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/lit/ - Literature

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10228773 No.10228773 [Reply] [Original]

>pragmatism
Why are americans allowed to do philosophy?

>> No.10228785
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10228785

>mfw a Europoor doesn't understand the pragmatist maxim, cenopythagorean categories, universal semiotics, dialectics of determination and indetermination, and the triadic classification of sciences near me

>> No.10228791

The James family have no flaws

>> No.10228824

>>10228791
>The James family have no flaws
has

>> No.10228842

>>10228785
>europoors so much as try to pronounce peirce's name
>their little brains explode
kek'd just imagining it
but I guess that's life when your unis are so poor

>> No.10228934
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10228934

>mfw Melville > Goethe

>> No.10228971

someone explain pragmatism to a brainlet like me. What's the difference between pragmatism and utilitarianism

>> No.10228976

>>10228971
Utilitarianism advocates the maximization of utility over time as the primary ethical and sociological princple
Pragmatism doesn't

>> No.10228987

>>10228976
>maximization
>sociological principle
Do you know what "brainlet" means?

>> No.10229002

>>10228987
No

>> No.10229217

>>10228934
Nabokov called Goethe a philistine lol

>> No.10229229

>>10229217
Nabokov was Russian and therefore cannot be a true patriot

>> No.10229286
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10229286

>>10228773
>mfw /lit/ likes Hegel but doesn't like pragmatism even though Hegel was a proto-pragmatist

>> No.10229297
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10229297

>>10229286
>It's a '/lit/ is retarded' episode

>> No.10229312

>>10228971
Pragmatism isn't an ethical philosophy. Pragmatism is a quasi-phenomenological style of doing philosophy that very naturally blended with phenomenology once the two strains encountered one another. Germans love pragmatism and American pragmatists love German idealism.

Pragmatism is hard to get your head around because it seems to be like a kind of "if it works, it works" philosophy, applied to epistemology. But that's not quite it. The most interesting strain of pragmatism is certainly William James, who was actually neglected in favour of Dewey for a good time.

Husserl once said of James that he was the seed of an entire native American phenomenological movement if only America had been ready for that movement. Deleuze has been compared to James. All in all, James is an unusually, almost bizarrely prescient philosophy of immanence. James even outdoes phenomenology in certain ways (IMHO, anyway) by bracketing, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, transcendental speculation in his philosophical psychology. He seems to intuitively understand that we don't understand much about the mind OTHER THAN ITS SUCCESSFUL AND CONTINUOUS CONNECTION/RE-CONNECTION TO REALITY. Like Deleuze and Wittgenstein, James makes a very strong effort to understand thought based on what we can say with reasonable confidence that it "does."

James' pragmatism is a little like this: The mind exists only insofar as it is INVOLVED in reality, invested in reality. When he talks about "cashing out" an epistemic assumption or belief about the world, he doesn't mean in a vulgar utilitarian sense of "does this confer some social benefit?" He means: Was the collective life of mind furthered by this belief? Did this belief terminate in something fruitful?

The key point of James' pragmatism to understand is that ALL movement is forward movement. Beliefs are guesses and hunches about reality. They can be wrong (i.e., they can "cash out" in a firm "no"), but if they drove mind/culture until that moment, then they drove it FORWARD. Not to venture, not to believe, is nonsensical. It is the nature of mind to have an incomplete understanding of the world and therefore to venture a more complete understanding in everything it undertakes. The "pragmatic" value of the present incompleteness of knowledge is in this perpetual futurity, progressiveness, and openness. Whatever the human mind is, and it definitely seems to be incredibly complex, it is bound up in reality, it CARES about the world, it is intrinsically pragmatic.

This is very different from Peirce's pragmatic principle and quite different from Dewey's pragmatism. Though Peirce is very brilliant on his own terms, just not concerned with the same thing as James.

>> No.10229319

>>10228934
Milton > Dante