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Pragmatism

William James began his lectures on Pragmatism (1907) with the philosophers themselves: “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments” (Lecture I). He gave philosophy a test and a task: “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one”. The method follows: “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable”, and it is “THE ATTITUDE OF LOOKING AWAY FROM FIRST THINGS, PRINCIPLES, ‘CATEGORIES,’ SUPPOSED NECESSITIES; AND OF LOOKING TOWARDS LAST THINGS, FRUITS, CONSEQUENCES, FACTS” (Lecture II, capitals his).

Dewey, quoting Peirce, wanted “the ‘laboratory habit of mind’ extended into every area where inquiry may fruitfully be carried on” (as the IEP quotes Dewey). He read philosophy’s history as social. Philosophy “has sprung from a clash of social ends”, and so “the task of future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920, ch. I). The old ambition is to be given up for a better one: “Philosophy which surrenders its somewhat barren monopoly of dealings with Ultimate and Absolute Reality will find a compensation in enlightening the moral forces which move mankind.” Three years earlier he had put it in a sentence: “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”, 1917).

Richard Rorty rejected the picture of philosophy as “a tribunal of pure reason, upholding or denying the claims of the rest of culture” (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979) and took up Wilfrid Sellars’s definition, “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together”. The philosopher is not “a ‘cultural overseer’” but “an ‘informed dilettante’ and a ‘Socratic intermediary’”; the aim is “edification”, “finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking”; and the method a back-and-forth: “we play back and forth between guesses about how to characterize particular statements … and guesses about the point of the whole situation, until gradually we feel at ease with what was hitherto strange”. In politics he spoke of “putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit” (all as the IEP quotes him). Dewey’s and Rorty’s views of whether philosophy’s task could be finished are on A finite task?.