Metaphilosophy, Neutrality, and the Public Use of Reason: A Critical Notice of Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse, Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy

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Notes

1. Many though not all neoclassical pragmatists fly under the banner of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. A & T treat this group of scholars as united by a single doctrine. While in this review I, for the sake of argument, follow them in this, this view is far too monolithic, overlooking considerable interpretive and philosophical disagreements within the camp of neoclassical pragmatists.

2. For example, the denial of tenure to Richard Bernstein at Yale was clearly a product of academic politics so understood.

3. Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach says: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’

4. Dewey and his Critics, ed. S. Morgenbesser (NY: Journal of Philosophy, 1977).

5. It is worth pointing out that for James temperaments are not given, culturally independent factors of our psychology, for they themselves depend on prior historical developments. The tough-minded need for facts, for example, is one that depends on modern science having become second natural for modern persons, with our coming to be ‘almost born scientific’.

6. See D. Rondel, Pragmatist Egalitarianism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and R. Westbrook, ‘Replies to Symposium Participants,’ Contemporary Pragmatism 4: 2, 2007, 29–34.

7. I realize that the transcendentalism at play in the Kantian constructivism internal to Rawls’ political liberalism is different than the one at play in the original position, much less in Kant’s own view. Nevertheless, it is still a kind of transcendental position, one concerned with the conditions by which a basic structure can so much as count as just, liberal, or democratic.

8. Many pragmatists, for instance Rondel, argue that Deweyian pragmatism is consistent with Rawlsianism insofar as both think the right is prior to the good and that ‘procedures for deciding how to proceed enjoy a certain theoretical priority over reflection about the substantive ends to be pursued’ (Rondel, Pragmatist Egalitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 18). This passage is correct in that Dewey did not think that it within the power of moral or political philosophy to give a self-standing account of the proper ends of human life. But it is misleading in that Dewey thought that the right and the good were co-equal concepts, both necessary for moral problems-solving, and that we could give an account of the good, but one articulated in terms of growth, not in specific substantive ends. It is also misleading because it suggests that for Dewey procedures for deciding how to go on are insulated from the substantive results that are produced from our so going on, results that involve a better understanding of what we are doing in going on and what we are shooting for.

9. References to Dewey are to The Collected Works of John Dewey 1182–1953 (Middle Works and Late Works). The Middle Works are abbreviated MW and the Late Works LW.

10. Dewey is thinking of the development of the bureaucratic state, the corporation, the worldwide market, and integrated media systems. For Dewey, normative theorizing and social-historical diagnosis are inextricably bound together. This is one way he is a ‘non-ideal theorist’, even given the important place of ideals in his thought.

11. It is important to point out here that due to his thesis of the reciprocity of means and ends, Dewey rules out non-democratic means to achieve such ends. ‘The fundamental principle of democracy is that the ends of freedom and individuality for all can be attained by means that accord with those ends’ (LW 11, 298). The only means that accord with these ends are means that themselves respect the free growth and individuality of subjects, and these means can only be democratic. The restructuring of social institutions to foster individual freedom must then be the result of well-formed democratic deliberation. This is not an idiosyncratic thesis that stands to the side of Dewey’s thought; rather it sits at the center of his experimentalism and his critique of the communist left in the thirties. In accusing Dewey’s view of democracy of being oppressive, A & T blow past this point. I am unclear how they do so.