his alleged status as the wellspring of
American pragmatism.
However, Kirk's assertion that Burke refutes once and for all an
American pragmatism yet to come and his reading of that pragmatism strike me as mistaken.
While
American pragmatism, broadly speaking, emerges and explains itself as a response (whether romantic, scientific, or ironic) to the accumulated failures of a received philosophical and cultural tradition, Frank's pragmatism emerges primarily as a response to personal loss.
American pragmatism was for Holmes the linchpin between fixity and flexibility.
He documents the decline of
American pragmatism first described by David Hollinger in his 1980 paper "The Problem of Pragmatism in American History' and goes on to note its rise and flourishing only sixteen years later, described by James Kloppenberg (1996: 100) as "alive, well.
Undoubtedly, this
American pragmatism is grounded in a Eurocentric understanding of liberal democracy, which exploits the consideration that Western democracies themselves are full of people who can be persuaded to vote in ways quite opposed to their own real long-term interests, if they can be deceived by liberal rhetoric to opt for short-term goals.
Perhaps Americans' decision to immerse themselves in the war by reading blow-by-blow accounts of it was
American pragmatism at work--the nation was stuck in a bad situation and the people preferred to deal with it as it was.
Nevertheless, alongside Glaude's moral philosophical embrace of a qualified form of
American pragmatism in the wake of the 1960s and 1970s, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route offers a rather agnostic approach to diasporic politics and desire.
The chapter on comparative epistemology, for instance, is an occasionally amusing traverse of Germanic idealism, Zen Buddhism, and
American pragmatism that bridges huge gulfs without being entirely clear, at least for this reader, how "justified belief" translates into moral or ethical imperatives.
Bruno Bosteels continues the examination of philosophy in Borges, focusing on the writer's links to
American pragmatism, especially the writings of William James.
Louis Menand, the author of "The Metaphysical Club," a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that explores
American pragmatism, will speak at 8 p.
His finesse is usefully contrasted with Richard Rorty's ham-fisted attempts to replace mainstream analytic philosophy with a watered-down version of
American pragmatism.
