is also exemplified in the work of one of James's most famous students, W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically in the closing chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, "Of the Sorrow Songs." I argue that "Sorrow Songs" can be read as an epistemological text, and that once one identifies the epistemic standards of pragmatism and radical empiricism in the text, it's possible to identify an implicit case for moderate fideism in "Sorrow Songs." I contend that this case illuminates the pluralistic philosophical methodology James worked throughout his career to develop, and that the James-Du Bois approach to philosophy may even help locate the epistemic value of other religious practices, beyond the singing of hymns, and identify terrain mainstream philosophy has long neglected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion of Habits of Mind is rooted in Ellen Winner and colleagues' groundbreaking research on the skills and dispositions taught in visual arts, music, and theater classrooms in the United States. The Habits students are learning in these creative contexts have applications to other domains, such as the sciences and everyday life. The philosophical origins of Habits of Mind are discussed in the context of American pragmatism, critical theory, and aesthetic theory in order to expand our understanding of habits and their relationship to creative-thinking and cognition. In contrast with cultural-norms, students' artistic pursuits may benefit from additional training in expressive imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cognitio - Revista de Filosofia is the property of Cognitio - Revista de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We value possessing knowledge more than true belief. Both someone with knowledge and someone with a true belief possess the correct answer to a question. Why is knowledge more valuable than true belief if both contain the correct answer? I examine the philosophy of American pragmatist John Dewey and then I offer a novel solution to this question often called the value problem of knowledge. I present and explicate (my interpretation of) Dewey’s pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey values competent inquiry and claims it is a knowledge-forming process, and I argue that it is competently conducting inquiry that explains why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. Knowledge is always the result of a process of competent inquiry (itself valuable) whereas belief can but need not be the result of inquiry. I end by considering and replying to reasonable objections to my pragmatic solution.