Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Philosophy, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Hephzibah Roskelly; submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-156).

In "Rethinking Legal Pragmatism: A Philosophical Approach," I take issue with the position of Judge Richard A. Posner, a contemporary spokesperson for legal pragmatism and the law and economics movement. Posner holds that academic philosophy and philosophical pragmatism in particular has no role to play in legal pragmatism as it manifests itself in the process of adjudication and the process of legal scholarship. By redefining philosophy functionally, as opposed to merely sociologically, I illustrate a threefold function of philosophy corresponding to the roles it plays in legal pragmatism. I show the methodological function of philosophy using C.S. Peirce's logic and epistemology, the critical function of philosophy using the insights of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s legal theory, and the normative function of philosophy, using John Dewey's illustration of continuity among moral, aesthetic, practical, and intellectual inquiries. By illustrating the insights of classical American pragmatism to Judge Posner, I show the normative dimensions of the use of history in adjudication and legal scholarship, which prescribe that we narrow the gap between theory and practice in the way we use history. By undermining the strict dichotomy Posner has erected between philosophy and law and between theory and practice, I cultivate a more productive dialogue between law and philosophy, prescribing a broad vision of normativity, allowing for intelligent social growth, and the reconstruction of ends.

Hating is an activity which can be useful to human endeavors. This study is a Pragmatic inquiry, and, as such, attempts to answer the question: What difference can our hating make to our projects, goals, and aspirations? We treat hate as an emotion, bracketed from any moral or ethical concerns, which might cloud a philosophical investigation. At the very least, the difficulty in choosing only one ethical or moral perspective from which to examine the usefulness of hate is inconsistent with Pragmatism's pluralism. Through exploring the writings of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, we find hate to be a strong, problematic emotion. Central to Nietzsche's philosophical corpus, hate is something felt by weak people who seek to discharge this emotion, in acts of revenge, onto stronger people - but who cannot because of their very weakness. The impotence to discharge this hate turns into ressentiment, a general hate for the world at large, on the order of rank which places the hater at the bottom and the hated at the top. Nietzsche claims that weak people of ressentiment joined together in an effort to overturn the natural order, and they created a new order where meekness and humility are virtues and where pride and strength are "wrong." This new order of values is the Christian Church, according to Nietzsche. There are solutions to the problem of hating that we find in Nietzsche's writings. The first is to hate the right enemies, that is, to hate stronger enemies. When we struggle against people who are stronger than we are, one of two outcomes are possible. We are either destroyed, or made stronger. Ergo, one way in which hate might be useful for Nietzsche is for us to hate stronger people and become stronger as a result of this struggle. This is understood in the context of the will to power, which Nietzsche claims is all life itself. The will to power wills one thing: power. For Nietzsche, an increased feeling of power brings with it an increased feeling of life. One might posit the equation: more power = more life. Nietzsche's other solution is also rooted in the will to power and is something of which we find the seeds in Concord, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nietzsche writes about something he calls sublimation. Sublimation begins when we repress an emotion and prevent its discharge. For Nietzsche, emotions exhibit a type of energy, which is expended when the emotion is discharged. He advocates that we repress some emotions in order to retain the energy and then use our rational faculties to discharge them in such a way that we thereby increase our power. This type of self-control and employment of the emotions would amount to actually using our hate to increase our power and, as such, to increase our feeling of life. William James, another thinker who was influenced by Emerson, presents us with something similar in his writings on energy and in "The Moral Equivalent of War." He claims that there are energies that enable us to act into which we can tap by means of some stimulus or act of the will - much the way that marathoners experience a second wind when they apprehend that they might overtake the lead runner. James works with the example of war, wherein a nation is able to achieve certain "manly virtues," such as strength, courage, and solidarity. He seeks some way for us to obtain the benefits of war without military conflict. In short, James claims that we can harness the energy from some stimulus and redirect this energy onto some object or toward some goal which we freely choose. To be sure, this is different from Nietzsche's sublimation precisely because of James' belief in free will. James' redirection of energies enables us not only to choose our goals - which for Nietzsche are always power - but also to choose the manner in which we will discharge this energy. There are instances wherein our hating is not something we would want to sublimate or redirect. When we hate the "correct" object, we should hate. The correct object of our hate is, in short, whatever stands in the way of our projects and goals. We examine Batman Begins and V for Vendetta, both recent films wherein the lead characters hate those who destroy their societies. Batman hates the criminals who infect Gotham City, but he lacks the conviction to do what is necessary and destroy them, since he is fettered by his own moral code, which he values more highly than the destruction of his enemies who stand in the way of the peaceful society for which he longs. V, on the other hand, has no such moral scruples. He successfully destroys his enemies (the corrupt state itself) by the end of his story, illustrating along the way Nietzsche's sublimation in his decades-long revenge and redemption.

This dissertation seeks to articulate a framework for critiquing and reconstructing science education by fleshing out the relationships between science education, its ontological commitments to nature, and educational practices that promote justice and democracy. Drawing on theoretical and methodological resources from American Pragmatism and science studies, I offer a case study that evokes the practices of a residential outdoor science program in the Pacific Northwest. I suggest that these practices provide an opportunity to imagine how science education emerges differently when it abandons its commitments to a singular and authoritative Nature, and explore how this program provides empirical resources for building a theory of science education that is multinatural. Grasping the plurality of nature diminishes the tension between experiences and the world, recognizing the importance of the sciences to democratic action without positioning them as a singular source of authority. Multinaturalism then becomes an orienting concept for imagining and reconstructing more democratic and just practices of science education, practices that move away from the transmission of a cannon of white, Eurocentric knowledge, and towards the navigation of problems in dynamic worlds.

Wittgenstein once asked, "What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" What would be left is, presumably, the quality of 'agency,' which differentiates between legitimate actions and mere behaviors. In my dissertation I investigate the way we conceive of this quality and recommend a change of the prevalent model for one that is developed in a more empirically informed way. Most current work in ethics employs a historically acquired and folk-psychology approved notion of agency. On this view, the distinction between actions and behaviors is fairly clear-cut. Actions proper are characteristic of human beings. They are 'rational' in either the deliberative process that preceded it or in terms of their efficacy; they are launched `autonomously' by the agent's self rather than influenced by context, emotion or habit. These, and a few other conditions have to be fulfilled for an act to earn the badge of an action; falling short of that standard disqualifies it, or, at the very least renders it an imperfect, faulty instance of agency. An agent is thus typically viewed as a disembodied, rational source of conduct, who can withhold her desires and choose between different courses of action using some form of deliberation. I submit that this model survives neither due to its empirical adequacy nor because it is otherwise valuable for ethics (or, more generally, for understanding human behavior). Rather, there is (I argue), a certain widespread philosophical attitude that determines its persistence--a general longing for the stability of the self and an orderly, controllable relationship between the agent and the world. I call the proponents of this attitude "tortoises" and offer a critique of their main claims. I conclude that we must alter this model. The empirical results from psychology and neuroscience suggest that an agent is best viewed as a bundle of modules that are governed by different rules. None of them is "more" the agent than another, but all operate to achieve a state of homeostasis between so the different processes within the agent and the environment.

In this paper I wish to trace some connections between Donald Davidson's work (1917-2003) and two major representatives of the classical pragmatist movement: Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910). I will start with a basic characterization of classical pragmatism; then, I shall examine certain conceptions in Peirce's and James' pragmatism, in order to establish affinities with Davidson´s thought. Finally, and bearing in mind the previous con-nections, I will reflect briefly on the relevance –often unrecognized- of classical pragmatist ideas in the context of contemporary philosophi-cal discussions.

With my dissertation entitled “Between the Flash and Fall of Turning”: “New York” School Poets, American Pragmatism and the Construction of Identity, I seek to account for the depiction of the anti-foundational self which emerges time and again in the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. While theorizing the self as a contingent, provisional, and shifting construct is hardly new to a theoretically oriented academy transiting into the present century, scholars and critics have tended to ground such interpretations in “structural linguistics” and so-called “French philosophy.” One of the goals of this project, therefore, is to propose that the philosophical skepticism toward the self as a site of stable and enduring meaning has always been felt and articulated by American Pragmatism, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and John Dewey. While a handful of critics have looked to Pragmatism to account for the protean self in the work of “New York” School Poets, these commentators have tended to focus their attention largely on O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s poetry. This project seeks, on the one hand, to round out this work with close readings of all the major “New York” School Poets, and extend it, on the other, by looking beyond poetry to visual art and classroom pedagogy to examine evidence of a Pragmatist orientation across the disciplines, despite the apparent interpretive consensus that American Pragmatism “goes silent” at mid-century.

It is the purpose of this thesis to study the development of some moral concepts in American life.

The problem of this thesis is to show that a humanistic, pragmatic, and instrumental concept of God would help man in his life, at the present stage of development in the western world, more than an authoritarian or absolute concept. This thesis endeavors to show that the confusion and instability in the moral and religious life is caused by a great need of change of attitude and beliefs towards the concept of God and religion.