"Should philosophy retire?"

(Or just some philosophers?)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was the philosopher's anti-philosopher. His professional credentials were impeccable: an influential anthology (The Linguistic Turn, 1967); a game-changing book (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979); another, only slightly less original book (Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982); a best-selling (for a philosopher) collection of literary/philosophical/political lectures and essays (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989); four volumes of Collected Papers from the venerable Cambridge University Press; president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (1979). He seemed to be speaking at every humanities conference in the 1980s and 1990s, about postmodernism, critical theory, deconstruction, and the past, present, and future (if any) of philosophy.

All the same, it began to be whispered among his colleagues that in mid-career Rorty had become disillusioned with being a philosopher and turned into something else: a culture critic, an untethered public intellectual, a French fellow traveler. And the chief whisperer, it turned out, was Rorty himself. After leaving Princeton's philosophy department in 1981, he never held another appointment as a philosopher—by choice. He thought philosophy's days were numbered and spent the second half of his career (and much of the first) explaining why.

But how can philosophy end? Surely the quest for Truth is eternal? Surely the hunger for Wisdom is part of human nature? Surely questions about the Good will never cease to exercise us? Well, yes and no. Certainly Rorty was not proposing that we simply give up on all the big questions. We will always mull over "how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word," a phrase he quoted often from one of his favorite philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars. But he thought that philosophy's perennial abstractions, distinctions, and problems—including Truth, human nature, and the Good—though they were once very much alive, had by now led Western thought into a dead end and should be retired...

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/should-philosophy-retire

Pragmatism’s Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy

While it is widely acknowledged that pragmatist philosophy originated within an intellectual climate profoundly shaped by evolutionary theory and its initial reception in the United States, the details of this cultural environment and of its influence upon the early pragmatists have tended to receive less attention than they merit. Trevor Pearce's impressive and well-researched study addresses this gap in the literature on early pragmatism, but it is also intended to appeal to historians and philosophers of biology, given its focus upon the various debates to which evolutionary theory gave rise in late Nineteenth and early twentieth century America, not only between supporters and rivals of evolution, but also amongst champions of different schools of evolutionism. Pearce understands the pragmatist tradition in a broad sense, in terms of relations within and between 'cohorts' of scholars, not all of whom are customarily acknowledged as 'pragmatists' in standard histories of the movement, notwithstanding their overlapping historical experiences, academic environments and cultural climates. Focussing throughout upon their cultural context and the details of their interventions in an on-going debate which he traces from the 1860s to the first decade of the twentieth century, Pearce is primarily concerned to situate the pragmatists within their lively intellectual environment, rather than to reconstruct and elucidate their doctrines and arguments in less explicitly historical terms. As such, Pearce does not seek to specify any particular doctrinal content to which one must subscribe in order to qualify as an authentic pragmatist... (continues)

Trevor Pearce, Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, 2020, 365pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226719917.

Reviewed by Daniel Herbert, University of Sheffield

How Self-Reliant Were Emerson & Thoreau

Transcendentalism, the American philosophy that championed the individual, emerged from an exceptionally tight-knit community.

 ...a new vision of Thoreau has taken shape. He is the townsman who turned his withdrawal into a conspicuously individual performance—"his well-built house" by Walden Pond "readily visible to passersby on the carriage road"—in order to take his neighbors and family along on his journey. Thoreau and his family were ardent abolitionists (his sister Helen was a friend of Frederick Douglass's), and he continued to hide enslaved people on their flight to Canada even while living at the pond.

The famous early chapters of Walden—which seem so brutally insulting toward greedy, wasteful, acquisitive farmers and townsfolk—turn out to have been delivered, face-to-face, as lectures to his neighbors in the Concord Lyceum in 1847, by a self-revealing Thoreau under the title "History of Himself." Such chastisement was in the old New England spirit of calls to the congregation. "Thoreau never sloughed off the heritage of Ezra Ripley and the message of community," Gross writes. "In his mind he was never alone. The community came with him." 

Atlantic 

Tadd Ruetenik

 Tadd Ruetenik is Professor of Philosophy at St. Ambrose University. He is the author of The Demons of William James: Religious Pragmatism Explores Unusual Mental States (2018) and Secretary of the William James Society.  

What does American philosophy mean to you?  

Since the term “American” signifies continents, “American philosophy” does not signifies more than “United States philosophy.” I take it to refer to philosophy related to life in the Western Hemisphere, and in contrast especially to Europe.  

I do not see a particular need to assert that American philosophy is strongly tied to  pragmatism. In fact, I have come to see that term “pragmatism” as problematic, since in almost all popular usage it means either an unscrupulous power play on  the world, or some kind of compromise that favors non-populist centrist politics. I  know that many philosophy terms have common usages that differ or even work  against the word in its philosophical sense—“idealism” and “metaphysics,” for  example—but I am having difficulty motivating myself for the battle of meanings. I  have been drawn to the term “pluralism,” or better, “radical pluralism” to describe  the philosophy in this part of the globe. If it wasn’t so occult-sounding, I’d suggest  “transcendental pluralism” which can refer to the problem of “the one and the many” that William James, perhaps presciently, said was the fundamental problem  of philosophy. But then we would still begin to run into troubles with the common  usages of the word. Perhaps I’ll be able to retire at that point.  

How did you become an American philosopher?  

Since an early age I have had a personal antipathy for nationalism, patriotism, and any types of large, political allegiance, especially as this relates to the United States. My early interests were in existentialism and philosophy of religion, and it does puzzle me a bit why I became interested in American philosophy to begin with. After a world religions course at a community college piqued my interest in philosophy, I enrolled at Eastern Michigan  University. The counselor had recommended I take just 4 courses, but I was a somewhat  older student, and thought I was ready for more, so I picked up the phone—it was the  beginning of touch-tone registration back in the early 1990s—and I added the first  philosophy class I could find. This happened to be American Philosophy, and was taught by a great professor for whom this was not in her area of specialization. There was something of a radical and environmentalist take to the class, but I remember being  especially drawn to Emerson and Thoreau... (continues)