Pragmatism and Diversity Dewey in the Context of Late Twentieth Century Debates

by Green, Judith M.; Neubert, Stefan; Reich, Kersten

• ISBN13: 9780230338517
• ISBN10: 0230338518
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Diversity is both an unavoidable aspect of twenty-first century living and a powerful challenge to older philosophical traditions that still assume as normatively universal a set of values, ways of thinking, institutions, and habits of living that emerged within earlier eras of more homogeneous cultures, less developed technologies, and more accepted forms of linguistic, legal, religious, economic, political, and military domination. Within recent years, new styles of philosophical discourse, including deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, have persuasively challenged these universalistic assumptions to reveal the important human differences they marginalize. Experience-based appreciation of the mutually educative potential of diverse standpoints as well as sober concern about the perils of our present times have led many thinkers to look for contemporary forms of pragmatism and cosmopolitanism as hospitable intellectual gathering places for urgently needed cross-difference conversations that may reflect and give substance to shared visions of democratic diversity. The eight authors in this volume engage in cross-difference conversations with other thinkers from earlier periods and other philosophical traditions, as well as with each other, in order to reconstruct pragmatism and cosmopolitanism in ways that are more attuned to our lived experience of diversity as well as our hopes for a diversity-appreciating democratic future.

Author Biography

Judith M. Green is an associate professor of Philosophy and co-director of Women's Studies at Fordham University. Stefan Neubert is the director of the Office for International Relations at the Universitt zu Kln. Kersten Reich is University Professor at the Universitt zu Kln.

Table of Contents

The Roots of Diversity in Pragmatist Thought--James Campbell * The Context of Diversity vs. The Problem of Diversity--William J. Gavin * Reading Dewey and Mouffe on Democratic Norms--Larry A. Hickman * Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism: The Diverse Democratic Community after Huntington and Benhabib--Judith M. Green * Democracy: Practice as Needed--Michael Eldridge * Dewey and Levinas on Pluralism, the Other, and Democracy--Jim Garrison * Reconstruction of Philosophy and Inquiry into Human Affairs: Deweyan Pragmatism in Dialogue with the Postmodern Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman--Stefan Neubert and Kersten Reich * Diverse Communities–Dewey’s Theory of Democracy as a Challenge for Foucault, Bourdieu, and Rorty--Kersten Reich * The Future of Democratic Diversity