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John Dewey (1859-1952) was a major figure of the American cultural and intellectual landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. While not the originator of American pragmatism, he was instrumental to its articulation as a philosophy and the spread of its influence beyond philosophy to other disciplines. His prolific writings encompass metaphysics, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, moral philosophy, the philosophies of religion, art, and education, and democratic political and international theory. The contributors to this Companion examine the wide range of Dewey's thought and provide a critical evaluation of his philosophy and its lasting influence, both elsewhere in philosophy and on other disciplines

Normative theory in international relations, as it is discussed at present in the framework of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate, is in a condition of stasis. Cosmopolitan and communitarian positions are generally assumed to be irreconcilable, with no means available for reaching conclusions on ethical questions in world politics. This book pursues three lines of inquiry. First, it aims to examine the nature and the extent of the impasse within this debate. Second, it re-evaluates whether the cosmopolitan/communitarian dichotomy offers a complete picture of the most pressing issues at stake within normative international relations theory. The book suggests that a more refined focus on epistemology and questions of foundationalism and antifoundationalism is necessary. Third, it constructs an argument for a normative approach to international ethics which draws from the tradition of American pragmatism and is sensitive to the wider picture of concerns raised in the course of the book

AbstractThis article examines the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) as an important site of women's international theorizing on the normative problem of statelessness in the League of Nations era. The problem of statelessness covered several issues connected with the loss of nationality, a new condition of human vulnerability associated with the dissolution of four empires after World War I. It opened up a series of questions about the Versailles system, where the ethical value of sovereignty was assumed, rather than examined for its consequences for individuals. WILPF developed programs of political and epistemic activity on global and local fronts that explored what it might mean to approach the statelessness question in terms of a transnational public interest, as opposed to the state interest privileged by the Versailles order. The article argues that WILPF's international thought is distinctive for the symbiotic relationship that exists between WILPF women's transnational activism and their theoretical conceptualization of the international. This is illustrated through an analysis of Jane Addams's thought, which provides a crucial link between late-nineteenth-century American pragmatism and the early twentieth-century progressive internationalism exemplified by WILPF. WILPF's interwar advocacy on the statelessness question shows how knowledge production and theory building were done in ways that are quite different to the mainstream neo-positivist idea of theory today, and which need to be included as part of our historical understanding of the origins of the twentieth-century field of international relations.

As a philosophy with human problems at its centre and in a time of rapidly changing social conditions, classical Pragmatism engaged an ethics of social radicalism, an ethics that extended as far as human problems do: to the global. To understand how ideas like global justice are generated within pragmatism, it is important to examine not only the thought, but also the activism of pragmatists and how the experimental method of pragmatism was applied to global problems of its day. The life and work of Jane Addams is particularly rich for this kind of investigation. Addams met human problems at both local and global levels with the working hypothesis of applying and observing what a democratic attitude of radical social justice brings to felt indeterminacies. This article begins by comparing and contrasting a pragmatist approach to global justice as opposed to one better known, that of John Rawls, and moves on to examining the difference that Addams's experience as a woman and an activist makes to how she practiced the pragmatist method in relation to global problems of the Progressive Era.

This article begins by critically evaluating recent work on cosmopolitan democracy by David Held. I argue that where cosmopolitan democrats should now focus their energies is in filling a significant gap that Held's inquiries have left open — an exploration of what `bottom-up' processes bring to cosmopolitan democracy, more specifically the work of problem-solving, publicity and advocacy that takes place in sites that are referred to as international public spheres (IPSs). The next stage for the literature on cosmopolitan democracy must continue the work that James Bohman and John Dryzek have begun; that is, theorizing the role of bottom-up processes, in particular how IPSs and their members — individuals — work together in making their shared views authoritative in international decision-making. However, I argue that a pragmatist understanding of this key democratic concept, as opposed to the deliberative ones used by Bohman and Dryzek, is better suited to this endeavour.

The appeal of positivism within International Relations (IR) hinges on the belief that it represents the application of science to the study of world politics. This article presents Deweyan pragmatism as an alternative, and better, way of employing scientific method in IR. John Dewey's unique formulations of key scientific concepts like `objectivity', `explanation' and `experimentation' led him to an understanding of social enquiry that retains many of the virtues of scientific method while anticipating and incorporating the epistemological concerns that currently animate post-positivist work in and beyond IR.