The American Thinker

Chapter 1 establishes Thurman’s place within modern American thought, arguing that he is part of the American pragmatist tradition. Thurman inherited pragmatism from William James by way of W. E. B. Du Bois and Rufus Jones. Du Bois applied James’s ideas about people’s “blindness” to the experiences of others and the theory that social norms could evolve over time, through human agency, to better represent the needs of the democratic whole to his ideas about Black agitation and activism—a school of thinking within which Thurman was educated and nurtured. Thurman’s liberal theological component, especially his mysticism, is best understood through the James-Jones lineage. Rufus Jones drew off of James’s secular theories on mystical experience to popularize a culture of religious seeking and the pursuit of spiritual truth. Informed by his Quaker background, Jones theorized that the individual could reach points of heightened consciousness and could achieve a sense of oneness with a divine truth (James did not specify what this universal truth was, but Jones insisted that it was God). Both James and Jones favored affirmation mysticism—the idea that once a person experienced wholeness with the rest of the universe that he would be motivated and even responsible for attempting to create the same synchronicity within the society that he lived. Thurman, who had mystical leanings since childhood but could never fully articulate his insights on spirituality, felt as though he found a kindred spirit after he encountered one of Jones’s books on mysticism in 1929. The discovery led Thurman to study under Jones at Haverford that spring (with special permission from the college since Haverford did not admit Black students at that point). Thurman emerged from Haverford armed with a sophisticated grasp of affirmation mysticism that he connected seamlessly to his activist education. Through close readings of James, Du Bois, Jones, and Thurman, the chapter argues that Thurman’s pragmatist heritage both establishes him as a distinctly modern American thinker and sets the Fellowship Church—the physical expression of his ideas—as a distinctly modern American institution.

Cognition, recognition, and the “game of interchange of arguments”

This article examines the key provisions of philosophical concept of the American pragmatist, representative of Pittsburgh School Robert Brandom, described in the commentaries to Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (published in separate volume in 2019). It is demonstrated that rational reconstruction of Hegel's philosophy's conducted by Brandom was intended to revive the legacy of the classic, taking into account peculiarities and trends of development of the modern analytical philosophy. The specificity of Hegelian approach towards the analysis of experience of human consciousness, Brandom traces in “hypostasization of the conceptual” and gradual separation from all kinds of idealistic antirealist doctrines that contrapose being-for-consciousness-in-itself to being of things and “disengage” the subject of cognition from objects of the world. Brandom claims that reality itself, things in themselves, is conceptually articulated, and thus cognizable. The author reveals the theoretical-methodological difference between Hegel's interpretation of normativity (“recognitive model”) and Kant's subjectivist approach: according to Kant, institutionalization of the normative status is exhausted by the gesture of accepting such as an autonomous subject; in Hegel’s opinion, the essential condition for founding the status is, as interpreted by Brandom, socio-communicative mediation (“assignment” of status to the subject by his interlocutors, as well as recognition of his assertions by interagents and audience). The article reviews Brandom's arguments against the reduction of Hegelian master – slave dialectic to the inner conflict of individual self-consciousness (position of J. McDowell). The conclusion is made that “re-description” of Hegel conducted by the American philosopher is of radically anachronistic nature, and sheds light on the views of author of the commentaries (primarily his semantic pragmatism and holism), but not on the content of work he provides commentaries to.

The Matter of Metaphor: Remembering Phillip

As an undergraduate student in Birmingham in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time in the stacks in the library where I had discovered, through back issues of TDR for the most part, something called ‘performance studies’. It didn't really figure on our curriculum, but having become duly exposed to Richard Foreman scripts, photographs of Annie Sprinkle shows and various essays on ritual, I wished like hell that it did. It was this that led me to a book, By Means of Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. One chapter in particular floored me completely. Entitled ‘What Does It Mean to “Become the Character”: Power, Presence and Transcendence in Asian In-Body Disciplines of Practice’, it combined a deep knowledge of the practices it discussed that could only have come from doing them in depth, with a level of philosophical and ethnographic detail that made tangible, material sense of the apparently esoteric premise of its title. The chapter was Phillip's, and his great gift as both teacher and scholar was always that ability to place the relationship between ‘the doer and the thing done’ at the heart of things. This is, of course, a key tenet of the American pragmatist tradition (the phrase is John Dewey's, I believe, although I often heard Phillip make use of it) and I don't think he would object to me aligning him with it.

A 5th E: Distributed Cognition and the Question of Ethics in Benjamin and Vygotsky, and Horkheimer and Dewey

The chapter uses Walter Benjamin’s engagement with Soviet developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and Max Horkheimer’s with the work of American pragmatist John Dewey to suggest a productive path not taken by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s as they considered the empirical study of human beings’ ‘mimetic’, i.e. pre-conscious and visceral interactions with others and with the world. Their analyses suggests positive ways of re-thinking the relation between norms and ‘primary intersubjectivity’ if we abandon their unnecessarily stark distinction between mimetic and goal-oriented forms of behaviour. The result is an understanding of how the basis of primary subjectivity, imitation, is itself necessarily distributed and ethically inflected, adding a 5th E to embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition.

Religion and Reconnecting with Nature

Attention to the work of American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey and Native American novelist, poet, and essayist Leslie Silko reveals what are in many ways remarkably similar and complementary conceptualizations of religion, as both authors situate religion in the human’s experienced alienation from and reconnection with the natural world, draw heavily on Romantic motifs in literary art to convey the “religious” dynamics of these experiences, and suggest that readers who sincerely engage with certain literary works of art can come to share in these dynamics in a way that has the potential to help reorient their everyday relations with and attitudes toward the natural world. Reading Dewey alongside Silko thus offers us an interdisciplinary set of resources to articulate and promote an ecological conception of religion founded on a mutualistic-symbiotic mode of human dwelling on the earth.

Interviews

Qualitative interviews are normally conducted as personal conversations between two or more individuals. Such personal conversations, however, are frequently used in the service of public scholarship, which gives rise to a number of significant issues having to do with researching private lives and placing accounts in the public arena. This chapter addresses the role of qualitative interviewing in public scholarship. It first discusses the very idea of the public, especially as it was articulated by the American pragmatist John Dewey. It is argued that the social sciences, and qualitative interviewing specifically, have a central role to play in the constitution of a public in modern society. The reader is then taken through various stages of interview research and some examples are given that show how qualitative interview studies have significantly advanced public scholarship.

Creative processes of impact making: advancing an American Pragmatist Methodology

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide new insights into the social impact of creative research methods. Design/methodology/approach Using the new methodology of cultural animation (CA), the authors highlight how knowledge can be co-produced between academics, community members and organisational practitioners. Drawing on the UK Connected Communities programme, the authors explore examples of immersive and performative techniques including arts and crafts, drama and poetry. Findings The authors showcase the practical and theoretical benefit of such exercises to generate impact and influence. Empirically, the authors demonstrate the potential of CA to bring together researchers and community members in useful partnerships that foster dialogical exchange. Theoretically, the authors extend and develop the value of American Pragmatism by highlighting how democratic, iterative and practical learning plays out through the materials, networks and processes of cultural animation. Social implications Exploration of the examples leads us to propose and explore impact as a form of legacy which captures the temporal, processual and performative nature of knowledge sharing and co-production. Originality/value The methodology of CA is innovative and has not been tested widely to date although, as the authors illustrate, it is particularly useful for encouraging interaction between academics and the wider world by developing and nurturing interactions and relationships. It carries potential to contribute new insights to the theorisation and lived experience of organisation.

Coubertin – the philosopher of paideia

This article presents some selected aspects of Pierre de Coubertin’s philosophical anthropology. Coubertin’s philosophy of man is conceived as a philosophy of paideia in the perspective of Werner Jaeger, Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault thought. The author describes three possible ways of interpreting Coubertin’s thought: doxographical, and creative as well as hermeneutical reconstruction. Next, the possibility of objective criticism of the idealistic vision of Coubertin’s Neo-Olympism is taken into consideration. It is pointed out that the principles of such objective and antydogmatic criticism were established by Immanuel Kant, and it is proposed to use them in the process of critical evaluation of Coubertin’s philosophy. By use of this form of criticism, the foundations and philosophical references of Coubertin’s pedagogical philosophy can be properly highlighted. The author creates her own hermeneutical trigger, comparing Coubertin’s anthropological refl ection with the somaesthetics of the contemporary American pragmatist and philosopher - Richard Shusterman.