This book explores the complex relationship between the philosophical schools of idealism and pragmatism. Idealism is the older tradition, with roots in Plato and Platonism, and has been developed in a myriad of forms. At heart, it holds that reality is either mind-like, or is contained in the mind. Pragmatism is a newer school, traceable to the work of philosophers such as C.S. Peirce and William James in the mid-nineteenth century. It offers a distinctive account of meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics which stresses our place as agents within the world.
While these two schools have often been set at odds with one another, it is increasingly recognized that idealism and pragmatism share some important common ground, and that their respective histories have been intertwined. The contributions to this volume, by leading international scholars, put these debates in a new light by studying the interrelation across a range of thinkers and issues, including Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Royce, Renouvier and Collingwood on the one side, and Peirce, James, Dewey and Brandom on the other. This book was first published as a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Introduction Robert Stern
1. Hegel as a Pragmatist Dina Emundts
2. Hegel, Dewey, and Habits Steven Levine
3. An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom’s Analytic Pragmatism Paul Redding
4. Inference by Analogy and the Progress of Knowledge: From Reflection to Determination in Judgements of Natural Purpose Preston Stovall
5. A House at War Against Itself: Absolute Versus Pluralistic Idealism in Spinoza, Peirce, James and Royce Shannon Dea
6. Peirce’s ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East’ Paul Franks
7. Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe: Charles Renouvier and William James Jeremy Dunham
8. The Lot of the Beautiful: Pragmatism and Aesthetic Ideals John J. Kaag
9. Unlikely Bedfellows? Collingwood, Carnap and the Internal/External Distinction Giuseppina D’Oro
Biography
Robert Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, UK. With Christopher Hookway, he was director of the Leverhulme funded project on Idealism and Pragmatism out of which this collection arose. He has published on this issue in his Hegelian Metaphysics (2009).
