Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2003 17:56:08 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [HAB:] Pragmatic realism: the state of philosophy Now


I've favored for sometime the rubric "pragmatic realism" as
a designation for philosophy "after" Habermas (philosophy
beyond *and* in light of JH). 

So, it's inspiring to find such a notion proffered by
Joseph Margolis in _Reinventing Pragmatism_ (Cornell UP
2002). Though his sometimes obscure discussion is clearly
insider baseball---throwing around allusions to others'
positions like someone convinced that philosophy really IS
a language game---he seems to me to capture the status of
contemporary academic philosophy in a way that is
particularly relevant to Habermas' self-positioning between
a weak naturalism and epistemological realism, in terms of 
Margolis' focus on Rorty, Putnam, McDowell, and Dewey. I'm
impressed by how Margolis sets up the Present of
*Analytical* academic philosophy as still living "in"
Hegel's critique of Kant, tacitly to Habermas' advantage,
even though he doesn't discuss Habermas at all. 

The first following quotation, from Margolis' chapter
titled "Cartesian Realism and the Revival of Pragmatism,"
may seem obscure, but I recommend it to you as a suggestion
of what the essential Present of philosophy really
is---particularly for the sake of the very accessible
second passage I'll quote here, from the same chapter (so
please bear with the first passage):

M: ...I find three very different treatments of *tertia*
(or, better, intermediaries [between mind and world]): the
first, the one Davidson and Rorty dismiss (quite rightly),
[i.e.,] the one featured so disastrously in Putnam's
"internal realism" [which Putnam rightly disavowed in 1994,
though JH and Lafont hadn't heard the news in 1999], which
assigns "epistemic intermediaries" a relational (a
Cartesian or Lockean) representationalist role; the second,
the one McDowell favors ..., which signifies that mind and
world are indeed "mediated" (adverbally, as I suggest) by
"concepts" that belong to our biological endowment but are
selected or featured by our *Bildung* (our "ordinary
upbringing"); and a third, the one I recommend (against
McDowell's "Cartesian"---or Kantian or
Aristotelian---proclivities), which treats our interpretive
intermediaries as both "adverbial" (rather than
"relational") and as "hybrid" (rather than merely "natural"
in the biological sense), that is, as historicized,
variable, artifactual, and open to the puzzle of
reconciling realism and, say, relativism or
incommensurabilism. On my view, to admit conceptual
*tertia* (or, better, adverbial intermediaries) is to make
our realism constructivist from the start and throughout;
there is no fallback objectivism to take for granted. I
intend this, of course, as an up-to-date reading of Dewey.
In the sense intended, it stengthens Hegel's account along
constructivist lines that Hegel himself does not explicitly
pursue...." (51)

M: [In my view,]...pragmatism poised at the turn of the new
century could easily recover in a single stroke
pragmatism's original promise and "second" energy: by
redefining realism in a way that could not have been
perceived in its first incarnation and by rereading with
care the anti-Cartesian strategies developed by the
European progeny of the post-Kantian world (the Marxists,
the early Frankfurt-Critical movement, the Hegelianized
Kantians, the historicists, the Heideggerian hermeneuts,
the European pragmatists, the existential phenomenologists,
the Nietzscheans, the post-structuralists, genealogists,
sociologists of knowledge), who never suffered the
conceptual break with the post-Kantian world that
Anglo-American philosophy imposed on itself.... (52-3).

Well! Looks like we've been on the right track.

Gary




     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---