Practice Judgment And The Challenge Of Moral And Political Disagreement

Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement: A Pragmatist Account offers an account of moral and political disagreement, explaining its nature and showing how we should deal with it. In so doing it strikes a middle path between troublesome dualisms such as those of realism and relativism, rationality and imagination, power and justification. To do so, the book draws on the resources of the pragmatist tradition, claiming that this tradition offers solutions that have for the most part been neglected by the contemporary debate. To prove this claim, the book provides a large account of debates within this tradition and engages its best solutions with contemporary philosophical theories such as perfectionism, critical theory, moral realism, and liberalism. The question of the nature of disagreement is addressed both at the general theoretical level and more specifically with reference to moral and political forms of disagreement. At the more general level, the book proposes a theory of practical rationality based upon the notion of rationality as inquiry. At the second, more specific, level, it aims to show that this conception can solve timely problems that relates to the nature of moral and political reasoning.

How can we justify democracy’s trust in the political judgments of ordinary people? In Knowing Democracy, Michael Räber situates this question between two dominant alternative paradigms of thinking about the reflective qualities of democratic life: on the one hand, recent epistemic theories of democracy, which are based on the assumption that political participation promotes truth, and, on the other hand, theories of political judgment that are indebted to Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic conception of political judgment. By foregrounding the concept of political judgment in democracies, the book shows that a democratic theory of political judgments based on John Dewey’s pragmatism can navigate the shortcomings of both these paradigms. While epistemic theories are overly and narrowly rationalistic and Arendtian theories are overly aesthetic, the neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment proposed in this book suggests a third path that combines the rationalist and the aesthetic elements of political conduct in a way that goes beyond a merely epistemic or a merely aesthetic conception of political judgment in democracy. The justification for democracy’s trust in ordinary people’s political judgments, Räber argues, resides in an egalitarian conception of democratic inquiry that blends the epistemic and the aesthetic aspects of the making of political judgments. By offering a rigorous scholarly analysis of the epistemic and aesthetic foundations of democracy from a pragmatist perspective, Knowing Democracy contributes to the current debates in political epistemology and aesthetics and politics, both of which ask about the appropriate reflective and experiential circumstances of democratic politics. The book brings together for the first time debates on epistemic democracy, aesthetic judgment and those on pragmatist social epistemology, and establishes an original pragmatist conception of epistemic democracy.

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 10.0px Arial} Crisis management has become one of the core challenges facing governments, but successful crisis response depends on effective public leadership. Building on insights from Pragmatist philosophy, this deeply nuanced book provides guidance and direction for public leaders tackling the most challenging tasks of the 21st century.

The aim of this book is to provide a fresh, wider, and more compelling account of democracy than the one we usually find in conventional contemporary political theory. Telling the story of democracy as a broad societal project rather than as merely a political regime, Frega delivers an account more in tune with our everyday experience and ordinary intuitions, bringing back into political theory the notion that democracy denotes first and foremost a form of society, and only secondarily a specific political regime. The theoretical shift accomplished is major. Claiming that such a view of democracy is capable of replacing the mainstream categories of justice, freedom and non-domination in their hegemonic function of all-encompassing political concepts, Frega then argues for democracy as the broader normative framework within which to rethink the meaning and forms of associated living in all spheres of personal, social, economic, and political life. Drawing on diverse traditions of American pragmatism and critical theory, as well as tackling political issues which are at the core of contemporary theoretical debates, this book invites a rethinking of political theory to one more concerned with the political circumstances of social life, rather than remaining confined in the narrowly circumscribed space of a theory of government.

In the context of increasing division and segregation in cities across the world, along with pressing concerns around austerity, environmental degradation, homelessness, violence, and refugees, this book pursues a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice in the city. Spatial justice has been central to urban theorists in various ways. Intimately connected to social justice, it is a term implicated in relations of power which concern the spatial distribution of resources, rights and materials. Arguably there can be no notion of social justice that is not spatial. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has argued that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. As such, urban planning and policy interventions are always, to some extent at least, about spatial justice. And, as cities become ever more unequal, it is crucial that urbanists address questions of spatial justice in the city. To this end, this book considers these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Crossing law, sociology, history, cultural studies, and geography, the book’s overarching concern with how to think spatial justice in the city brings a fresh perspective to issues that have concerned urbanists for several decades. The inclusion of empirical work in London brings the political, social, and cultural aspects of spatial justice to life. The book will be of interest to academics and students in the field of urban studies, sociology, geography, planning, space law, and cultural studies.

This monograph presents a unitary account of Dewey’s philosophy of science and demonstrates the relevance for contemporary debates. The book is written from a theoretical angle and explains Dewey's via on Experience, Language, Inquiry, Construction and Realism. Via taking this route the book addresses key philosophical problems - such as the nature of language, the idea of experience, the notion of logical constructivism, the criticism of representationalism and the nature of scientific practices. John Dewey (1859-1952) is one of the most representative philosophers of the United States. He is well known for his work in education, psychology and social reform and one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism. His Philosophy of Science underwent a period of almost total unpopularity and neglect. In recent times, however, as a consequence of the strong pragmatist renaissance we are now witnessing, Dewey’s philosophy of science has attracted new attention. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of Dewey's philosophy of science and will be of interest to scholars working in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy of science and on the relationship between Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism.

This book delineates a pluralist and dynamic model of practical action which thoughtfully takes into account the reflexive conception of agency that is, by and large, prevailing in current social sciences research. Such a model will challenge the one the cognitive sciences have rather successfully imposed on our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and action. To make this model available, the book compares Wittgenstein’s theses on knowing, the pragmatist outlook on inquiry and the analysis of action in common offered by interactionist sociology. It thus shows how an integrated theory of practical action would warrant a radically contextual conception of human individual and collective behaviour.

Japanese youth, like everywhere else, are trying to build their future despite the crises that are shaking their world, the latest being the triple disaster of Fukushima. Often considered to be more focused on a personal or even hedonistic life, they surprised the media when a student movement took the floor to criticize the Abe government's security and Self-Defense Forces bills in 2015. The so-called SEALDs movement (Student Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy) was formed some time after the Indigenous or Occupy Wall Street movements, but it shares similar concerns. Understanding the SEALDs' experience from the perspective of John Dewey's philosophy allows us to highlight once again the dangers that digital technology poses to individuals, the collective and their values.