Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, July 6, 2026

Claude, who has explored the pragmatism-existentialism connection?

• Richard Bernstein, Praxis and Action (1971) — the classic direct comparison of pragmatism and existentialism on action/freedom.

• Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism — his “prophetic pragmatism” draws heavily on existentialist themes of contingency and tragedy; a chapter on this pairing also appears in the Routledge volume Cornel West and Philosophy, by Clarence Johnson.

• John Lachs (your own dissertation advisor) — Stoic Pragmatism and In Love with Life fuse James/Dewey pragmatism with existential concerns about finitude and mortality. Given your history with Lachs, this may be the most natural entry point.

• Sidney Hook’s 1959 Antioch Review essay “Pragmatism and Existentialism” — not a book, but foundational; a pragmatist’s take contrasting the two on truth and freedom.

• For the truth-theory angle specifically, there’s scholarship on James’s influence on Sartre’s existentialism, largely via a posthumously published 1948 text, Truth and Existence, where Sartre engages James’s pragmatic theory of truth against Heidegger.

Nothing currently occupies the exact title Existential Pragmatism — so that territory does still look open, as you’d noted before.

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