Richard Rorty's main thesis in his work Philosphy and the Mirror of Nature centers on a critique of representationalism in a fundamentally relativistic way. The aim of this disseration is to grasp Rorty's ideas in broader sense as a critique of inadequate interpretation of knowing- that and shift the attention to knowing-how as a key to new understanding the success of natural sciences. The fact that something is reproducibly possible for us to make in the surrounding world is not relative, and it is precisely in this way that technology (knowing- how) spreads so successfully even at multi-cultural level. In contrast, the explanatory function (knowing-that) of the natural sciences is relative, making sense only in the context of what is already known and accepted. Natural sciences are so successful because their experiments and only then take agreement of hypothesis with experimental practice (knowing-how) as the criterion of its acceptability. This dissertation offers, as a way out of Rortian relativism, the concept of "open authority" and proposes a new development in philosophic pragmatism based on it.

The aim of this MA thesis was to analyze the correspondences and differences between the individual philosophers and writers from the loosely formed intellectual group of Euro- American pragmatism. The thesis utilizes a chronological approach, starting with the early signs of transatlantic pragmatism in Immanuel Kant's philosophy, and traces this development throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century. In addition to the comparison of philosophical similarities and dissimilarities of the examined authors, each chapter also considered the possible uses of pragmatic techniques in pedagogy and education. Therefore, besides the examination of differing epistemologies of writers of transatlantic pragmatism, this thesis also aims to offer educational suggestions, ideas and practical methods for an educator. The first chapter of the thesis is designed to introduce the theme of the work at large. The second chapter of the thesis analyzes the rudimentary signs of pragmatism, in the revolutionary ideas of Immanuel Kant and Johan Gottlieb Fichte. This chapter focuses on the genesis of subjective idealism, subjective category creation and Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, along with his lectures on vocations. The third chapter surveys the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his approaches towards the...