Phenomenological Pragmatism: A Reintroduction

I have re-commenced editing my book manuscript, which is 230 pages at the outset.  Part of the editing includes offering a more general introduction to Dewey studies targetted at those either familiar with pragmatism or willing dive head-first into an unusual tradition of philosophy.  The other part includes making some of the technical moves clearer, as "obvious" inferences common to phenomenologists are not always common for contemporary pragmatists, and Dewey scholarship is not very unified beyond the basic theses.  Below is a draft of the re-introduction that includes the first two paragraphs that are meant to get the reader's attention.

Another’s choices are inscribed into my body and mind long before I call them my choices.  They are my choices in the sense that I claim them, yet I am not their author, but their performer.  I am easily led to think I am the agent of my actions, because the tincture of my intention pervades the scene.  We all mistake our being actors for being agents, because we read the script of history one line at a time, a script that no one holds before us, but we all follow.

Society and civilization engender patterns of desire, wherein instinct, impulse, and want motivate action and not mythic free will.  Human agency grows through the cultivation of desire, whose patterns and objects are given definite form by culture.  We are not first motivated by choice, but by want, and only subsequently realize the suggested idea.  Only that realization frees us from the tyranny of instinct and impulse, from another’s choices written into my body and mind, and frees us to be intelligent.  Freedom is not absolute, but exists to the degree that we mold desire by thinking it against its anticipated consequences.  We begin our thought as free to the extent that the habits of our locale, society, and civilization encourage, since they provide the proximate objects of desire that we only afterwards call “my choice.”

Realism vs. Nominalism

There has been quite a back-and-forth between Matt of Footnotes to Plato and Levi of Larval Subjects.

Speaking just to principles, Matt is arguing a variant of a scholastic realist position per Whitehead, while Levi is arguing a nominalist position that he attributes to Deleuze.  The former argues for the reality of universal (generals); i.e., the basic categories of metaphysical description are not merely convenient fictions of the mind, but are real distinctions (per Scotus).  One motivation for this is to explain why nature appears to have patterns, i.e., laws of nature, even if we may only know them fallibly.  Levi's position, in contrast, rejects these as unknowable.  This kind of move is fundamental to object-oriented philosophy's notion of withdrawal, though that is not to say that it is shared by all such philosophies.

Matt is doing a great job of articulating the position and reasons, but Levi refuses to acknowledge that this is a reasonable fundamental disagreement.  Some months back I tried to argue this with Levi, and I have given up.  Part of the problem is that as hard as Matt tries, the position is position is mischaracterized as it was in Levi's latest post.  I will use Aristotelian terminology rather than Whiteheadian to explain the mischaracterization.

It is not that forms impose something upon matter from without, which appears to give forms some kind of agency.  Rather, forms are within the thing, where a "form" is a description of the law-like possibilities of nature.  The thing realizes the form within itself through its own powers; the "form" merely describes an immanent possibility.  If a person affirms nominalism, then the person denies either that there are law-like possibilities of nature or that they are knowable.  Levi claimed the latter view some months ago.  Matt is trying to explain something that Levi thinks is in principle unexplainable.

Contra Levi, I insist that if nature is law-like, and all evidence points to "yes," then explanation is both possible and a worthwhile pursuit.  That is, there is no need to accept a Humean or Kantian position on the regularity or purposiveness of nature; it is neither a "habit" (Hume) nor a necessary fiction (or antimony) of human understanding (Kant).  There is no reason to accept Kant's submerged Cartesian dualism and sever human knowing from nature.

If nominalism is the case, then Levi's own position is nothing more than fiction by his own account.  Any principle or rule is a mere human imposition on reality for nominalism.  He has invoked pragmatism per the pragmatic maxim to defend his account, which is ironic as the classical pragmatists were scholastic realists.  The maxim allows one to decide on competing abductive hypotheses based on the consequences of adopting either position given abductive criteria.  Levi would have us believe than onticology provides the best consequences, since as a nominalist he can claim neither reality nor truth for it.  This is not the intended use of the pragmatic maxim, which is intended to compensate for human fallibility and not provide a meta-theoretic justification for nominalism.

Why do I bring all this up?  Nominalism vs. realism is the root of the disagreement, and further discussion is intractable without discussing that.

EDIT:
See one of my previous and detailed posts on this:
http://immanenttranscedence.blogspot.com/2011/12/varieties-of-nominalism-and-realism.html

I just added the following comment, which I took to be obvious at the time, but perhaps is not:
"Transcendental argumentation cannot be claimed to be human-independent if one is an epistemic nominalist.  And since Levi Bryant was arguing for the human-independence of his work, he enters into a contradiction.He then denies to scholastic realists (Peirce, Dewey, Whitehead, etc.) their own solution to this problem."

This is also happening in Matt's case; I am trying to show the general structures underlying each form of argumentation without delving into the special terminology of each.

CFP: Graduate Philosophy Conference on Personhood

Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Personhood

15th Annual "Building Bridges"

Graduate Student Philosophy Conference

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

November 16 -17, 2012

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Fanny Söderbäck
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Siena College, Loudonville, New
York

Deadline for submissions: September 14, 2012

This fifteenth annual Building Bridges conference will be held at
Southern Illinois University Carbondale November 16 -17, 2012.

This year’s topic is the concept of the “person,” its formation, and
meaning. What does it mean to possess “personhood,” to be considered
“less than a person” by virtue of attributes or attitudes? What
attributes, biologically, socially, and culturally enable someone to
be a person? Can non-humans be persons? Is “personhood” a valuable
concept? The topic is to be construed broadly and we invite papers and
presentations from all areas of philosophy, as well as philosophically
interesting papers from other disciplines.

Submission Guidelines:Papers should not exceed 3000 words and should be prepared for blind
review. Please do not include any personal information in the paper.
On a separate cover page include the following items:
The paper's title
The author's name
Institutional affiliation
E-mail address
Word count (3000 words maximum)
An abstract (150 words maximum)

E-mail a copy of your paper and your personal information, as
attachments, in MS Word format (.doc), (.docx) or in Adobe Portable
Document Format (PDF) to j.charlesflowers@gmail.com. Please name the
file of your paper with an abbreviated paper title and title the file
of your contact information with your last name and first initial.

Conference Statement:The purpose of “Building Bridges” is to bring into dialogue diverse
elements not commonly associated. We seek interdisciplinary as well as
intra-disciplinary themes that address problems from multiple
philosophical standpoints, from different traditions, or in which two
or more thinkers not customarily brought into conversation are
compared. Our goal is to provide a pluralistic forum for constructive
and critical communication across boundaries. For more information
visit our website: http://philosophy.siuc.edu/Graduate/bridges.html

CFP: Peirce's Semiotics at 11th World Congress of Semiotics

Call for Papers

Round Table 44: Peirce’s Semiotics

11th World Congress of Semiotics

The 11th World Congress of Semiotics

Time: October 5 – 9, 2012

Location: Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

http://www.semio2012.com/

Organizers:

Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

(Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies, University of Helsinki)

ahti-veikko.pietarinen@helsinki.fi

Priscila Borges (University of Ouro Preto – Brazil)

primborges@gmail.com

Peirce’s Semiotics

We call for abstracts that make a contribution to the Peirce scholarship. In particular, we welcome proposals that deal with theoretical aspects of Peirce’s work (his logic, philosophy, pragmaticism, semeiotic, the theory of signs) or applications of his thought to the contemporary inquiry across the sciences, including philosophy, human, social and cultural sciences. We specifically encourage proposals by scholars from East-Asian countries.

Please send abstracts and papers in Rich Text Format or Word doc attached to an email to the Round Table organizers (primborges@gmail.com). The abstracts must have no less that 200 and no more than 500 words (including references) and the paper must be delivered in 15 to 20 minutes (including discussion). The RT is held in English.

The following information must be send together with the submission:

Round Table: No. 44

Name:

Country:

Affiliation:

Professional / positional / academic title:

Paper title:

Mobile phone:

Email:

Deadline: June 30, 2012. Notification: July 15, 2012.

CFP: Psych and Philosophy Edited Volume for Open Court

Call for Abstracts

Psych and Philosophy

Edited by Robert Arp

robertarp320@gmail.com

(1) Submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to: robertarp320@gmail.com
(2) Abstracts due: June 1, 2012
(3) Notification of accepted abstracts: June 15, 2012
(4) First drafts due: September 1, 2012 (flexible)
(5) 10 to 12-paged papers are written in a conversational style for a
lay audience (this definitely ain’t no JPhil, Mind, or Nous
publication)

Any relevant topic considered, but here are some possibilities:

- Crime scenes and the relationship between deduction, induction, and abduction
- The use of logical fallacies to influence or manipulate beliefs
- Pseudo-science vs. science
- Psychic abilities, hypnosis, and skepticism
- A psychosocial explanation of a psychic’s “abilities”
- The ability to recall numerous facts and what counts as being “smart”
- Shawn’s abilities and Bloom’s taxonomy (remembering, understanding,
application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation)
- Photographic memory and other forms of evidence
- Knowledge of the facts vs. getting lucky regarding the facts
- Non-creative vs. creative forms of problem solving
- Solo vs. communal problem solving
- Shawn’s justified true beliefs, or lack thereof
- Shawn’s proofs and disproofs for the existence of god
- Yin, Yang, and dualist themes in Psych
- Straight men, funny men, and the philosophy of humor
- Shawn’s relationship to his father, moral education, and virtue ethics
- Shawn, Gus, and the nature of moral and intellectual friendship
- An analysis of the nature of murder vs. other forms of killing
- Deontological vs. utilitarian themes in Psych
- The moral perspectives of the various characters in Psych
- Rationale for the continued use of psychic detectives by the police
- The continued apparent need for charlatans in our 21st-century societies
- Shawn, Gus, race relations, and Psych

Psych and Philosophy will be a book in Open Court Publishing Company’s
Popular Culture and Philosophy Series:
http://www.opencourtbooks.com/categories/pcp.htm. Submit ideas for
possible future PCP books to the series editor, George A. Reisch, at:
greisch@caruspub.com. Thanks for your consideration.

Sokal and Lynch on First Epistemic Principles

The Stone, a New York Times philosophy blog, hosts an exchange between Michael Lynch and Alan Sokal.  For those not familiar with them, Lynch is a famous proponent of social constructivism (“all truth is made up”), while Sokal is famous for the Sokal Affair in which he published absolute garbage in an academic humanities journal to make a point about the weakness of knowledge claims in the humanities.

The NYT only allows 10 free articles a month, and a login might be required.

Harman on Second-Rate Philosophers and Religion

I'm a bit late in linking this, but it's still good.  My own students can never guess my own religious background, because as soon as they guess one thing--whatever I am teaching at the time--I will soon discuss something deeply counter to it.