Pragmatic Perspectives In Phenomenology

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction: Localizing the Pragmatic Turn in Phenomenology -- PART I Contemporary Pragmatic Readings of Phenomenology -- 1 On Layer Cakes: Heidegger's Normative Pragmatism Revisited -- 2 Heidegger's Pragmatist Readers -- 3 Primordiality and the Pragmata: A Critical Assessment of Rorty's Challenge to Heideggerian Nostalgia -- 4 Two Forms of Practical Knowledge in Being and Time -- 5 Discursive Intentionality as Embodied Coping: A Pragmatist Critique of Existential Phenomenology -- PART II Pragmatic Readings Challenged by the History of Phenomenology -- 6 The Limits of Dreyfus' View of Husserl: Intentionality, Openness and Praxis -- 7 On Dreyfus' Naturalization of Phenomenological Pragmatism: Misleading Dichotomies, and the Counter-Concept of Intentionality -- 8 Perceptual Faith beyond Practical Involvement: Merleau-Ponty and His Pragmatist Readers -- 9 Max Scheler and Pragmatism -- 10 From Circumspection to Insight -- PART III Opening Up Perspectives -- 11 Freedom and the Theoretical Attitude -- 12 The Primacy of Practice and the Pervasiveness of Discourse -- 13 Making Sense of Human Existence: Heidegger on the Limits of Practical Familiarity -- 14 Exemplary Necessity: Heidegger, Pragmatism and Reason -- Contributors -- Index

In the philosophic world today, pragmatism and phenomenology can be found standing at a crossroad. Though each has arrived there via divergent paths and for very different reasons, the direction that each takes in the future may be significantly influenced by the suggestions the other has to offer. The intention of this book is to parallel the two positions in such a way that basic points of convergence and divergence are noted and accounted for in terms of their systematic significance. Each position is presented in such a manner that philosophers engrossed in one movement can enter into the other in a way which allows a real encounter to develop.

The themes chosen for study in this volume are deeply embedded within the respective structures of phenomenology and pragmatism, though often implicitly so. Each of the six chapters begins with the phenomenological perspective and then proceeds to the pragmatic focus. The intent of each chapter is both to provide increased clarity in understanding each of the two positions and to reveal the basic philosophic rapport between them. Such a recognized rapport in turn adds to the insightful understanding of each position, at times opening up new possibilities for the expansion or deepening of a particular position. For, once the fundamental rapport is uncovered, the two different approaches can be found to cast mutually revealing lights on seemingly diverse, but ultimately unifying, interests. The phenomenological philosophy of this study thematically focuses primarily on the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. The pragmatic framework incorporates the philosophies of the five major classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, G.H. Mead, and C.I. Lewis.

Bringing to light new facets in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and William James, Megan Craig explores intersections between French phenomenology and American pragmatism. Craig demonstrates the radical empiricism of Levinas's philosophy and the ethical implications of James's pluralism while illuminating their relevance for two philosophical disciplines that have often held each other at arm's length. Revealing the pragmatic minimalism in Levinas's work and the centrality of imagery in James's prose, she suggests that aesthetic links are crucial to understanding what they share. Craig's suggestive readings change current perceptions and clear a path for a more open, pluralistic, and creative pragmatic phenomenology that takes cues from both philosophers.

The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this 10th volume focuses on the interface between pragmatics and philosophy and reviews the philosophical background from which pragmatics has taken inspiration and with which it is constantly confronted. It provides the reader with information about authors relevant to the development of pragmatics, trends or areas in philosophy that are relevant for the definition of the main concepts in pragmatics or the characterization of its cultural context, the neighbouring field of semantics (with particular respect to truth-conditional semantics and some main branches of formal semantics), and recent philosophical debates that involve pragmatic notions such as indexicality and context. While most of the references are to the analytic philosophical field, also perspectives in so-called continental philosophy are taken into account. The introductory chapter outlines some unifying routes of reflection as regards meaning, speech as action, and self and mind, and suggests some connections between doing pragmatics and doing philosophy.

This book searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience. The spirit of this book is "pragmatic" and relies on a Husserlian phenomenology primarily understood as a "method" of exploring our experience. The authors do not aim at a neo-Kantian "a priori" new theory of experience but instead they describe a concrete activity: how we examine what we live through, how we "become aware" of our own mental life. The range of experiences of which we can become aware is vast: all the normal dimensions of human life (perception, motion, memory, imagination, speech, everyday social interactions), cognitive events that can be precisely defined as tasks in laboratory experiments (e.g., a protocol for visual attention), but also manifestations of mental life more fraught with meaning (dreaming, intense emotions, social tensions, altered states of consciousness). The central assertion in this work is that this immanent ability is habitually ignored or at best practiced unsystematically, that is to say, blindly. Exploring human experience amounts to developing and cultivating this basic ability through specific training. Only a hands-on, non-dogmatic approach can lead to progress, and that is what animates this book. (Series B)

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The history of 20th-century philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both of these schools, as well as their overt or covert mutual hostility. What is often left out of this history, however, is the relationship between the two European schools and a third significant philosophical event: the birth and development of pragmatism, the indigenous philosophical movement of the United States. Through a careful analysis of seminal figures and central texts, this book explores the mutual intellectual influences, convergences, and differences between these three revolutionary philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume aim to show the central role that pragmatism played in the development of philosophical thought at the turn of the twentieth century, widen our understanding of a seminal point in the history of philosophy, and shed light on the ways in which these three schools of thought continue to shape the theoretical agenda of contemporary philosophy.

In Cognition and Work, Max Scheler offers an early critique of American pragmatism and demonstrates the dynamic relation that not only the human being but all living beings have to the environment they inhabit.