Judith M. Green

Pragmatism and social hope : deepening democracy in global contexts

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Pragmatism and Social Hope: Deepening Democracy in Global Contexts1. Achieving Our Country, Achieving Our World: Rorty, Baldwin, and Social Hope2. American Dreaming: From Loss and Fear to Vision and Hope3. Hopes Progress: Remembering Deweys Pragmatist Social Epistemology in the Twenty-first Century4. Choosing Our History, Choosing Our Hopes: Truth and Reconciliation Between Our Past and Our Future5. Trying Deeper Democracy: Pragmatist Lessons from the American Experience6. The Continuously Planning City: Imperatives and Examples for Deepening Democracy7. The Hope of Democratic Living: Choosing Active Citizen Participation for Preferable Global FuturesNotesBibliographyIndex

Participatory Democracy: Movements, Campaigns, and Democratic Living

Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first-class men. ... A brave delight, fit for freedoms athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success. Whatever we do not attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt at least. ? Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

On the Passing of Richard Rorty and the Future of American Philosophy

The passing of Richard Rorty is an event to mark in the annals of American philosophy – the passing of a spirit-guide to some, and of a dark shadow to others, but certainly that of an original, iconoclastic thinker who brought classical American pragmatism back into the contemporary philosophical conversation, and who got philosophers telling stories of achieving a long-loved dream of democracy. I outline a twelve-point agenda for productive future philosophical wrangles with Rorty, highlighting his metaphysical nominalism, antireligious ironism, and “Western bourgeois liberal democracy.”

Bernstein’s Deployment of Jamesian Democratic Pluralism: The Pragmatic Turn and the Future of Philosophy

James’s pluralism shapes his understanding of the philosophical task. We can see this by highlighting his reflections on vision and temperament.... James tells us that “a man’s vision is the great fact about him/’ and that, “if we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingen- ious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred — there is no other true word — as one’s best working attitude.”

Concluding Conversation: The Future of Democratic Diversity

In the following conversation, the eight authors of this book discuss selected issues, challenges, and risks of democracy and diversity in our time and the relevance of Deweyan pragmatism as an intellectual resource for reconstruction of philosophical methods; personal habits; traditional cultures; institutions of government and civil society; and public policies at local, national, and international levels. They further clarify their position by responding to six general questions.

Cultivating Pragmatist Cosmopolitanism —Democratic Local-and-Global Community amidst Diversity

In The Cosmopolitanism Reader (2010), Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held helpfully distinguish among five different focuses of contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers: global justice, culture, law, politics, and global citizenship.1

Reframing Barack Obama’s Thick Philosophical Pragmatism: An Experiment in Democratic Redirection

This article focuses on the relationship between Barack Obama and pragmatism by reframing Barack Obama’s deeply held values, carefully considered intellectual commitments, highly developed gifts, hypothetically framed transformative strategies, and their emerging outcomes in light of works by classical and contemporary philosophical pragmatists in order to help us clarify how we can advance pragmatism’s meaning and relevance in the twenty-first century