1. Jehlen, American Incarnation, 2.
2. Paul Stob and Robert Danisch also attend to the populist nature of James’s style of speaking and writing; see Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement; and Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy.
3. Peters, Speaking into the Air, 266.
4. See, for example, Ferdinand Schiller’s observation that “the academic pedant always thinks in his heart, and occasionally all but says, ‘What I can understand, I despise.’ Now he frequently found Dewey hard to understand, and respected him accordingly; whereas James was such easy reading that the typical professional never attended properly to what he said, and invariably misunderstood him.” Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” 102. For James’s use of the term “cash value,” see PM, 32, 97.
5. See Plato, Gorgias, 25. See also Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, 19 (I. ii. 7–8).
6. Shapiro, “A Matter of Discipline,” 159, 160.
7. Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 1.
8. For a general discussion of the gendered nature of foundational Western philosophical concepts such as reason, although problematic in some of its particulars, see Lloyd, The Man of Reason.
9. Kaag, Review of Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism.
10. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 64.
11. Connolly, Pluralism; Gandhi, Affective Communities; Baker, William James, Sciences of Mind; Kautzer and Mendieta, Pragmatism, Nation, and Race.
12. Kautzer and Mendieta, Pragmatism, Nation, and Race.
13. PM, 32.
1. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism” (1980), 107.
2. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History” (1995), in Hollinger and Depew, Pragmatism, 31.
3. Bernstein, Praxis and Action, 168. Bernstein, along with fellow philosophers John McDermott and John E. Smith, are among those Cornel West terms “lonely laborers in the vineyard who continued to keep alive the pragmatist tradition during the age of logical positivism,” presaging Rorty’s later efforts (West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 194). See Bernstein, John Dewey, Philosophical Profiles, and Praxis and Action; McDermott, Culture of Experience and Streams of Experience; Smith, Spirit of American Philosophy and America’s Philosophical Vision.
4. See, for example, in philosophy, Margolis, Pragmatism’s Advantage; Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism; H. Putnam, Pragmatism; and West, American Evasion of Philosophy. In legal theory, see Brint and Weaver, Pragmatism in Law and Society; and Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy. In literary theory and criticism, see J. Richardson, Pragmatism and American Experience; Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism; Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police; Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally; and Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain and Beyond Solidarity. In theology and religious studies, see Anderson, Pragmatic Theology; Dean, American Religious Empiricism; Davaney, Pragmatic Historicism; Frankenberry, Religion and Radical Empiricism; and Stout, Democracy and Tradition. In social theory, see Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory; and Fraser, Unruly Practices, esp. chap. 5. In history, see Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Menand, The Metaphysical Club; and Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism. In communications theory and rhetoric, see Carey, Communication as Culture; Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy; and Mailloux, Rhetoric, Sophistry. In feminist theory and theology, see Fraser, Unruly Practices; Nelson, “Breaking the Dynamic of Control”; Chopp, “Feminism’s Theological Pragmatics” and “Feminist Queries and Metaphysical Musings”; Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism; Sullivan, Living across and through Skins; and McKenna, The Task of Utopia. See also the special issues on “Feminism and Pragmatism” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 27, no. 4 (Fall 1991); Hypatia 8, no. 2 (Spring 1993); and Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15, no. 2 (2001).
5. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama. See also Cormier’s review of the book in “Reconsidering Obama the Pragmatist.”
6. Dickstein, “Introduction,” in Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism, 2. As Dickstein points out, references to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton as “the ultimate pragmatists” capture well both the positive and negative sides of the popular understanding of pragmatism: “This may mean that they got something done, or that their behavior, for better or worse, differed from their rhetoric, or that they were cunning and pliable men with few consistent values or ideals” (ibid.).
7. For an influential application of pragmatism in the sense of “practical” or “strategic,” see James and Busia, Theorizing Black Feminisms. The editors state that several guiding principles unify the essays in this collection: the importance of accessible scholarship, the inseparability of theory and practice, and the premise that “black women are not simply victims of various oppressions. They are also . . . visionary and pragmatic agents of change” (i). Following James and Busia, Patricia Hill Collins employs the notion of “visionary pragmatism” as a conceptual framework for the praxis of black feminist thought and the construction of a critical social theory. Visionary pragmatism is taken from the everyday experience of black women and involves a “fusion of visionary ideas about freedom” and “pragmatic actions taken in search of freedom” (Collins, Fighting Words, 188, 240). For another application of visionary pragmatism in the context of black women’s experiences, see Willett, The Soul of Justice. Feminist theologian Serene Jones, discussed in chapter 4, similarly employs a notion of “pragmatic” as “strategic” in her discussion of the essentialism debate in feminist theory.
8. Charlene Haddock Seigfried notes this frequent (mis)understanding of pragmatism in Pragmatism and Feminism, 277n4.
9. Ibid.; see also 5–6.
10. Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 4–11.
11. Smith, Spirit of American Philosophy, 188; emphasis in original.
12. Smith, America’s Philosophical Vision, 2.
13. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History” (1995), 19.
14. Ibid.
15. For example, Menand argues for an understanding of pragmatism as emerging from a devastated, fractured American national culture in the wake of the Civil War, generating a widely shared sense that “ideas should never become ideologies.” Menand, The Metaphysical Club, xii.
16. See, for example, James Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” which is critical of certain contemporary forms of neopragmatism for abandoning the commitments to democracy and progressive politics evidenced in James, Dewey, and Mead. More recently Kloppenberg has shifted his focus to the “consequences of pragmatism for American thought,” specifically the influence of James’s pragmatism on U.S. history. Kloppenberg, “James’s Pragmatism and American Culture,” 8.
17. Cornel West’s The American Evasion of Philosophy is one example.
18. Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism, 15.
19. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 106. Fraser calls zero-degree pragmatism a “useful, though hardly all-sufficing, ingredient of socialist feminism” (ibid.). It is also, as we see in chapter 5, a version of pragmatism that Fraser employs as a mediating position between differing feminist theories.
20. As, for example, in Stanley Fish’s claim that “if pragmatism is true it has nothing to say to us; no politics follows from it or is blocked by it; no morality attaches to it or is enjoined by it.” Fish, “Afterword: Truth and Toilets,” 419. The phrase “nothing more than antifoundationalism” is Kloppenberg’s, who is critical of such forms of neopragmatism as manifest in the writings of Fish, Rorty, and Richard Posner. While quite different in important respects, they appear to share (at times) a view of pragmatism as bottom-line antifoundationalism. In Kloppenberg’s view, this amounts to a reductive reading of the complexity of the tradition and a conflation of pragmatism with certain strains of postmodernism. See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” 43.
21. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 5. See also Consequences of Pragmatism, 51, for the same claim.
22. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty describes his project in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as offering an account of analytic philosophy in terms of its “gradual ‘pragmaticization’” (xviii).
23. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xviii.
24. Ibid., xvii.
25. For a small sampling of these critiques, see H. Putnam, Words and Life, chaps. 14, 15; Stout, Ethics after Babel, 230; West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 194–210; Stout, Democracy and Tradition; and Misak, New Pragmatists.
26. These are just a few examples of anthologies composed of critical appraisals of Rortian pragmatism: Hardwick and Crosby, Pragmatism, Neo-pragmatism, and Religion; Brandom, Rorty and His Critics; Pettegrew, A Pragmatist’s Progress?; Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism; Hollinger and Depew, Pragmatism; and Festenstein and Thompson, Richard Rorty.
27. West, Keeping Faith, 137.
28. Ibid., 137–138.
29. Ibid., 138.
30. Rescher, Realistic Pragmatism, 238–240.
31. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 4.
32. Gunn, Beyond Solidarity, xiii.
33. I highlight Gunn here only because he explicitly frames pragmatism as a mediating methodology. For invaluable contributions to thinking about race and African American political thought in relation to the pragmatist tradition, see West’s discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois as “Jamesian Organic Intellectual” in American Evasion of Philosophy, 138–150; and Fraser, “Another Pragmatism,” 157–175. Glaude develops both a critical reconstruction of the classical pragmatist tradition around the issue of race and a pragmatist critique of contemporary African American politics in his In a Shade of Blue.
34. Fraser, “False Antitheses,” 59–74, and “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,” 157–171. I discuss Fraser’s understanding of neopragmatism in more detail in chapter 5.
35. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism” (1980), 106.
36. Ibid., 104, 105, 106; emphasis in original.
37. Hollinger, “The Problem of Pragmatism in American History” (1995), 32.
38. Ibid., 32–33.
39. Pettegrew, “Introduction,” in Pettegrew, A Pragmatist’s Progress?, 1.
40. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” 40; for Rorty’s response, see “Afterword: Intellectual Historians and Pragmatist Philosophy,” in Pettegrew, A Pragmatist’s Progress?, 207–211.
41. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” 44–45.
42. See West, American Evasion of Philosophy; H. Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, chap. 9; Stout, Democracy and Tradition; Chopp, “A Feminist Perspective”; Bernstein, The New Constellation, chaps. 8, 9; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy.
43. Kuklick, “Histories of Pragmatism,” 138–139, quoting from Pettegrew, A Pragmatist’s Progress?, 6.
44. Ibid., 139, 136. But compare Kloppenberg’s careful elaboration of a pragmatic hermeneutical approach to history in The Virtues of Liberalism, chap. 9.
45. Kuklick, “Histories of Pragmatism,” 136.
46. Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 44–45.
47. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 5.
48. Chopp, “A Feminist Perspective,” 125. However, Chopp, like Schüssler Fiorenza, is critical of West’s uncritical appropriation of the Christian notion of “the prophetic.” Chopp states that West lacks a “theological reconstruction” of “the prophetic” and of the pragmatist tradition, thus in her view coming close to a kind of neo-orthodoxy (117n14).
49. For attempts to situate pragmatism in the context of Progressive-era cultural changes, see, for example, Menand, Metaphysical Club, which provides a cultural history of pragmatism as emerging out of the watershed event of the U.S. Civil War; and Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, which discusses pragmatism alongside the rise of industrial capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century.
50. See Isaac, “Is the Revival of Pragmatism Practical?,” 156–157. See also Crunden, Ministers of Reform. For the Congregationalist and Pietist lineages of pragmatism, see Kuklick, Churchmen and Philosophers.
51. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 439.
52. Mailloux, “Introduction,” 1–32.
53. Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy.
54. Stob, William James and the Art of Popular Statement, 193.
55. West, Keeping Faith, 135–141; Chopp, “A Feminist Perspective,” 116.
56. Chopp, “A Feminist Perspective,” 121.
1. Stuhr, Genealogical Pragmatism, ix.
2. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 61.
3. James to George Holmes Howison, 24 July 1898, CWJ, 8:398.
4. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 55.
5. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” reprinted in Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (hereafter CP). James said, incorrectly as it turned out, that the term “pragmatism” was introduced in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (PM, 28–29). Both papers, although they nowhere mention the term, are widely considered to be textual foundations of the American pragmatist tradition. According to Peirce in an unpublished ca. 1906 manuscript, they were prepared and read by him for a meeting of the Metaphysical Club in the 1870s (see CP, 5:13, and discussion in the next section).
6. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” CP, 5:402.
7. This, of course, is to put the matter in its most general terms. I discuss differences between James and Peirce at somewhat greater length later, but space prohibits a thorough treatment of the topic. For more detailed discussions see, for example, Hookway, “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes”; H. S. Thayer’s introduction to the Works edition of Pragmatism, xxii–xxvii; Bernstein, Praxis and Action, part III.
8. John J. McDermott, commenting on a later, slightly revised version of this essay, criticizes James’s broad-stroke descriptions of British empiricism and Kantian idealism for their “precipitous and rather startling generalizations” but concedes that “James’s fundamental point is well taken. The empiricist tradition, in fact, does lean to some version of the pragmatic maxim.” McDermott, “Introduction,” xxvii.
9. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 297, citing James to Howison, 24 July 1898.
10. In fact, as Perry states, the address did not attract much attention until after it was republished in 1904, with slight changes, as “The Pragmatic Method” in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 274). The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods was at that time the primary venue for debates about pragmatism. “The Pragmatic Method” is reprinted in EP, 123–139.
11. James to Théodore Flournoy, 2 January 1907, CWJ, 11:299.
12. James to Henry James, 4 May 1907, CWJ, 3:339.
13. Thayer, “Introduction,” PM, xx.
14. James to William James Jr., 24 April 1907, CWJ, 11:350.
15. Thayer notes that “the great controversy” over truth had been “raging” in journals since 1903, with contributions by many of the most important philosophers of the day. See Thayer, “Introduction,” PM, xxviii.
16. Again I am sketching out a very complicated matter in the barest of terms here. For differing interpretations of James’s understanding of truth, see, for example, H. Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 166–185; Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, 48–57, 205–223.
17. James’s radical empiricism is generally understood to be primarily articulated in the posthumously collected volume Essays in Radical Empiricism. For the argument for an earlier dating of radical empiricism, which finds its fullest expression in the “pluralistic panpsychism” of A Pluralistic Universe, see Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience.
18. Thayer, “Introduction,” MT, xiii.
19. James to Théodore Flournoy, 2 January 1907, CWJ, 11:299.
20. Lamberth disagrees, concluding that James’s pragmatism follows from his radical empiricism, rather than the other way around, and indeed is best understood in this way: “The position of pragmatism is a series of related conceptions or explanations that are contingent on but otherwise not fully specified in James’s radically empiricist position.” Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, 207.
21. As Lamberth points out, the term “pragmatism” is used only once, quite hesitantly, in A Pluralistic Universe (111); see Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, 208n13.
22. For example, Thayer notes that the essay “Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878) “very clearly contains one of the central themes of Pragmatism, namely, the doctrine that mental activity, our ‘conceiving or theorizing faculty,’ is largely prompted by emotional and practical factors.” Likewise, James’s 1885 essay “On the Function of Cognition,” which he later described as “the fons et origo of all my pragmatism (in its second sense as ‘theory of truth’)” and which was republished as the first chapter of The Meaning of Truth, foreshadows his treatment of truth in Pragmatism as a function of “pointing” or “leading.” See Thayer, “Introduction,” PM, xii, xiv–xv; Thayer, “Introduction,” MT, xxi. James’s quote is found in James to Charles A. Strong, 17 September 1907, CWJ, 11:448.
23. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 347.
24. F. C. S. Schiller, “The Making of Pragmatism,” in Schiller, Must Philosophers Disagree?, 103. Not coincidentally, “humanism” was Schiller’s own preferred appellation, and he had tried to persuade James to adopt it. As James’s letters show clearly, however, he deliberately chose to retain “pragmatism” despite his awareness of its difficulties. In a letter to Schiller he wrote, “‘Humanism’ doesn’t make a very electrical connexion with my nature.” James to F. C. S. Schiller, 5 July 1903, CWJ, 10:280.
25. Schiller, “The Making of Pragmatism,” 103.
26. James to Charles S. Peirce, 3 January 1894, CWJ, 7:482–483.
27. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 281.
28. Peirce to James, 10 November 1900, CWJ, 9:355. See also CP, 8:253.
29. James to Peirce, 26 November 1900, CWJ, 9:369. See also James to Peirce, 3 February 1899, where James asked, “Did you, by the way, ever get a couple of copies of a lecture of mine in California, wherein I flourished the flag of your principle of Pragmatism?” (8:493; apparently unanswered).
30. Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 86. For more on Peirce and the origins of pragmatism, see 82–89, 273–274.
31. Peirce to Christine Ladd-Franklin, 1905, reprinted in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 13 (1916): 718, quoted in Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 281. Ladd-Franklin was a doctoral student of Peirce’s at Johns Hopkins and, along with some of his other students, had contributed to the cutting-edge symbolic logic anthology Studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins University, published in 1883. Though she had completed all of the requirements for the Ph.D. by 1883, she did not receive her degree for another fifteen years because she was a woman. Ladd-Franklin also is acknowledged to have authored, at Peirce’s request, more than half of the two hundred definitions in the logic section of the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology that were credited to Peirce. See Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 128, 274–275.
32. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” CP, 5:394, 402, 401, 400.
33. As Peirce put it in an unpublished manuscript, James’s pragmatism “differs from mine only in that he does not restrict the ‘meaning,’ that is, the ultimate logical interpretant, as I do, to a habit, but allows percepts, that is, complex feelings endowed with compulsiveness, to be such.” CP, 5:494. See also the first of Peirce’s 1903 Harvard lectures, in which he comments that one of the criticisms made of him by the “new pragmatists” is that he makes “pragmatism to be a mere maxim of logic instead of a sublime principle of speculative philosophy.” “Lectures on Pragmatism,” I, CP, 5:18.
34. Hookway, “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes,” 148. Similarly, Perry points out that for James, “the significance of a conception lies in its leading into the field of particulars and adapting the agent to the exigencies that arise therein.” He further links this to a difference in “ethical ideal” between Peirce and James: “For Peirce the good lies in coherence, order, coalescence, unity; for James in the individuality, variety, and satisfaction of concrete interests.” Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 282.
35. Hookway, “Logical Principles and Philosophical Attitudes,” 152.
36. Ibid., 159.
37. Peirce, unpublished manuscript, CP, 5:467.
38. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” CP, 5:403. Peirce later revised his understanding of “hardness” to include objective as well as subjective possibility in the 1905 article “Issues of Pragmaticism,” CP, 5:453–457.
39. Kuklick, History of Philosophy in America, 156.
40. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” CP, 5:397, 400.
41. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” “Issues of Pragmaticism,” and “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” in CP, 5:411–437, 438–463, 4:530–572.
42. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” CP, 5:411, 412; emphasis in original.
43. Ibid., 412.
44. Ibid., 414.
45. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 281. Perry famously concludes this passage with the comment, “Perhaps it would be correct, and just to all parties, to say that the modern movement known as pragmatism is largely the result of James’s misunderstanding of Peirce.” However, as many James scholars have pointed out, this remark is actually quite unjust to James, who had begun sketching out ideas contained in Pragmatism as early as 1878.
46. Peirce, “Pragmatism,” CP, 5:11–12.
47. Ibid., 12–13. James was already familiar with Bain, founder of the New Psychology in Britain, and had discussed his work in Principles of Psychology.
48. Ibid., 13.
49. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” CP, 5:414n1; see also ibid., 13. For the text of the Baldwin’s Dictionary entries, see ibid., 1–4.
50. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, 24.
51. For more on Peirce’s recollections of the Metaphysical Club and its importance for establishing the origins of pragmatism, see Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 82–89, 273–274. For an excellent study of some of the members of the Metaphysical Club and their ideas in the context of nineteenth-century American history and culture, see Menand, The Metaphysical Club.
52. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 280n3.
53. Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce, 85–86.
54. For Dewey’s account of James’s influence on his thought, see “The Development of American Pragmatism,” John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953 (hereafter LW), 2:15–17; “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” ibid., 5:157–160; see also Dewey’s letter to James, where explaining his request to dedicate the volume Studies in Logical Theory to James, he writes, “So far as I am concerned your Psychology is the spiritual progenitor of the whole industry.” Dewey to James, 20 March 1903, CWJ, 10:215. Though Peirce was a lecturer in logic at Johns Hopkins at the same time Dewey was a student there, Dewey did not come to appreciate Peirce’s thought until later in his career. See Bernstein’s helpful comparison of the thought of Peirce and Dewey in Praxis and Action, 165–229.
55. Hickman and Alexander, “Introduction,” 1:ix. On the decline of pragmatism in the United States, see, for example, West, American Evasion of Philosophy, chap. 5.
56. For a more in-depth treatment of Dewey’s relationship to pragmatism as developed by Peirce and James, see Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, chap. 5. As Westbrook notes, the development of pragmatism took place in the context of a “complex, three-sided debate between proponents of idealism, realism, and pragmatism” over the “right of succession to leadership of American philosophy.” Because Dewey’s attempt to integrate philosophy and politics “went against the grain of the development of American philosophy in those years” of the increasing professionalization of the discipline, his “ascendancy as an important voice in the culture as a whole was matched by the steady decline of his reputation among academic philosophers” (120–121). For an account of the professionalization of philosophy and the centrality of Harvard’s philosophy department in the debate among pragmatists, realists, and idealists, see Kuklick, Rise of American Philosophy.
57. Dewey also mentions the Principles chapter “The Nature of Necessary Truths and the Effects of Experience.” He comments on its discussion of the development of the modes of perception and conception as embodying “the whole of pragmatism in embryo” in its conclusion that it is “not the origin of a concept, it is its application which becomes the criterion of its value.” LW, 2:16.
58. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 137.
59. Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899–1924 (hereafter MW), 10:48. See also The Public and Its Problems and Reconstruction in Philosophy. For more on Dewey’s understanding of philosophy’s public role in a democracy, see, for example, Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy; Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism; and Rockefeller, John Dewey.
60. Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, 57; for the text of Studies in Logical Theory, see MW, 2:295–375.
61. Preface, Studies in Logical Theory, MW, 2:296.
62. James, “The Chicago School,” EP, 102; originally published as “The Chicago School,” Psychological Bulletin 1 (January 15, 1904): 1–5. James coined the term “Chicago School” himself, which first appears in his correspondence dating from 1903. Announcing its birth, he wrote: “Chicago University has during the past 6 months given birth to the fruit of its 10 years of gestation under John Dewey. The result is wonderful—a real School, and real Thought. Important thought too! . . . Here [at Harvard] we have thought, but no school. At Yale a school but no thought. Chicago has both.” James to Sarah Wyman Whitman, 29 October 1903, CWJ, 10:324. See also James to Schiller, 8 April 1903 (232–233); James to Dewey, 17 October 1903 (321); and James to Schiller, 15 November 1903 (327), where he says of the Studies volume, “It is splendid stuff, and Dewey is a hero.” For more on James’s thought in relation to Dewey’s, see Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 305–312; Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, chap. 5. For a comprehensive collection of the writings of the Chicago School, see Shook, The Chicago School of Pragmatism. For an account of the development, history, and ideas of the Chicago School, see Rucker, The Chicago Pragmatists. Rucker notes in the preface that “the Chicago philosophy reflected an awareness of the interconnections among the advances being made in biology, psychology, and sociology” so “was able to provide a method and a perspective for an array of disciplines.” “The Chicago School was a school, not merely in the sense that several men were working together evolving (not just defending) a philosophy, but in the fuller sense that their work had effects in a cluster of fields of thought around philosophy; it was a school with a university full of its progeny. The progeny were as much products of the susceptibility of the new university to untraditional approaches to academic matters as they were of the fecundity of the philosophy” (vi–vii).
63. Dewey to James, 20 January 1904, quoted in Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 308–309.
64. See the preface to The Meaning of Truth, where James argues for more similarity between his, Dewey’s, and Schiller’s pragmatist accounts of truth than their critics would allow, MT, 8–10; see also MT, 93, for James’s comment that “as I myself understand Dewey and Schiller, our views absolutely agree, in spite of our different modes of statement.” See also Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 310–312. For Dewey’s own account of the differences between him and James, see ibid., 305; “The Development of American Pragmatism,” LW, 2:3–21; “What Does Pragmatism Mean by Practical?,” MW, 4:98–115; and “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?,” MW, 4:125–142.
65. See James to Schiller, 8 April 1903, CWJ, 10:232: “It appears now that under Dewey’s inspiration, they have at Chicago a flourishing school of radical empiricism.”
66. James to Dewey, 4 August 1908, ibid., 12:73.
67. James to Schiller, 8 April 1903, ibid., 10:232.
68. Myers, William James, 302.
69. R. Putnam, “The Moral Impulse,” 63.
70. Lovejoy, “Thirteen Pragmatisms,” 1–2.
71. Ibid., 3, 29.
72. See the exchange between Lovejoy and James on this essay: Lovejoy to James, 1 January 1908, CWJ, 11:497–500; and James’s response, 11 January 1908, ibid., 517. Lovejoy complains that there is a “tendency to hypostatize Pragmatism, to treat it as a sort of Ding-an-Sich. . . . So far as I can see, there is no more any such thing as ‘Pragmatism’ than there is (to steal an illustration of your own) such a thing as the weather, over and above the sequence of temperature and air-pressure states” (498). In reply, James wrote, “The great thing to aim at now among all us discussers of ‘pragmatism’ is ein Verständigung [mutual understanding, agreement]” (517).
73. Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” 104.
74. Both Mailloux and Danisch use this essay by Schiller, as well as his claim that Protagoras, with his claim that “man is the measure of all things,” is the earliest pragmatist to argue for the complementarity of pragmatism and rhetoric. See Mailloux, “Introduction,” 1–32; and Danisch, Pragmatism, Democracy.
75. Schiller, “William James and the Making of Pragmatism,” 94–95. In a similar vein James had articulated the “classic stages of a theory’s career” as follows: first “a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.” PM, 95.
76. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 147.
77. Caldwell, Pragmatism and Idealism, 172–173.
78. Hans Joas offers an excellent account of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s criticisms of pragmatism, both individually and together in Dialectic of Enlightenment, noting that they associate pragmatism with positivism and instrumental reason. He also shows how their mis-readings of pragmatism led to unexplored areas of congruity. See Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory, particularly chap. 3. See also John Durham Peters’s critical review of Joas: “The Curious Reception of Pragmatism Examined—and Exemplified.”
79. Halliwell and Rasmussen, “Introduction,” 2.
80. Russell, “As a European Radical Sees It”; Dewey, “Pragmatic America,” MW, 13:307.
81. Dewey, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence,” LW, 3:147; “The Development of American Philosophy,” ibid., 2:6, 5.
82. Peirce was widely regarded as a profligate and a person of questionable morals due to his penchant for overspending and constantly falling into debt and his scandalous associations with women. His first wife, Melusina Fay, left him because of his infidelities, and he was known to have openly traveled and cohabited with his second wife, Juliette (Froissy) Pourtalai, prior to their marriage, resulting in his dismissal from Johns Hopkins. See Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce.
83. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 61.
84. Bernstein quotes from MacIntyre as follows: “A tradition not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only recovered by an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings.” MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises,” 461.
85. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 61–62.
86. George Boas, “Preface,” in Lovejoy, The Thirteen Pragmatisms, vii.
87. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 62. As Bernstein notes, not even analytic philosophy was completely dominant in its day, though those “who had not taken the analytic ‘linguistic turn’ were clearly on the defensive.” See “Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Healing of Wounds,” in Bernstein, The New Constellation, 330–331.
88. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 55.
89. Henry S. Levinson holds a similar view of pragmatism as composed of conflicting narratives, writing that “at least as most pragmatists see themselves, there will be, and should always be, conflicting narratives about pragmatism as a movement. This conflict of narratives, indeed, makes up or reflects a good deal of pragmatism’s liveliness. So the thing we pragmatists should never want to do is to settle into some supposedly definitive story about our movement. In the end, we’ll have to ask what good this or that narrative does” (emphasis in original). See Levinson, “Rorty, Diggins, and the Promise of Pragmatism,” 27.
90. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 61.
91. Ibid., 67.
92. Ibid., 66. Elsewhere Bernstein has termed this approach an “engaged fallibilistic pluralism.” See “Pragmatism, Pluralism,” 336.
93. Dickstein, “Introduction: Pragmatism Then and Now,” in Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism, 1.
94. Ibid., 16.
95. Ibid.
96. There is an ongoing debate between intellectual historians, historians of philosophy, and philosophers with affinities to classical pragmatism, on the one hand, and neopragmatists like Rorty, on the other, over this move and the stark differences it sets up between classical pragmatism and neopragmatism. See the exchanges in Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism, and Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism.” Rorty defended his “anachronistic” interpretation of Dewey as a hypothetical construction, the point of which is to “separate out what I think is living and what I think is dead in Dewey’s thought, and thereby to clarify the difference between the state of philosophical play around 1900 and at the present time.” Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 292.
97. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 296–297.
98. James to Dickinson Miller, 5 August 1907, CWJ, 11:411.
99. James to Schiller, 5 July 1903, ibid., 10:280.
100. See also James to Wilhelm Jerusalem, 15 September 1907, ibid., 11:448, where James comments, “Pragmatism is an unlucky word in some respects, and the two meanings I give for it are somewhat heterogeneous. But it was already in vogue in France and Italy as well as in England and America, and it was tactically advantageous to use it.”
101. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” 83–84.
102. Ibid., 83.
103. See, for example Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii.
104. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 5.
105. Ibid., 6.
106. Ibid., 7.
107. Ibid., 6–8.
108. Ibid., 35, 37.
109. Ibid., 5.
110. Ibid., 182–183.
111. Ibid., 209.
112. Ibid., 233, 230.
113. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 73.
114. Ibid., 18.
115. Ibid., 21.
116. Ibid., 19.
117. All of these women were students or associates of “first-generation” pragmatist men. Seigfried believes that Taft’s dissertation, “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness,” may be the “first Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy on the women’s movement” in the United States. See Seigfried, ibid., chaps. 3–4 passim. For an excerpt from Taft’s dissertation, edited and introduced by Seigfried, see “Feminism and Pragmatism,” special issue of Hypatia, 215–229.
118. See, for example, Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, chaps. 3–5; Lagemann, “Experimenting with Education,” 31–46. The most work on mutual influences has been done on Dewey’s relationship with Jane Addams, particularly the way in which her work at Hull House influenced his views on education and democracy; see, for example, Seigfried, “Socializing Democracy”; Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 149–153; Pettegrew, “The Religion of Democracy in Wartime.”
119. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 60.
120. Ibid., 26, 17.
121. Miller, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in Seigfried, Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey, 79.
1. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 3.
2. Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 371, 372; William James to Sarah Wyman Whitman, 7 June 1899, CWJ, 8:546.
3. Pratt, Native Pragmatism, 16, 19, 20, 16.
4. Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, 3, 2, 7.
5. “Guide to the Records of the Philosophical Union.”
6. James to Pauline Goldmark, 2 March 1898, CWJ, 8:348.
7. James to Howison, 1 June 1898, ibid., 368.
8. James to Howison, 24 July 1898, ibid., 398.
9. Ibid. He ended up postponing the Giffords until 1901–1902 because of illness.
10. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 9 July 1898, CWJ, 8:390.
11. Ibid., 390–391.
12. Ibid., 391.
13. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 3 August 1898, ibid., 403.
14. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 5 August 1898, ibid., 404–405.
15. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 10 August 1898, ibid., 407.
16. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 11 August 1898, ibid., 408.
17. James to Susan Goldmark, 17 August 1898, ibid., 412.
18. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 23 August 1898, ibid., 415–416.
19. James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” PM, 257.
20. James to Carl Stumpf, 30 August 1899, CWJ, 9:34. This ordeal produced a “bad dilatation of the heart, with severe chest-symptoms,” which caused James to have to postpone the Gifford Lectures and take a second year of absence from Harvard.
21. Around Kant is the way forward: “The true line of philosophic progress lies, in short, it seems to me, not so much through Kant as round him to the point where now we stand” (PM, 269). Later, in a letter to his wife, he wrote, “The animadversion on Kant seemed to be considered the most striking part of the performance, which (I think) was just a mite too long.” James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 28 August 1898, CWJ, 8:420.
22. Dewey, “William James,” MW, 6:93.
23. Turner, “Significance of the Frontier in American History.”
24. Dewey, “William James in Nineteen Twenty-Six,” LW, 2:159.
25. Kallen, “Introduction.”
26. Pratt, Native Pragmatism, 1–3. According to Pratt, the other major account of pragmatism’s origins is “the story of genius,” in which European American thinkers come to develop new ideas not out of their encounter with the new land but out of their own “spontaneous originality” (3).
27. Writing in 1939, Dewey defined the present frontier as “moral, not physical.” See “Creative Democracy—the Task before Us,” LW, 14:225.
28. Kittelstrom, “Against Elitism” and “Too Hidebound”; see also her Religion of Democracy.
29. James referred to the “Anglo American Alliance” in philosophy in his correspondence on multiple occasions; see, for example, James to Henry Sidgwick, 22 March 1899, CWJ, 8:511, where he invites Sidgwick to lecture in Harvard’s philosophy department the following year to constitute a “new link in the great Anglo-American alliance.”
30. Though Fiske, a Harvard professor, first coined the term in his famous lecture, published in Harper’s in 1885, the ideas were certainly in circulation much earlier. For an argument that manifest destiny’s roots lie in Jacksonian policy making, see Hietala, Manifest Design.
31. Stephanson, Manifest Destiny, 79–80; Strong, Our Country.
32. James to William Mackintire Salter, 8 April 1898, CWJ, 8:355.
33. Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher, 132.
34. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism,” 45.
35. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 15.
36. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 35–36.
37. Ibid., 32.
38. Gunn, “Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism,” 415, commenting on Rorty’s “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.”
39. See, for example, Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy and most recently, Democratic Hope; Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Kittelstrom, The Religion of Democracy; Danisch, Pragmatism, Rhetoric.
40. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 245. On James and the mugwumps, see Simon, Genuine Reality, 277–278. The Venezuela crisis was precipitated by President Grover Cleveland’s December 1895 address to Congress, which many interpreted as a threat to declare war if Great Britain and Venezuela could not settle their long-standing dispute over the territorial boundaries of British Guiana. See also James to Edwin L. Godkin, 24 December 1895, CWJ, 8:108–109: “Three days of fighting mob-hysteria in Washington can at any time undo the peace-habits of a hundred years” (109).
41. Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 238. Cotkin has a fuller discussion of James’s “mugwumpishness” in William James, Public Philosopher, chap. 5, esp. 127–130.
42. James to François Pillon, 15 June 1898, CWJ, 8:372–373; for the meeting, see 374n2.
43. Ibid.
44. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 24 June 1898, ibid., 380.
45. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 28 June 1898, ibid., 383.
46. James to William Mackintire Salter, 18 November 1898, ibid., 454. Salter was married to Mary Gibbens Salter, sister of Alice Howe Gibbens James.
47. Ibid., 454–455. Salter wrote in a later addendum to the letter that he had changed his mind and abandoned his previous views (see ibid., 455n1).
48. McKinley, “Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation.”
49. McKinley, “Interview,” vii.
50. James to William Mackintire Salter, 5 January 1899, CWJ, 8:480.
51. James, “The Philippine Tangle (1899),” ECR, 154–155.
52. James to Henry Rutgers Marshall, 8 February 1899, CWJ, 8:495; see also James to Samuel Gray Ward, 28 December 1898: “Above all, I find the cant about educating [the Filipinos] to freedom etc. simply nauseous” (ibid., 475).
53. James to Henry Sidgwick, 30 April 1899, ibid., 523.
54. James to Henry William Rankin, 22 February 1899, ibid., 499.
55. James to Sarah Wyman Whitman, 7 June 1899, ibid., 546. See also Robert Richardson’s excellent biography of James for more context and discussion of his anti-imperialism in relation to “A Certain Blindness” and his critique of “bigness.” Richardson, William James, 380–384.
56. James to Wincenty Lutoslawski, 10 August 1900, CWJ, 9:266.
57. “The Philippine Question (1899),” ECR, 159.
58. “The Philippines Again (1899),” ECR, 160.
59. James to Henry Sidgwick, 30 April 1899, CWJ, 8:523. Robert Richardson nicely notes that James’s “vascular imagery” here was “deeply felt, deeply rooted in the family habit of strong language and perhaps even in his own physical condition,” since he had been struggling with heart problems since the previous summer (384).
60. James to Henry Stephen MacKintosh, 9 April 1899, ibid., 514.
61. “Robert Gould Shaw,” ERM, 72–73.
62. “Address on the Philippine Question,” ECR, 85.
63. James would recall, in a 1903 letter, how he “cried, hard, when the hostilities broke out & General Otis refused Aguinaldo’s demand for a conference,—the only time I’ve cried in many a long year, and I know one other person who did likewise, a man of 60.” James to Josephine Shaw Lowell, 6 December 1903, CWJ, 9:339.
64. Leela Gandhi also connects James’s anti-imperialism with his pluralism as well as his interest in spiritualism in her Affective Communities; she argues that his pluralist commitments allow him to transcend national boundaries to think about broader kinds of world community.
65. James to Elizabeth Glendower Evans, 15 February 1901, CWJ, 9:422.
66. James to Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, 6 August 1902, ibid., 10:100.
67. Schaefer, “Jeremiah Wright.” In his sermon, Wright contrasted the failure and temporality of governments with the unchanging justice of God. He said, “Not God bless America, God damn America! That’s in the Bible. For killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme.” “Jeremiah Wright—God Damn America.”
1. Dewey, “Development of American Pragmatism,” LW, 2:14.
2. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 183.
3. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 34–35.
4. Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic, 97–98. By the term “wo/men” Schüssler Fiorenza means to indicate the social constructedness of the category “woman” and to acknowledge its fragmentation along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism, and so on; she further seeks to include in the category non-elite men.
5. Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy, 5.
6. The only place where James directly treats the issue of women and gender relations in a sustained manner is his 1869 combined review of Horace Bushnell’s Women’s Suffrage and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. See James, “Women’s Suffrage, by Horace Bushnell and The Subjection of Women, by John Stuart Mill,” ECR, 246–256.
7. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 113.
8. But see Seigfried’s rebuttal to Lorraine Code, in which she tries to clarify her approach in Pragmatism and Feminism by stating that she does not regard pragmatism as an “irremediably tainted” philosophy, nor does she regard the androcentric biases of James and Dewey as “central and pervasive.” Instead, she sees them as “exceptions” that need to be “laboriously searched for and disentangled from the more common pluralistic textual approaches.” Seigfried, “Perspectives on Pragmatism,” 25–27.
9. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 132–133.
10. Ibid., chap. 6 passim.
11. Grossman, “Review of The Creation of Chaos,” 114–115. For a sustained treatment of the concept of vagueness in James’s work, see Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague.
12. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 115.
13. Ibid., 32.
14. Ibid., 32–33; see Mahowald, “A Majority Perspective.”
15. Myers, William James, 428.
16. Ibid., 425, 427.
17. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 118–119. Kim Townsend holds a similar view, finding that in this review James is being “explicit about what he wanted in a wife” and therefore agrees with Bushnell’s position but not his reasoning. See Townsend, Manhood at Harvard, 62–65.
18. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 114.
19. Myers, William James, 426.
20. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, 12.
21. Ibid.
22. This contrast becomes more apparent if one compares James’s review of Bushnell and Mill with a review of the same books by his father, Henry James Sr., who critiqued Mill for disregarding the “civilizing function” that the traditional marriage ideal serves for men. His own view was that “woman is by nature inferior to man” and exists to inspire him to his better nature by her spiritual purity. See H. James Sr., “The Woman Thou Gavest with Me,” and Livingston’s comparison of father and son’s views in Pragmatism, Feminism, chap. 5. On the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood see Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture.
23. The dedication reads: “To the Memory of John Stuart Mill from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day.” PM, 3.
24. Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, 131.
25. Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” 148; Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, 133.
26. Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, 134.
27. Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom, 9–10.
28. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 7.
29. Ibid., 11–12.
30. Ibid., 16. See also Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity, a study of specifically Protestant efforts to reinvigorate manhood and, thereby, Protestantism itself.
31. On the effeminacy of Victorian society, see the famous quote of Basil Ransom in Henry James’s The Bostonians: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is. . . . That is what I want to preserve, or rather . . . to recover” (322). On the development of neurasthenia as the diagnosis for the cultural weakness of the civilized white male body, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 84–92. On James as neurasthenic, see Putney, Muscular Christianity, 27.
32. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 18.
33. Ibid., 19.
34. For an account of Harvard University and its professors, students, and graduates as exemplars and promulgators of this new ideal of masculinity, see Townsend, Manhood at Harvard; on James in particular as an embodiment of this ideal, see chaps. 1 and 3.
35. Compare with Dewey’s notion of faith in A Common Faith, LW, 9:1–58. James and Dewey are engaged in similar projects in the sense that both identify a tension between science and religion that they want to ameliorate in some way. For Dewey, the answer lies in a redefinition of science as a method, not associated with any particular body of beliefs but oriented toward the critical pursuit of truth, and of faith as the religious quality in human experience, freed from the encumbrances of traditional religions and signified by a trust in the possibilities for human solidarity and self-unification in the service of human ideals. A major difference between Dewey and James is that while Dewey rejects supernaturalism out of hand in the bridging of this gap between science and religion, James is not willing to do so.
36. Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 136.
37. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 64.
38. Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, 143, 134.
39. Ibid., 7.
40. Ibid., 146.
41. Ibid., 145, 146; but see James to Thomas Davidson, 8 January 1882, CWJ, 5:195, for a contrasting example of James’s association of rationalism with manliness. See also note 42.
42. For a restatement of the pragmatic theory of meaning in the context of James’s argument in Varieties, see VRE, 350–351.
43. See Lamberth, “Interpreting the Universe after a Social Analogy,” 237–259, esp. 243–245. Lamberth argues in this essay that James has a very complex notion of intimacy, as a phenomenological affect, metaphysical relationality, and ideal of sociality. He also notes that while in the Principles James describes the socius as only ever existing in “an ideal world,” in A Pluralistic Universe the view is rather that an adequate socius is potentially attainable through a spiritualistic philosophy (245).
44. The normative characterization of those who adopt the cynical or materialistic worldviews as exhibiting “signs of something wrong” recalls James’s discussion of temperament in Pragmatism, quoted earlier, in which he notes that one’s temperament predisposes one to view opposing tempers as somehow “out of key with the world’s character.” James freely acknowledges the important role temperament plays in one’s philosophical outlook and method of argumentation yet notes that temperament by itself can never be a sufficient argument for one’s “superior discernment or authority” (PM, 11). Philosophy is very much a matter of preference, although this does not mean that it is wholly subjective or that no reasons can be given in support of one’s conclusions.
45. James’s sister Alice, who suffered from illness and depression through much of her life, is a prime example. In one of the passages in her diary she writes, “I think the difficulty is my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women, the absence of which has always made me so uncharming to & uncharmed by the male sex.” Quoted in Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James, 107. Cited in Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 136. See also Strouse, Alice James.
46. James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, 24 September 1882, CWJ, 5:255.
47. Strouse notes that this passage bears a strong resemblance to James’s description of his wife’s care for their infant son Herman prior to his death from whooping cough in July 1885. See Strouse, Alice James, 180–81; James to Henry James, 11 July 1885, CWJ, 2:21.
48. Yet in the beginning of the Varieties Teresa is the only woman to be included, along with Jesus and Jonathan Edwards, on a list of those who prefigure James’s method of evaluation by “fruits, not roots.” VRE, 34–35. In this sense we may say she is the only woman James includes in his genealogy of pragmatism. For more on Teresa as empiricist, see Whitehead, “Bridging the Chasm.”
49. James’s discussion of habit in relation to the Victorian ideal of manliness as self-mastery is evidenced by passages such as the following. In stressing the necessity of action in building up character, he writes: “There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed” (PP, 1:129). Action is opposed to emotion here in gendered hierarchical terms. Further, he describes the man who has built up his character through daily “gratuitous exercise”: “Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would not rather do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. . . . The man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things . . . will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast” (PP, 1:130).
50. But compare this statement with James’s reference to the “animal potency of sex” in the 1869 Bushnell-Mill review in ECR, where the argument is the opposite.
51. James to Thomas Davidson, 8 January 1882, CWJ, 5:195.
52. Again, the fluidity and rhetorical functioning of James’s use of gender are evident here as well, as in this letter rationalism is associated with manliness, while in Pragmatism the association is between empiricism and manliness.
53. Townsend, Manhood at Harvard, 181.
1. Gunn, “Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism,” 404, quoting Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 21.
2. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 155, 153.
3. Ibid., 150–151; emphasis in original.
4. Ibid., 22; emphasis in original.
5. Ibid., 20, 73.
6. As Seyla Benhabib has observed, Rorty’s narrative is itself a version of the meta-narrative of the “death of metaphysics,” that is, “the narrative first articulated by Heidegger and then developed by Derrida that ‘Western metaphysics has been under the spell of the “metaphysics of presence” at least since Plato.’” What Rorty calls the project of “epistemology,” according to Benhabib, is the notion that “philosophy is a meta-discourse of legitimation, articulating the criteria of validity presupposed by all other discourses. Once it ceases to be a discourse of justification, philosophy loses its raison d’être.” Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 24–25.
7. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” 8, 5, 8.
8. Ibid., 13–14. Religion and philosophy are also, for Rorty in this essay, the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a literary culture (13).
9. Ibid., 9–10.
10. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 155.
11. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 68, 86.
12. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 148.
13. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 9, 80, 83, 68.
14. Bernstein, The New Constellation, 286. Kloppenberg also makes a similar point about the inconsistency of Rorty’s insistence on the strict dualism of public and private in The Virtues of Liberalism, 171.
15. Fraser, Unruly Practices, 93–94.
16. Ibid., 93, 94, 101, 100.
17. Ibid., 104, 105. In response Fraser seeks to construct a “democratic-socialist-feminist pragmatism” that avoids dividing public from private and politics from theory (106).
18. Williams, “Rorty, Radicalism, Romanticism,” 70, 71.
19. Ibid., 71.
20. Ibid., 73.
21. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 60–61, 194.
22. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 36, 43. But in response to critiques by intellectual historians that his understanding of twentieth-century leftist politics is rather limited and problematic, Rorty has acknowledged that this book is “amateurish,” “oversimplified and even distorted,” yet he insists that his view of history should be evaluated separately from his philosophical views. See Rorty, “Intellectual Historians and Pragmatist Philosophy,” 207, 210.
23. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism, 174.
24. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 169.
25. Rorty, “Religious Faith,” 123, 131, 135.
26. Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” 28.
27. Ibid., 27, 29, 28.
28. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 169; see Carter, The Culture of Disbelief.
29. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 170–171, 169, 170, 171.
30. Stout, Democracy and Tradition, 88, 89–90; emphasis in original.
31. Ibid., 90.
32. Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Rorty,” 134; emphasis in original. Similarly, Stout argues that Rorty’s notion of “conversation” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as a kind of “discursive exchange” that we adopt when we can no longer “straightforwardly adjudicate between competing claims” is at odds with his claim that religion is a conversation-stopper (Democracy and Tradition, 90). For a fuller explication of Wolterstorff’s views on the place of religion in public debate, see Audi and Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square.
33. Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Rorty,” 136.
34. Ibid., 137; for Rorty’s vision of the “American sublime” and democracy, see Philosophy and Social Hope, 126. In one of his final statements on the subject, Rorty explicitly framed his “social hope” in religious terms: “My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.” Although how such a society could ever come to be is a “mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concern[ing] the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things,” Rorty clings to this “unjustifiable hope” as his own “religiously non-musical” sense of transcendence and faith. See Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 40.
35. Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 141.
36. In this articulation, Rorty said he preferred to describe his views on religion using the term “anticlericalism” rather than “atheism,” since the former is a “political view, not an epistemological or metaphysical one” and is based not on “a recognition of the true essence of religion, but [is] simply one of the morals to be drawn from the history of Europe and America.” Anticlericalism he defined as “the view that ecclesiastical institutions . . . are dangerous to the health of democratic societies.” But “religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatized—as long as ecclesiastical institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long as believers and unbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live.” “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 36, 33.
37. Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 142.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 147, 143.
40. Ibid., 148.
41. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism.” For another take on the same topic, this time with reference to pragmatism’s superiority to deconstructionism as an ally for feminism, see Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction.”
42. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 234.
43. Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” 259.
44. For earlier feminist philosophical work on pragmatism, see, for example, Fraser, Unruly Practices, chap. 5; Mahowald, “A Majority Perspective”; Radin, “The Pragmatist and the Feminist”; Seigfried, “Pragmatism, Feminism.”
45. Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” 259–260.
46. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 231, 233.
47. Ibid., 234.
48. Ibid., 240. Rorty also critiques Marxism for having “unfortunately taught us to believe” that philosophy can be a “source of tools for path-breaking political work”; his version of pragmatism instead sees philosophy as at best performing a kind of “mopping-up” work. “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction,” 100.
49. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 247, referencing Frye, The Politics of Reality, 106n.
50. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 247.
51. Ibid., 235–236; emphasis in original.
52. Ibid., 240.
53. Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction,” 101.
54. This picture of the philosopher as “under-laborer,” a term he borrows from Locke, is one that Rorty intends to contrast with the notion of “philosophy as pioneer,” which he sees as “part of a logocentric conception of intellectual work” that Derrida has thoroughly critiqued. As pointed out earlier, James at times seems to understand the philosopher as pioneer. “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction,” 100; Rorty’s reference is to Derrida, Geschlecht I. See Derrida, “Geschlecht.”
55. For discussions of the rhetorical feminization of prophets and poets, see, for example, Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly; and Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture.
56. Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” 261.
57. Williams, “Rorty, Radicalism, Romanticism,” 70.
58. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 238.
59. Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction,” 100.
60. Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” 260.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 265, 266, 263.
63. Ibid., 263.
64. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 64.
65. See, for example, Fraser, “False Antitheses?,” 59–73, and “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,” 157–171; and Chopp, “Theorizing Feminist Theology.” In these essays, pragmatism is rhetorically posed as the helpful third term, moderate middle, or locus of hitherto unrecognized agreement upon which divergent, even seemingly irreconcilable, feminist positions can find common ground.
66. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 246, 248.
67. Fraser, “False Antitheses,” 62; Fraser is referring to Fraser and Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy.”
68. Fraser, “False Antitheses,” 71.
69. Fraser, “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,” 158, 166.
70. Ibid., 167–168.
71. Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 44.
72. Ibid.
73. Jones, “Women’s Experience between a Rock and a Hard Place,” 53.
74. Davaney, “Continuing the Story,” 207, 214.
75. Ibid., 208, 209, 205, 214. Davaney develops her understanding of pragmatic historicism more fully in her Pragmatic Historicism.
76. Chopp, “Theorizing Feminist Theology,” 224–226.
77. Ibid., 226–227.
78. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 245, 246.
79. Fraser likewise situates the emergence of neopragmatism in feminist theory in the context of the 1980s and 1990s “culture wars” and debates over identity and difference. See Fraser, “Mapping the Feminist Imagination.”
80. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 232.
81. Ibid., 233, 235, 234.
82. Ibid., 245, 251, 249.
83. Ibid., 249–250.
84. Ibid., 253, 256.
85. See, for example, Hamington and Bardwell-Jones, Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism.
1. Bernstein, “American Pragmatism,” 67.
2. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 181.
3. For the use of gendered tropes in argument during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see, for example, the analyses of Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Putney, Muscular Christianity; Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom; Townsend, Manhood at Harvard; and Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender. For a more recent example, Mansfield’s Manliness argues for a revalorization of the virtue of “manliness” as the manifestation of courage, strength, and respect, and as the “next-to-last resort, before resignation and prayer” (ix).
4. See, for example, the work of Pateman, The Sexual Contract; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference; Benhabib, Situating the Self; Okin, Women in Western Political Thought; and Fraser, Justice Interruptus.
5. Rescher, Pluralism.
6. Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology, 44; and Fraser, “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,” 166.
7. Hanssen, Critique of Violence, 252.
8. Ibid., 254.
9. Gunn, Thinking across the American Grain, 148.