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Cover -- Contents -- Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- How to Use This Book -- Part One Researching Pragmatism -- 1 Introduction Sami Pihlström -- 2 Research Methods, Problems, and Resources Sami Pihlström -- 3 A History of Pragmatism James Campbell -- Part Two Pragmatism and Theoretical Philosophy -- 4 Epistemology, Logic, and Inquiry John Capps -- 5 Metaphysics Sami Pihlström -- 6 Science and Technology Larry Hickman -- Part Three Pragmatism and Applied Philosophy -- 7 Aesthetics Armen T. Marsoobian -- 8 Ethics Michael Eldridge -- 9 Social Theory Erkki Kilpinen -- 10 Politics Shane J. Ralston -- 11 Education Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon -- 12 Economics Paul B. Thompson -- 13 Race Shannon Sullivan -- 14 Religion Ulf Zackariasson -- 15 Environmental Pragmatism Jennifer Welchman -- 16 Global Pragmatism and Higher Education Naoko Saito and Tomohiro Akiyama -- Part Four Pragmatism in the Multicultural World -- 17 Feminist Pragmatist Praxis Danielle Lake, Sunny Heenen, and Judy Whipps -- 18 Pragmatism and Indigenous Philosophy Anna Cook -- 19 Pragmatism in Europe Emil Višňovský -- 20 Analytic Philosophy and Pragmatism Henrik Rydenfelt -- 21 New Directions Sami Pihlström -- Part Five Appendices -- 22 Chronology Michael Eldridge -- 23 Glossary Michael Eldridge and Sami Pihlström -- 24 A Select Bibliography John R. Shook Updated by Sami Pihlström -- Index.

Humanism, Antitheodicism, and the Critique of Meaning in Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion develops a distinctive approach to pragmatist philosophy of religion, and more generally to pragmatist investigations of the human search for meaning, by emphasizing what may be considered two closely interrelated main features of this tradition: humanism and antitheodicism. Humanism here emphasizes the need to focus on religion as a human practice within human concerns of meaningfulness and significance, as distinguished from any metaphysical search for cosmic meaning. Antitheodicism, in turn, stands for the refusal to accept any justification, divine or secular, for the experiences of meaninglessness that individuals undergoing horrendous suffering may have. Developing a critical form of pragmatism emphasizing these ideas, Sami Pihlström explores the relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy in the philosophy of religion, especially regarding the question of religious meaning, as well as the significance of literature for philosophy of religion, with particular emphasis on William James's pragmatism.

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: On the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism: Logical Empiricism between Pragmatism and Neopragmatism -- Chapter 3: Brandom on Pragmatism -- Chapter 4: Pragmatic Realism, Idealism, and Pluralism: A Rescherian Balance? -- Chapter 5: "Languaged" World, "Worlded" Language: On Margolis's Pragmatic Integration of Realism and Idealism -- Chapter 6: The Will to Believe, Epistemic Virtue, and Holistic Transcendental Pragmatism -- Chapter 7: Toward a Pragmatist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement: Emergence or Continuity? -- Chapter 8: Finnish Versions of Pragmatist Humanism: Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright as Quasi-Pragmatists -- Chapter 9: A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism.

The essays collected in this volume and authored by Sami Pihlström emphasize that our relation to the world we live in and seek to represent and get to know better through our practices of conceptualization and inquiry is irreducibly valuational. There is no way of even approaching, let alone resolving, the philosophical issue of realism without drawing due attention to the ways in which human values are inextricably entangled with even the most purely "factual" projects of inquiry we engage in. This entanglement of the factual and the normative is, as explicitly argued in Chapter 7 but implicitly suggested in all the other chapters as well, both pragmatic (practice-embedded and practice-involving) and transcendental (operating at the level of the necessary conditions for the possibility of our representing and cognizing the world in general). The author claims we need to carefully examine the complex relations of realism, value, and transcendental arguments at the intersection of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. This book does so by offering case-studies of various important neopragmatists and philosophers close to the pragmatist tradition, including Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Joseph Margolis, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It appeals to scholars and advanced graduate students focusing on pragmatism and analytic philosophy.

It is commonly believed that populist politics and social media pose a serious threat to our concept of truth. Philosophical pragmatists, who are typically thought to regard truth as merely that which is 'helpful' for us to believe, are sometimes blamed for providing the theoretical basis for the phenomenon of 'post-truth'. In this book, Sami Pihlström develops a pragmatist account of truth and truth-seeking based on the ideas of William James, and defends a thoroughly pragmatist view of humanism which gives space for a sincere search for truth. By elaborating on James's pragmatism and the 'will to believe' strategy in the philosophy of religion, Pihlström argues for a Kantian-inspired transcendental articulation of pragmatism that recognizes irreducible normativity as a constitutive feature of our practices of pursuing the truth. James himself thereby emerges as a deeply Kantian thinker.

Both as a traditional theological issue and in its broader secular varieties, theodicy remains a problem in the philosophy of religion. In this book, Professor Sami Pihlström provides a novel critical reassessment of the theodicy discourse addressing the problem of evil and suffering. He develops an antitheodicist view, arguing that theodicies seeking to render apparently meaningless suffering meaningful or justified from a "God's-Eye-View" ultimately rely on metaphysical realism failing to recognize the individual perspective of the sufferer. Pihlström thus shows that a pragmatist approach to the realism issue in the philosophy of religion is a vital starting point for a re-evaluation of the problem of theodicy.

Pragmatism provides not just a theoretical perspective on science and inquiry, but ways of being in the world, of knowing the reality we inhabit. Approaching this philosophical tradition as a diverse set of philosophies that it is, The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism introduces many of the ideas and debates at the centre of the field today. Focusing on issues in 12 different subject areas, this up-to-date companion covers current research in aesthetics, economics, education, ethics, history, law, metaphysics, politics, race, religion, science and technology, language, and social theory. Supported by an introduction to research methods and problems, as well as a guide to past and future directions in the field, the chapters are also enhanced by a glossary, research guide and an annotated bibliography. For anyone working in contemporary pragmatism or modern American philosophy more generally, this companion provides a practical means of navigating what can sometimes feel like a disparate field. Showing where important work continues to be done, the tensions that exist, and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking, The Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism expands our understanding of the role of pragmatism in 21st century philosophy.

Transcendental Guilt challenges traditional ways of understanding moral philosophy by proposing, instead of mainstream ethical theorizing, a serious moral reflection on our ethical finitude, focusing on the concept of guilt. It argues that guilt plays a 'transcendental' role in our ethical lives by being constitutive of the seriousness characteristic of the moral point of view

The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by pragmatism - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Twelve specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to aesthetics, economics, education, eth

This book examines the issue of moral realism from a pragmatist point of view, drawing attention to our human practices of ethical evaluation and deliberation. It defends the essentially ungrounded and humanly fundamental place of ethics in our thought and action. Ethics must remain beyond justification and ubiquitous in our human form(s) of life

Abstract
The covid-19 pandemic and the increasingly polarized political situation in many countries today have highlighted the significance of various humanly natural intellectual mistakes, cognitive biases, and widespread inferential errors. This essay examines, at a philosophical meta-level, the relation between our natural epistemic errors and the kind of humanly unavoidable transcendental illusion analyzed by Immanuel Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic of the First Critique. While both kinds of illusion are usually primarily discussed in an epistemological context, my approach is not exclusively epistemic. Rather, my main argument extends the broadly Kantian critique of reason – as a critical via negativa focusing on what is epistemically "wrong" about us, as the kind of cognitive agents we human beings naturally are – into a pragmatically enriched investigation of "the negative" as constitutive of the human condition, that is, our lack of sufficiently critical epistemic and ethical capacities, including our propensity to both cognitive error and moral evil. Our being inescapably inclined to manifest such negativities in our epistemic and ethical lives, and our insufficient awareness of doing so, are, arguably, "transcendental facts" about us, to be critically examined in terms of a Kantian-cum-pragmatist philosophical anthropology. This significantly enriches our picture of transcendental philosophy.